Oh shit yeah, Butlins...
I'm told we went to Butlins-type concentration camps when I was very small, but I was either too young to remember or the experience was so scarring it's been locked away in my memory somewhere.

But this isn't when I was a kid - I was about 22 at this time when we went to a years-derelict holiday camp where a (legal) weekender was being staged. Two carfuls of us showed up for it. The tunes were okay if not spectacular, and we knew one of the security guys as a clubber from a place we went often, and he was enormously helpful in bolstering our stock of substances from what he'd confiscated from a number of, as he put it, 'poor unfortunate fuckers'. Helped to compensate for the tunes a great deal :)

But the place. Oh my. Being a holiday camp, it was near-cardboard-walled chalets which would be bad enough, but remember I said 'years-derelict'? At least ten. You could tell that the front doors had been hung, the windows unboarded and the plumbing and electricity reactivated in less than a week. All over the area of chalets which had been deemed safe for habitation and refurbishment, doors fell off, windows fell out and very, very few were fortunate enough for their plumbing or power to continue working past just getting ready. And the beds? Old stuffy mattresses on uncarpeted, damp, ten-years-unlived-on lino floors. Good job that sleeping bags were advised on the flyer.

But we were curious about one thing at first - this place was huge and right on the coast, but had been apparently dropped as a dead loss by the look of it. Yeah, lots more people went abroad, but this place could still do some trade, surely? So we had a look around. After a little exploring we discovered that we were free to roam the living area and the clubhouses where the DJ's were playing, but the rest of it was taped off. If there'd been security about we may not have crossed it, but there weren't so we did. There were more chalets that made us acutely aware of what ours must have looked like very recently, half-dismantled playgrounds, a drained swimming pool or two - but for those assembled here that night, this place was stone dead. It was getting dark and just a little spooky (Scooby Doo style rather than Friday 13th lol) when we reached the edge. We could see the coast and a mile or so along it we could also see, standing or more accurately squatting proud in the late summer twilight, the familiar yet innately disturbing giant spherical-ish shape of a nuclear power station.

Curiosity satisfied.

We stayed until just after noon the next day - the event was winding down early and an exodus had begun, partly because of the not-especially brilliant tunes, partly the accommodation/needing a shower and I've no doubt partly the close proximity of a fucking nuclear fission reactor. Yeah, true, mostly harmless but even knowing that as fact tell me; how much time could you comfortably spend next to one? Eh?
(thatblokeoverthere not quite as much an arsehole as I thought, Tue 22 Jan 2008, 22:56, 1 reply)

Locked away
I think you'll find that you've locked it away in the deepest recesses of your mind - it's better that way...
(james_tiger_woods is going to start his killing spree on the, Wed 23 Jan 2008, 0:07, closed)