Not my home town (Yeovil is covered elsewhere!) but the mecca for ***** on holiday where I had the fortune (or misfortune) to work in all summer!
Newquay is well known for being a centre for ***** on tour. I mean the whole town thrives on the money they all bring in. There aren’t actually proper clothes shops in Newquay, save for all the ‘surf’ shops offering over priced ‘hoodies’ most of which appear to be red, have LIFEGUARD – BABEWATCH DIVISION and NEWQUAY 2005 in yellow lettering on them somewhere. Not to mention all the t shirts with somewhat ruder sayings on them, and thats just what the ladies are wearing, which believe you and me, wasn’t much!
While I’ve never experienced Newquay on a Saturday in the height of summer I’ve had to deal with the mess and the fallout of it the day after the drunken adventures.
Saturday afternoon in Newquay often meant the arrival of the many National Express coaches from around the country. They would then get an overpriced taxi, or a bus out to one of the many holiday parks so designed for them. One of them has a double deck bus service running every half an hour into town, and I got to experience the delights, or otherwise of the operation. Even when you happen to be aboard one of the local service buses the cry from the drunks awaiting at the stops (an acheivement for them for some don’t get that small concept into their heads) of are you going to ‘Sunnyside’ or ‘Trevelgue’, to which we would answer no. Now Trevelgue is pronounced tre-vel-ge(emphasising the eee) which again to some of them appears almost impossible to pronounce correctly. Mind you it is Cornish! There were all kinds of antics, best was the usual game of the drunks ringing an unmanned office to ‘find out the next bus’ at 2300 hours while you’re on a break from a shift. Result: lots of phones ringing and not being answered.
Saturday mornings were spent at the bus station dealing with those who had been out the night before (using the last bit of money they had remaining) and missed the bus ‘cos the taxi didn’t turn up’. Only the once did I get an honest one who said ‘we purposely missed it’. Problem is if you miss the coach the ticket isn’t valid so you of course tell them the cost (for the five of them) to get home. I didn’t get abuse off people, though some of my colleagues did (well you mention £150.00 to a bunch of ***** and wait for the reaction). There was the memorable experience of helping out several attractive females by sorting out the ticket and getting them onto another bus. I did once get this really abusive person, who needed telling three times the bus was on the way, and he was adamant it had turned short of the stop. Suffice to say the conversation ended after he began to swear. The idiot rang up for more, so same response again, phone down. A trick I learnt from being a taxi controller in Yeovil (reference all the bits about drunks at 0200) was to simply put the phone down when they get abusive!
Generally however the attitude of the ***** on tour left a lot to be desired – there were those who took the pi*s cos I was actually working, I just wanted them to miss the bus home so they would have to be nice to me again. Me, I just smile sweetly and put up with it and be as helpful as possible. But do we really have to be nice to a sub section of the population that indulges in getting wasted at almost every opportunity? Perhaps not.
Newquay after a night out was a sight to behold, various sections of vomit everywhere (from the kebab that seemed SUCH a good idea at 0300) and the smell of urine from where they decided to take a leak. The bus station toilets were even designed accordingly, so that when they were locked you could take a leak through the railings, and there was a conveniently situated plughole to blast the lot down in the morning somewhere in the doorway… We had to lock the toilets cos people would, well, do things that we cant go into here in them and generally wreck them.
So there you have it, Newquay the mecca for **** holidays. I forgot to go into great detail about the chavved up motors that run about the place with the passenger in the back thumping the windows (or is that actually meant to be music?!) or the latest ‘rap’ tune blasting out for us all to hear. I thought public broadcasting wasn’t allowed unless you had a licence?
Then there was the coming of christ in August, when the KFC opened. Ignoring the large queue I went to the slightly quieter than usual pasty shop for my lunch. But this was a better than average KFC, where you didn’t have to point at the sign to tell them what you wanted to eat!!
Newquay gets a mention for being a **** town cos of the people who visit it, mind you get the St Austell lot on tour. Now there’s a place worth its own entry!!
