The Brean Exotic & Amusing Fruit Festival
One year, during Glastonbury, I was sitting around with the friends who were too skint to go and wondering what the hell to do. So we decided to go the seaside. This is in the west country, and the main seaside resort is not for nothing known as "Weston-Super-Mud" so we decided to go somewhere else. We got out a map and looked along the coast. We picked - for reasons that now escape me - Brean. We thought we'd have a festival of our own and so we packed a guitar and some unusual fruits we'd bought in the supermarket and set off.

At about 10pm at night.

It was my girlfriend's birthday the next day and I didn't want to be to bed dreadfully late, but I agreed anyway. I figured we'd be back by club turning out time, which was fairly usual fare for a weekend.

I was driving. My friend Graham was in the front seat navigating. There are three people behind me skinning up and passing them forward. There is another car behind me, following my tail lights, relying on Graham & I to get them safely to Brean in the pitch dark.

On the map it had looked straightforward. In the dark, considerably the worse for wear, it turned out not to be. I thought it was largely on driving the main roads but shortly after leaving the city Graham cried "turn left" and I did, into a country lane that merited the description "a maze of twisty little passages, all alike".

After nearly an hour of this, I was getting pretty fed up. I wanted to go to the seaside. I wanted to pee. I wanted to make sure I was home by 2am and it was already nearly midnight. I wanted not to be driving a car in what was now a fairly advanced state of cannabis inebriation. I started shouting at Graham.

"Where the fuck are we?"

"We're here" he said, jamming a finger onto the map in an expert fashion. "Quick, turn right, QUICK".

I nearly flipped the car on its roof.

I slammed on the breaks and demanded he show me where we were. And while we were arguing about it, we saw the badger.

It came sniffling out of the dark woods like something out of a Lewis Carroll poem, grunting and burbling as it came, and ambled across the road before our astonished eyes as though we weren't there. Which is probably the case since badgers have bad eyesight and it was unlikely to have been able to smell anything other than the clouds of dope smoke billowing from the open doors of my small car. Having ascended the bank on the other side of the road it turned round and peered at us contemptuously before defecating and vanishing into the bushes. It's the closest I've ever been to a wild animal.

Suitably awed by our brush with mother nature we got back into the car and carried on our merry way. Except it wasn't merry for long. I still didn't know where we were. I was still driving down country lanes. I still wanted a pee, and the smell of the salt air, and to be home by 2am and not to be driving. None of these things were forthcoming. I got very angry.

Since everyone in the car was stoned, things rapidly assumed a bad-trip like atmosphere. Everything looked threatening. The terrifying trees looming close outside the window, the impenetrable inky blackness that surrounded us and which the headlight beams could barely pierce. We'd all fucking had enough. Everyone started yelling at Graham who was perfectly calm and assured us we'd get there soon.

And amazingly, we did.

We sat on the clifftops, taking it turns to demonstrate our ineptitude with the guitar and eating strange fruits. And in the relative calm that had descended I turned to Graham and asked him:

"You really didn't have a clue where we were, did you?"

"Oh, I knew exactly where we were the whole time" he replied. "I just decided it would be more interesting to see if we could go the whole way on the back roads".

I left the fucker there to hitch hike his own way back in the morning.
(MattDP (Squiggle), Fri 15 Jul 2011, 16:33, 3 replies)

You planned to go there, do whatever it is you were going to do,
and get home in 4 hours?
( monster munch person, man, woman... camera... TV?, Fri 15 Jul 2011, 19:46, closed)

Yes
It's not actually very far at all. I still live in th area and now know you can do the drive in 30 minutes. So we'd have had a good 3 hours to chill out by th sea in the dark had it not been for Graham's desire to explore the intricacies of the Somerset farm LAN network which took four ties as long.
(MattDP (Squiggle), Fri 15 Jul 2011, 22:46, closed)

"grunting and burbling as it came"
Badgerporn?
( SteamedCleaner, Sat 16 Jul 2011, 2:47, closed)