The Upgrade: A Cautionary Tale of a Life Without Reservations (34 page)

She’d started off gently trying to persuade me that waking up every morning with no memory of the previous night was not the optimum way to live—she was worried about me. But soon she too had become frustrated by my complete unwillingness to cut down on booze.

All of that stuff—getting drunk, being dumped—takes up a lot of
time, and I had to write 900 words a week for the
Guardian
, so I could hardly be blamed for slipping a bit when it came to writing my next book.

And anyway, I reasoned, all of the parties and the drinking and the girls were technically research, so it wasn’t like I hadn’t done
any
work. I just hadn’t written as many actual words as possibly I should have done. Which is to say, I hadn’t written a single one.

Of course the story I told Alan, my publisher at W&N, was slightly different. Every so often he’d email to check on progress and I’d happily report that all was “going fine” or that I was “plowing ahead.”

My editor at the
Guardian
would email me every so often too—enquiring why the column was sometimes as much as twenty-four hours late.

“I’m sorry,” I’d explain, “I’m just racing towards my book deadline—so much going on right now.”

And then I’d close my laptop and head out to meet whichever Brit was in town, and spend the rest of the day getting trashed.

Life was good, as far as I could remember.

“Wait, you’re going to Butt Lands?”

Kelly seemed surprised.

“Butlins. I’m going to Butt
lins
. It’s a holiday camp in England where poor people who are scared of flying go on holiday.”

“Butt Lands sounds like more fun.”

She had a point. It was now five months until my book deadline and I’d finally decided to start taking it seriously. I had loads of good material about staying in hotels, and I was pretty sure I had enough
amusing stories to fill a book—but I wanted some extra color.

Having stayed in a villa and a student dorm, I decided I needed to try at least one other alternative to hotels. And when my friend Paul Walsh called me from London, I knew I’d found it.

“Hey, buddy—how do you fancy flying back from San Francisco for a weekend in Butlins?”

Apparently Butlins had hired a new PR person who had decided, inexplicably, that it would do their brand a world of good if they invited a group of “influential Internet users”
⁴⁸
to visit the camp for a weekend-long “social media party.”
⁴⁹

I hesitated for all of ten seconds: did I really want to fly 5000 miles to spend three days in a shitty holiday camp with a group of bloggers, even if it would be a funny addition to the book?

Yeah, of course I did—not only was there probably a chapter in it, but there was also at least one column and a half-dozen blog posts.

The deal was sealed, though, when I realized what date it took place on. The trip came a week before the arrival in London of the Traveling Geeks—the American version of Webmission, where a group of entrepreneurs and journalists from Silicon Valley travel to London to, well, I suppose to give themselves the smug satisfaction that things really are better back home. A few of my friends from Silicon Valley would be on the trip, including Sarah.

I missed Sarah. Since we’d stopped talking regularly, I would often find myself stuck with a line in a column, or trying to understand some element of entrepreneurship in the Valley, wishing I could pick up the phone and ask her. I’m sure she’d have answered had I called, but there was something about the change in her manner towards me that made it obvious that she wouldn’t exactly be thrilled to hear my voice.

And yet I couldn’t think of anything specific I’d done to offend her.
Maybe if we could catch up in London I could find out what had gone wrong, and how I could fix it.

Robert would be in town too, of course, and I knew I could always rely on him to have a good word for me when all those around me had lost theirs.

Come to think of it, I hadn’t heard from Robert for a few weeks either, but according to the published invitation list he was going to be at Butlins too.

That was the final deciding factor. I booked my ticket.

I
n his book
How to Lose Friends and Alienate People
, Toby Young writes about his first trip back to London after spending a few months in New York.

He talks about seeing England through the eyes of an American: “The people, with their sallow complexions and cheap, non-designer clothes, looked so drab … Britain was so dowdy … as if everything was covered in a thick layer of dust.”

As Robert and I sat on the train from Victoria to Butlins, in the charmingly named town of Bognor Regis, I knew exactly what he meant. Even the name Bognor Regis sounds dowdy and British.

We’d decided the best plan, if we were going to survive the weekend—me with my jetlag and both of us with the fact that we were heading to Butlins—would be to start drinking early. Specifically, we decided that the best plan would be to sit in the vestibule between the train carriages, drinking cheap supermarket “champagne” from paper cups, as if to underline how ironically we were treating the whole trip.

The decision proved to be a sound one as we’d dramatically misjudged how far away Bognor Regis is from London. “I think it’s about half an hour,” said Robert as the train pulled out of London’s Victoria Station.

The “champagne” ran out after about an hour. “We should have bought a second bottle,” said Robert.

“We should have bought a whole case,” I replied.

If the point of the trip was to confound our snobbish expectations of Butlins then things got off to a shaky start as we were checking in. Walking towards the reception desk, our way was unintentionally
blocked by half a dozen fat men in black t-shirts bearing the slogan “Ken COCKS party.” As if the comedy value of Mr. Cock’s name was too subtle, even with the capitals and the missing apostrophe, each shirt also sported a huge cartoon penis, ejaculating over the text.

“Oyoy!” hinted one of the men, at the top of his lungs.

“’Ave it!” suggested a second.

The receptionist looked ashamed of herself, as well she might. Our visit coincided with one of Butlins’ “Big Weekends” (adults only—no children allowed) and, despite the company’s terms and conditions emphasizing that bachelor parties were not welcome, it would be fair to assume from the COCK chaps that a few had snuck in.

Furthermore, each group of men had determined that their coordinated costumes—which they wore for the whole weekend—would be the most brilliantly hilarious in the camp, through a combination of blunt irony and shock value. Accordingly, the whole place was overrun with gangs of overweight man-children in drag. The bachelorette-weekend girls, meanwhile, had all taken their cue from American college chicks at Halloween and were resplendent in a variety of “slutty” variations of traditional costumes—slutty cats, slutty soldier girls, slutty ballerinas and slutty nuns, each with her name and alliterative description written on her back (“Naughty Niccie,” “Cute Chantelle” just two real examples).

By far my favorite, though, was slutty Tinkerbell—who, on the second night, we watched having an absolutely screaming row with a man dressed as a fat Peter Pan. “You need to fucking grow up, mate,” she yelled, brilliantly.

The people, it soon became clear, were more entertaining than the actual organized entertainment. On the night we arrived, we were treated to a performance in the resort’s nightclub by the three remaining members of ’90s teen band S Club 7, and a boy-band called 911 (pronounced “nine one one” and not, as Milo Yiannopoulos, a stereotypically posh
Telegraph
journalist who was also on the trip, suggested, “nine-eleven”).

A man dressed as a fat, masked Captain America tried gamely to talk his way into the VIP area (a roped-off section of the main nightclub, guarded by a man in a bright red jacket) using the line “do you know who I am?,” which was almost as brilliant as Tinkerbell vs. Peter Pan.

On the second day, we all went karting, an experience that ended with Robert nearly flipping his kart over thanks to some clumsy oversteering and me trying to undertake him on a hairpin bend. As we were leaving the track—heading toward an archery lesson that would see Robert being stabbed in the leg by Milo—we overheard a woman complaining that she had suffered whiplash. Clearly the ambulance-chasing daytime TV message was getting through to these people: where there’s blame there’s a claim.

After that it was time to head for the high ropes course and the climbing wall, where a man dressed in a pink tutu and stockings complained about having to wear a helmet because “it makes me look stupid.”

If all of these encounters had reinforced my prejudice about holiday camps, there was one area where my expectations were completely confounded. I knew exactly what to expect from Butlins: dated self-catering chalets with peeling wallpaper and TVs that you had to put low denomination coins into every half-hour to keep them switched on.

Having already written, in my head, a hilarious chapter about trying to sleep in the equivalent of a garden shed, I was actually disappointed when I realized that we’d be staying in a proper hotel within the camp. Worse still, my room was really, unironically, nice: far better than a lot of the rooms I’d had in four- and five-star hotels in London.

The PR person, hearing I was from the
Guardian
, had decided to pull some strings and I’d been upgraded to the best room in the resort. Leather sofas, a king-sized bed, a minibar and wine chiller—but better than all of that, a huge roof terrace with a telescope pointing out across the sea.

Sure, some of the attempts to make Butlins “posh” were laughably brilliant—the copies of the
Daily Mail
and the
Sun
newspapers
in reception were on wooden sticks, like in upmarket members’ clubs (“Oh, look, the
Sun
on a stick,” said Milo from the
Telegraph
) and on arrival each member of our group received a pot of strawberry and champagne jam in a little bag. But all in all, every aspect of the accommodation surpassed my expectations by a considerable chalk.

“In fact,” I said to Robert, as we sat in the camp’s Burger King, on the last night, “if only the people who stayed here weren’t so predictably hideous, I could just about live here permanently.”

I gestured at the scene outside Burger King, which was situated in the main Big Top, surrounded by fast food outlets and arcade games and shops selling scrunchies and pregnancy test kits (but not, as far as I could see, condoms. Know your audience). It reminded me of that scene in the film version of
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
where Dr. Gonzo and Raoul Duke are off their tits on ether, making everyone look grotesque and twisted and loud and terrifying. Except I wasn’t on ether—the people were just grotesque and twisted and loud and terrifying.

One man was surfing on the roof of a ride-on Bob the Builder dump truck; another was scaling the outside of the children’s climbing area.

“I mean, look at them,” I continued. “They can hardly walk—how can they live like this?”

Robert just looked at me. He didn’t smile.

“You realize that’s how you look some nights?” he said. I laughed. He didn’t, just carried on talking. “I’m worried about you, mate—and coming from me that’s saying something. Everything I hear about you from San Francisco is about you being drunk. I don’t just mean from friends, but total strangers—how they saw you at a lunch event and you were already well on your way, or how you were still drunk at breakfast meetings. It used to be that you would turn into Drunk Paul when you drank too much, but that the rest of the time you’d be this nice guy who everyone liked. Like a Jekyll and Hyde thing. But I’m worried the analogy is getting a bit too accurate. I care about you, mate, and I don’t
want you to end up poisoning yourself to death.”

The man on the Bob the Builder truck lost his footing and fell to the floor laughing.

“Oh, come on,” I said, “I’m not that bad. And at least I get paid to be an asshole.”

“Yeah, but that’s my point,” said Robert, “that guy on the floor has a real job. He works all year and then come to Butlins for a weekend of acting like a dick. That’s just a normal Tuesday night for you. I know people love reading about it—I love reading about it, too—and you keep getting paid for it, but most of the people who are your biggest fans don’t know the real you; they don’t give a shit if you kill yourself.”

It was quite a speech, and one that hit its mark. My drinking was seriously out of control again, probably worse than it had ever been. But I was trapped again. I’d built a career—or at least the beginnings of one—as a drunken scapegoat. The guy who failed at business, and at relationships and at just about everything else, and then wrote about it so everyone could laugh and thank their lucky stars they weren’t me. If I stopped being that guy, then what?

The first installment of my new book advance had just hit my bank account. I might be killing myself, but I was being paid well to do it. What was I supposed to do? Call up my editor and say, “sorry, I’ve decided to quit drinking—no more drunken adventures from me. Here’s your check back, I’m going to get a job in Starbucks …”?

No. For better or worse, this was the career I’d decided on and I had to see it through. I was too far down the road.

One thing I did decide, though, was that I wasn’t going to drink while Sarah was in town.

I’d be spending a week with her and Robert and this was my chance to show them both that I wasn’t totally out of control. I arrived back in London from Butlins on Monday evening. The Traveling Geeks were due to arrive on Tuesday afternoon.

I’d have one quick drink on Monday night and then that would be it for a week. Tuesday morning came, and I woke up in my hotel next to Amy—a producer for the BBC who I’d met on my flight back from San Francisco and, if my hung-over memory served me correctly, I’d drunk-dialed at about eleven o’clock the previous night, insisting that she come down to Adam Street where I was enjoying a quick post-Butlins drink with Milo from the
Telegraph
.