In a moment of idle browsing I found this excellent web site, Postcard Nostalgia, ok, so its an excellent website if you from the UK and wish to be reminded of those hellish holiday that you and your parents spent in the 1960s and 70s…
Specifically I would refer you dear reader to this page – The Devon Coast Country Club, being that I have specific knowledge of the place, specifically in the year of 1978, the year when it rained for 365 days.
I wrote about it here actually, the holiday where we had to buy kagouls just to survive, the holiday where everyone had wrinkled wet-skin on a permanent basis, the year when I swear that by the time autumn came around the people of the UK had started to evolve gills.
Looking at the photographs on that web site I am immediately reminded of two epic cinema films – “Dirty Dancing” of course, and the scene in “The Shining” when Jack Nicholson is having his delirium and experiences flashbacks in the hotel bar where he is talking to a ghostly barman – have a look at that postcard of “The Lounge Bar” and tell me I’m wrong, its spooky.
The Lounge Bar scenes on those postcards do not illicit any recollections from the museum of recollections that is my brain and I suspect that is because we, as a crowd of nine 21 year old lads were gently steered away from the genteel Lounge Bar so beloved of besuited gentlemen and cocktail dressed ladies, to the wooden hut at the very top end of the site, almost an afterthought it was, a large wooden hut in which was another bar that catered for “the likes of us”, in other words it sold beer and no-one minded if you spilled some of it on the floor as the night grew old.
It was in that large wooden hut of a bar that we were all utterly amazed one night to see Brian Armit with a girlfriend, for “Brian Armit” think Rik Moranis in “Little Shop of Horrors” but clad in a red Adidas V-necked sweater that must have been knitted to his skin as he never wore anything else.
There was Brian, in the wooden hut of a bar long before we all arrived, and there he sat with a girl of similar age, sitting on his knee. We all stood at the doorway and gaped open-mouthed for such a thing had never been noted before, Brian with a girl, say it ain’t so, strike me down now Lord for I am hallucinating, Brian and a girl, no, surely not.
But indeed it was true, and there they sat for most of the night, he whispering sweet nothings in her ear inbetween drawing long drags from the Embassy Regal that was a permanent fixture ‘twixt his thumb and forefinger – keep thinking Rik Moranis in “Little Shop of Horrors”, now imagine Rik Moranis trying to look as cool as Steve McQueen by holding a cigarette at arms length ‘twist thumb and forefinger, yes we laughed at Brian Armit all the time too.
And then, sometime just before the bar closed Brians love target stood up and stormed away to join the small group of uglier girls that were sitting in a darkened corner of the wooden hut, he sat there devastated, then sat there dumbfounded as one of the uglier girls came across and slapped his face for him, knocking his black rimmed national health specs awry, Eric Morecambe stylee.
How dare he take the piss out of her friend all night long she shouted at him, how we all laughed as Brian sat there open-mouthed stammering the words, “but, but, but…” in explanation.
“YOU KNEW SHE IS DEAF” she finally screamed and stormed back to the darkened corner where girls of her visage are best kept, oh how we laughed some more whilst Brian sat mouthing the words “She’s deaf ???”.
All those sweet nothings, all night long, all to no avail.
