I’ve lately got into the habit of starting off a Saturday night out in a quiet pub at the top of the town. I like the draught Japanese lager and the ridiculous glasses it comes in. The pub is friendly enough, but I don’t get involved. I have two or three pints, nod thanks, and move on. But the last time I was in there, one of the regulars said did I want to go to a music festival at Butlins in Minehead next weekend? A crowd of them were going. Twenty bands. Blockheads, Bad Manners, Selector. Come; it’ll be a laugh, he said.
I arrived in the early evening of the festival’s second day. At the check-in counter, I was delighted to learn that I had been upgraded from a room only to an apartment. But where were my new pals? And how would I find them? I knew none of their surnames. Butlins at Minehead is the size of a small town. I had the phone number stored of the chap who’d invited me, but my phone was away at the menders.
The lads in the next apartment to mine were sitting out on the balcony playing a drinking game involving a plastic funnel and four feet of tubing. They were dressed as jockeys in yellow and mauve quartered silks. I made myself a nice cup of tea, then went for a wander around the site. On the footpaths between the rows of apartments and chalets, I encountered punks, mods, bikers and gangs of blokes dressed in bondage and fetish gear, or dressed as sexy nuns in fishnet stockings and suspenders, or as Playboy bunnies. Cross-dressing seemed to be the ultimate party statement. Most people were boozing inside their chalets or seated outside on plastic chairs enjoying the evening sunshine. I wasn’t stared at, but I felt self-conscious. I must have been the only straight, stone-cold sober, boringly dressed person on the site. And this slightly paranoid consciousness of not being in the swim was accentuated a few minutes later when I ran into my new pals, who were standing around a table outside one of the bars.
They were in the swim alright. They were all completely off their faces. I hardly recognised them as the sedate regulars I knew from the quiet, rather intellectual pub. It was perhaps a miracle that they recognised me. Beyond effusive, inarticulate greetings, I couldn’t get any sense out of any of them, apart from, ‘It’s fantastic!’ Or, ‘It’s just fantastic!’ Or, ‘It’s really, really fantastic!’ I turned from one to the other hoping to move the conversation on, but they seemed to have been seized by a collective delirium. One or two couldn’t even speak at all. Others were jabbering away 15 to the dozen but not rationally. It was as though against all expectations they’d come to Butlins at Minehead, stumbled on the secret of happiness, and gone mad at the same instant.
I was pleased for them; jealous even. Added now to my sense of coming late to the party, however, was the realisation that I wasn’t in a party mood. I went to the bar to buy a pint, thinking I might try to catch up. It did no good. My thoughts turned to my nice apartment. I’d brought daffodils to make it homely and books and tins of soup. I made a decision to have a night in. Without taking my leave of my new pals, I returned there (the jockeys were gone), sat down on a sofa and opened a book — a 1935 Hogarth Press edition of The Common Reader by Virginia Woolf – and started reading the first essay, ‘The Pastons and Chaucer’.
I’ve never read any of Virginia Woolf’s novels with as much enjoyment as I read this essay. I was utterly enthralled and amazed by the quality of the writing and the clear-sightedness of her historical perspective. I read it in a kind of rapture, dreading coming to the end while still at the beginning. It was just fantastic. That I had my reading head on had a lot to do with it. I was in the right mood, both for her and her subject. But was it more than that? This unexpected and normally temporary deepening of enjoyment of the English language has happened to me abroad sometimes. Somehow English becomes more vivid to this native speaker when read in countries where it isn’t widely spoken. Is a like, mysterious process at work at Butlins, Minehead? Does Butlins, with its long experience, understand what makes you happiest, whatever it is, then deliver it without further ado? I read ‘The Pastons and Chaucer’ by Virginia Woolf twice through, savouring every sentence, dimly conscious that the caterwauling of the revellers passing the window, and the wailing of the seagulls copulating clumsily on the roof opposite, were becoming ever more raucous.
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