A Matter of Choice

As two of my blogging buddies Lauren and The Boy and Me are away at Butlins, Bognor Regis at the moment it got me reminscing about the times  I've been there and how much I love it. Ive blogged about it before, - my hen weekend,   and some of the best weekends I've ever had  but my love affair with the place started way back in the 80's when it was then known as 'Southcoast World'  It was 1987 and my friend and I were old enough to go off by ourselves around the resort which is probably the main factor in my long standing love affair with the place, it offered a sudden and amazing freedom as we chose where we wanted to go and what we wanted to do, a feeling that was similar in some ways with the adult weekends we went on in recent years. There was so much choice, we spent hours in the funfair, messing about on the boating lake trying not to drop our oars overboard  (I believe the lake now has a hotel on it - I was quite sad to see it was cov...

Love it or hate it even in Cyprus where it's not widely acknowledged you can't avoid the fact it's Halloween, so it's no surprise that this weeks Gallery theme is 'Frightful'  It didn't take me long to figure out what photo to dig out the archives... Meet Scary Clown, aka my husband in his favourite fancy dress costume of all time!  This was his outfit of choice on a adult party weekend at Butlins several years ago. I tried to disown him for the night but as much as we tried we couldn't lose him even in a packed nightclub, you could always tell where he was by the screams coming from random people as they ran away!   

Back in the good ol'days we went through a bit of a second childhood!  It all started with my hen weekend when 8 of my friends and I went to Butlins for a 'School disco' weekend  and ended up with five separate trips in just two years! They were quite simply the best weekends of all time! Friends, fancy dress, dancing, drinking and lots and lots of laughter. There was something about the place that made you regress to childhood - maybe it was all the flashing lights on the arcade machines! From the Friday when we arrived until the Monday when we left it was like being in a different world - a world that was often very surreal! Aaron and I, as we do went to great efforts to persuade everyone to dress up, at least on the Saturday night. Over the various trips we have been school kids on several occasions (the simplest and one of the most fun, especially when there are 8 of you dressed like it!), Superheroes, and other random and quite bril...