One of my most recent photos; this was taken almost exactly a month ago when I was at Colwyn Bay for a Christian camp I go to every summer. Left to right is Jonny, Jessie and Clare. I can’t work out why, but I think this is one of my favourite photos. I think it might be because it shows really well the underlying relaxed atmosphere surrounding camp, and shows how much we all enjoy being there, in a comfortable kind of way, if that makes sense.
I took this on our second-to-last full day of camp, so the Friday. Each evening we were given between one and two hours free time to do what we liked. For my friends and me, this usually meant going down to the beach, and sitting, often quite cold, eating chips, drinking coffee, and chatting to Moe, who owned the tiny kiosk on the front. Moe was such a legend, and came up with the funniest things. One of my friends, Simon, tipped him so much that he didn’t have any money left at the end of the week! However, our friendship cooled off a little (with the girls, at least), when we all said we’d add him on Facebook when we got back. The next day it turned out that he’d already found Clare and added her. Needless to say, we were a little freaked out.
Usually every evening, the tide was either out, or coming in. We got a little bit of sand, but didn’t make much of it – it was too cold most of the time. On what turned out to be our last evening down there, the day I took that photo, though we’d been banned from the sea, a few of the boys decided to man up, strip down to their boxers, and go in. What they didn’t account for was the fact that wet boxers are prone to stick to your skin. They all walked out with excuses of cold water shrinking their dicks.
There was actually quite a lot of nudity this year on camp. James was the worse one, getting naked twice, though not through choice. The first time he was in the shower and the rest of the guys stole his clothes and towel, and chucked them over the landing. He had to walk downstairs to collect them, all the while being videoed. As he was walking back up, someone grabbed his towel and yanked it down again – luckily for everyone else who saw the video, his hand was still in place covering his modesty. The second time was when he stood up to go somewhere, while we were all sitting in a circle chatting. The guy behind him “pantsed” him, but did it rather harder than he intended. I was looking away at the time, but the person sitting next to me got an eyeful.
In fact, the day I took that photo, James wasn’t down at the beach with us. He’d got grounded because on the way back from a trip in a minibus, he’d mooned out the back window at the car behind. As if that wasn’t funny bad enough, the person in the car behind happened to be a teacher for the boarding school we were staying in. And the minibus was the school’s own one, with “Rydal Penrhos” on the back (the name of the school).
A standing joke about the Colwyn Bay beach is the pier. Walking down to the beach we have to cross the road right in front of it. A sign on top says “Open all day, every day of the year” – when the place has been boarded up and closed for many years, by the look of the smashed glass and tree growing through the roof. I suppose you could look at it as a cool subject to take loads of photos of (Matt took a few, though he’s not uploaded them yet1 ), but otherwise it’s just a piece of junk that’s going to fall down one day. Colwyn Bay in general is a bit of a dead town, there’s nothing really picturesque about it, unless you like looking at wind farms out to sea (you may be able to see some turbines in that photo).
However, it’s home to camp, and camp is brilliant.
- you think the photos on flickr are good, you should see some of the ones on his facebook [↩]
That is such a nice photo. It looks so peaceful. I always wished I had memories from camp but I never went to camp as a kid, or ever for that matter. It must be nice. Sounds like you had fun.