by Paul Carr
• For some reason, when San Francisco shopkeepers or bartenders hear a British accent, they feel the need to use the word “cheers” instead of “thanks.” This sounds as odd as a Brit using “bucks” as slang for dollars or an Australian speaking French.
• Cab drivers in San Francisco have no idea where anything is. If you asked one to drive you to one end of the road and back again, you’d still have to tell him the cross street.
• But even if you made that journey back and forth till the end of time, it would still cost you less than taking a black cab one block back in London.
• American service is astonishing. You could give a Labrador puppy a hand job with a Prozac glove and it still wouldn’t be as pleased to see you as the staff of the Leland teashop on Bush Street.
• There are more than 80,000 kinds of American toast, seven hundred ways to cook an American egg but only one way to make American bacon. And it isn’t pretty.
• In restaurants, it is impossible to finish a glass of water before it’s refilled. The state of California is permanently in the grip of a water shortage. No one seems to have connected these facts.
• Free universal healthcare is tantamount to communism. Free soft drink refills are a basic human right.
• Newcastle Brown Ale is a delicacy.
• Adoption of new technology here is highly selective. Minicab drivers have Priuses, hookers accept PayPal but the idea of a three-pin plug is only just beginning to catch on.
• The Onion newspaper’s headlines are brilliantly satirical, but the body of its editorial often stretches the joke into unfunniness. The Fox News Channel does the exact opposite. Both are still wonderful.
• Thanks to Frost/Nixon, when you mention David Frost to an American, they picture Tony Blair doing an impression of Austin Powers.
• “Double the tax” sounds simple in theory but only natural-born Americans will ever understand the rules of tipping.
• See also: American football.
Another huge difference between Britain and America is their attitude to drinking. Of course, this was hardly news to me but there was something about actually moving to the place that really drove it home.
During the time I was applying for the visa, I’d started to pay attention to Robert and Sarah’s concern about my drinking, and had made a concerted effort to cut down.
But now that I’d actually made it to San Francisco, my intake had started to ramp up again. Part of this was cockiness—getting the visa despite my record made me feel invincible—but there was also a practical reason: to get enough material to a write the column each week without leaving San Francisco I’d had to throw myself wholeheartedly into the party scene.
Every night was the same: I’d grab my notebook and head to whichever of the town’s maybe five big venues was hosting the best party to promote some dot-com company or other. Then I’d avail myself of the free bar while talking to partygoers and taking notes of anything amusing they might say.
The parties would generally wind down about eleven, and it was at this point that the difference between Brits and Americans would make itself most apparent. In London, 11 p.m. is the time when my friends and I would head onto a late bar or a club to continue drinking, basically until one or more of us fell over.
We’d do this six or seven nights a week: I tended to hang out with journalists and entrepreneurs; groups of people who can set their own hours and so are unafraid of hangovers on a school night.
In San Francisco I was partying with entrepreneurs and journalists too, but, for reasons I couldn’t understand, come 11 p.m. they’d go home. Some of them were still so sober that they’d actually drive; in fact many would drive even if they weren’t sober—Californians obsess over Pilates and frown at the notion of eating carbs but their attitude to drink driving is straight out of the 1970s.
Occasionally I’d be able to convince someone to stay out for a late drink—but, even then, California’s licensing laws meant that even the late bars were closed by two.
My solution to this problem was twofold. First of all, I would start drinking early. This was the easiest fix, but it also meant that by the time the parties got started, I was already drunk. I was quickly getting a reputation as the drunk British writer at every party, a reputation I did absolutely nothing to counter as it only drew more attention to me, and by extension the columns that I was writing.
Wherever I went in the world, people still gave me a pass for my appalling behavior on the basis that I was a journalist—in America they gave me a second pass because they assumed that being a drunken idiot was just how British people behaved.
My second trick was to hang out more with Brits, which in San Francisco isn’t particularly difficult to arrange. Every week at least one entrepreneur from London would make the pilgrimage across the Atlantic either to meet their Silicon Valley counterparts or to beg for money from one of the valley’s super-rich venture capitalists.
And, of course, for those who read my Guardian column, I was the first person they’d email or call. Could they take me for a drink to tell me about their company? Of course they could; and what started as one drink always ended as an all-day binge.
Life was good, work was good and the drinks were free.
1302
April.
If my liver had fists, it would have been pounding them on the mat and begging for mercy.
I was covered in strange bruises, I had no idea what day it was—and in about half an hour I was heading out again to yet another party.
I hurt.
Webmission week had rolled around again, and the Brits had invaded San Francisco in their dozens. My last vivid memory from the previous evening was watching a British entrepreneur—who should probably remain nameless—standing on a bar, pouring tequila into the gaping mouth of a journalist from the Daily Telegraph newspaper.
Meanwhile, across the bar, another entrepreneur—who should definitely remain nameless—was making plans to take one of the female bartenders home, as his friend failed to gain support for a belching competition.
An hour or so later, with the Brits having drunk the bar dry, we decided to move things onto the Beauty Bar on Mission Street, but not before someone handed me a black bag containing something heavy.
“What’s in there?” I asked.
“A wooden duck.”
“Why have you put a wooden duck in a black bag?”
“Because otherwise they’ll realize we’re stealing it.”
I blacked out shortly afterwards. I woke up the next morning at Kelly’s house. Kelly was one of the few American girls who drank almost—at least half—as much as I did, and so was less put off by my drunken behavior than most. But still I could tell that even she was starting to tire of the constant hangovers and drinking with Brits until the sun came up. It was only a matter of time before she came to her senses.
I’d become increasingly aware that my American friends had started to give me a wide berth since I’d move to San Francisco. I’d seen Eris and her boyfriend maybe once or twice since arriving—both times it was at a party and I was drunk. We would make vague plans to catch up, but she was always busy, usually with work. Scott was busy with his new company and so had dropped off the social scene, at least as far as I was concerned.
The person, though, who had made her wide berth the most obvious was Sarah.
Before I moved, we’d virtually become best friends—emailing most days about book woes, speaking on the phone as often as international calling rates would allow. It was nice for us both to have a friend who could critique our writing and to whom we could vent about editors and publishers.
It was Sarah who said that if I ever decided to move to San Francisco she’d be happy to introduce me to people in “the Valley,” and generally help me make a start in building a network of professional contacts to rival the one I had in London.
At the start of the year she’d accepted a job at TechCrunch— organizers of the Tech
Crunch 50 conference—as editor at large, further increasing her professional profile. We’d had lunch a few times during my first weeks in town, but she too had since become increasingly “busy” and the few times we’d run into each other at parties—usually while I was drunk—she’d made it pretty clear that she didn’t have time to talk.
Frankly, I felt patronized: like I was some errant child who had let her down. I mean, yes, she had a point—in a few months I was going to turn thirty and I should probably be giving more serious thought to my health and my career—but I was also being paid handsomely for writing about being a drunk expat curiosity in San Francisco; the party invitations were showing no signs of drying up, and in a few months I’d finish writing my book about living in hotels and—well—being a drunk curiosity.
Be as disapproving as you like, I thought, but, as jobs go, mine isn’t a bad one.
1303
May.
Seven months until my book deadline, and I was a little behind schedule.
It wasn’t my fault, of course; I’d spent the previous two and a bit months getting used to my new town; slipping into the social scene, making new friends, arguing with Kelly, that kind of thing.
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.
1304
June.
“Wait, you’re going to Butt Lands?”
Kelly seemed surprised.
“Butlins. I’m going to Buttlins. 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.
Chapter 1400
Butt Lands
In 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 a
t 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.