Interesting Postcards

'Bing bing bong, this is Radio Butlin'. Yes, it really happened. We used to go on holiday to Butlins in the seventies, and always had a brilliant time. I'll tell you about it someday, as well as posting more of my surprisingly extensive Butlins postcard collection. Bet you can't wait. But you'll have to, as I'm now on holiday for a bit. Reheating a soufflé is a pretty tricky operation. 

Interesting Postcards

Cavendish Hotel
Eastbourne
Tel: 27401
Hotel photograph includes new Devonshire Wing.

These Britons on holiday in Britain are doing what Britons on holiday in Britain always end up doing: making the best of it. On that unforgiving beach, under the relentless scrutiny of older people in deckchairs and in the shadow of the monstrous, unsympathetic new Devonshire Wing, the adults smile and try and look like they're having the time of their lives. To their right, however, their daughter undermines their plucky efforts with a simple but eloquent gesture of abject despair.

The back of the postcard says it all.

Short Announcement

I know I’ve only just got back, but I have decided to put Island Of Terror on hiatus for a while. I seem to have less to say than I used to, and am saying it in a less interesting way, so I’m going to shuffle off for a bit and do a few other things. British horror and sci fi and all the rest of it are still massively important to me so, believe me, I will be back and we can carry on where we left off.

In the meantime, I will still be contributing to ‘Mounds & Circles’, the smut / art blog, as well as to ‘The Pseudoscientific World Of TOMTIT’, on which Fearlono and myself will shortly be presenting our first original audio works (we’re not calling it music). In addition, there is, or was, ‘Sub-Machine Gun’.

Please continue (or start) to follow this site for updates, especially regarding some interesting ‘Island’ related events coming up in November and December.

I’m not going to say too much more, as I will be coming back here and will be around elsewhere, but thanks for all your support and your interest over the last few years, it’s much appreciated.

TTFN,

Paul

Wacker's World

It's holiday season on The Island (and Mounds & Circles). There are other blogs, of course, but they mainly just pinch stuff from us. I'll be back on the 1st September, but I'll leave you in the capable hands of those glorious Scouse femme fatales The Vernons Girls.

Be seeing you!

Portrait Of A People

010: A young couple enjoying a typical British summer.

Smile! You're In Southend

Happy people, many of whom are now dead, in Anthony Simmons' 1953 short 'Sunday By The Sea', filmed in Southend, or Sarfend as we Essex folk would have it.

I went to Southend last year. It's a bit too far west for me in many ways, so I didn't enjoy it half as much as the people in the pictures above. My twin and I did pose around in our trunks though, so it wasn't a complete waste of time. 

Freedom To Roam

Ah, Caravans. Not a British invention, but a British institution. For such a diffident, singular race, the caravan provides a fantastic way for us to exercise our freedom to go wherever we damn well please, but to take our own private space with us. A caravan is a little like a mobile embassy: wherever it stops in the world that patch of ground technically belongs to the family inside, who will normally be brewing up and remarking upon how wonderful it is to be able to make a cup of tea whenever you feel like it, despite not being at home.

Here are some images culled from a BBC documentary called 'Caravans: A British Love Affair'.

I wonder what she's looking at? Rhyl, perhaps.



Family time. There's nothing else to do.



An early wooden caravan / home from home.



Coleopatra.



A typical caravanning trip.

England, Paris.

 

Sam Alper, the Henry Ford of the UK caravan industry



NOT Kessingland.

When I was in my teens, we had a caravan. We did Wales and Devon and Cornwall and all that but, mostly, we went to Kessingland in Suffolk (about sixty miles from home). It's a lovely place, but there's not much to do there or in nearby metropolis Lowestoft if you're 14, and you soon exhaust that small supply of excitement if you go every fucking weekend, so I grew to resent the place and the way it cut into my burgeoning social life. Now I have a job and a family of my own, of course, I'd love to go to Kessingland every weekend, especially now Lowestoft has that new wind turbine.

Interesting Postcards

Fistral Bay Hotel
Pentire, Newquay, Cornwall
The Superb Heated Swimming Pool

I don't think that swimming pool looks superb at all. I think the whole area looks like a cramped, concrete holding pen for holidaymakers too scared to leave what the owners no doubt describe as 'The Complex'.

It's like something out of J.G Ballard: limited space and too few sun loungers leads to territorial tussles and simmering resentment and when the concrete bridge across the pool gets wet it becomes a death trap and civilisation breaks down completely. On the plus side, the seven foot wall blocks some of the traffic noise and the water temperature is a steady four degrees centigrade.

I think I'm going to write to 'Watchdog'. Was it on in 1979?