It'll be three weeks of camping near the coast I was told...
Back in the mid 80's my dad took a job catering for a charity that worked with under-privileged kids from the inner cities, giving them a countryside holiday they would otherwise never experience. The gig was for him to spend three weeks cooking for the kids at a camp site close to Bognor Regis.

I was 10 years old at the time and was pretty excited when Dad suggested I come along for the stint. We would camp at the site, and I could take part in the daily events with the other kids.

The first sign that this would be a holiday to forget was when we first pulled up in a barren field in our Ford Capri, and opened the door to be greeted by the most acrid smell of shit imaginable. Locating the source of the odour was fairly simple, it was coming from the sewage pumping station in the adjacent field. It was a smell that I would acclimatise to remarkably quickly.

The kids started arriving later that day, and my excitement evaporated when I realised that each and every one of them was likely to beat me to a pulp at the first available opportunity. I retreated sharply to the kitchens where dad was working, and rarely ventured out for the next three weeks. Rather than fishing and playing ball-games all day as I had hoped, my time was spent peeling potatoes, removing thousands of earwigs from the kitchen floor and doing my best to avoid having to use the toilet at the same time as any of over one hundred other boys.

My lingering memory of that hellish time though is spending hour after hour in that hot kitchen, with nothing for company other than a tiny radio that was only able to pick up the local commercial radio station. I don't know who compiled the playlist for that station, but they were certainly a bit partial to the Eurythmics. I feel scared whenever I hear "There must be an angel".
(BinDipper, Fri 15 Aug 2014, 11:11, Reply)