Jeremy Clarke Jeremy Clarke

Missing the point

A social leper tells you of his miserable existence

issue 02 August 2003

We’ve moved up from a Festival 30 to a Willerby Bermuda. Or rather my philanthropic aunt has. We knew she was thinking of upgrading this year, but we thought she was going to go for a Festival Super maybe, or at a push an Atlas Fanfare Super 35. Not in our wildest dreams did we imagine she’d get a Willerby Bermuda.

When me and the boy and the boy’s half brother arrived on Saturday for our annual free holiday in north Cornwall and we were confronted with this spanking new Willerby Bermuda in place of the old Festival 30, our feelings were mixed though. We were sentimentally attached to the old Festival 30. We liked its worn, etiolated upholstery, its ill-fitting doors, and that familiar musty smell, peculiar to old caravans, second-hand bookshops and nonconformist chapel cloakrooms, that greeted us when we first arrived and tugged open the door. It was a caravan without pretensions to being anything other than a holiday caravan.

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