End Of Season Adress

Fellow mebers, ¿
As sum of you are maybee aware my wyfe elsy usually does my tiping. But as usual for the end of season adress I aM going to tipe this miself.,.*^`{
I wud like to tank all our slaff at the “Cuberland Tex Srvicmens Klub for a highly sucksesfool treason this tyme around, wee have now morethan 600··# mebers and a fare few of them are laffable

and all rouwnd nice people ¡
We had a an End of seasons barbeque on toosday !!which was well attended and we haD turns on.A very poor comelian who i have forgotten and a Vetrilicwist called roger de corset and Wooky bear. ==I think that mabee he was drUnk cos the bare was slerring his words and made jokes about my wife´s goat ++ ..She wasnt best fleased to say the leased and she didn´t lick the stripper either. We all lik a laff and a coke but he went over the toop.I wod lik to tank Edith MerYDITH for making the buffy it was luvly´&%%” and i enjoyed the sausage scrolls and my wife liked the sherry rifle. Our stewart Nigel made a speech that was well percieved, - what a prick
ly response though when he mentioned the probleM with the doorman – we havent got won.”·€@ and in it he tanked the comity for all there effort, and there weedy response to the ?¿crisis wen the club was in rouble. ·$%&¬€
it´s with a minge of sadness However thAt I speek now though, for me, personelly, as my wyfe Elsy recently had a wild stroke, and one of my pigeons was salvaged by a dog. )(The pigeon “Jaunty Jack” had been innocently pecking awat at some willet in his loft when this jack russet came from next doot and salvaged him in the bottom
tier of the loft, leaving him witH a bad back. Lookily it did not prove natal and he is now on the bend.
wee will be having a new resident in October and then next yeer a new VICE resident. Pleese ensure that you attend the meeetings as we will bee holding an erection in Febroorary.
I will bee taking a rest now for a bit. But my nephew kevinn Holt is about to embalm on a gorilla charity treck. See his latest progres on http://www.thecampinggorilla.blogspot.com/
I will be chairing the reunion dinner in august in blacpool for details and other tings see http://www.cumberlandbarbenidorm.com/
kinD Regards THe COncert Chairman “**%

Presentation Night 2008/09 Season

Last Thursday night´s annual prize giving evening was a huge success, our function room was full to capacity, Yvonne did a cracking job with the buffet, and his royal highness the Prince Of Wales kindly agreed to stand in for Syd little to hand out the trophies when Syd suddenly realized he was seriously ill. The Prince was on his way down to Marbella for a Polo match and had popped in for a livener and a game of snooker after his driver had taken badly with the “Two Bob Bits”. I reminded the Prince that this was actually the second time we had met, the first when he had opened a new disabled toilet at an engineering firm where I worked in the early seventies. On that occasion I had presented him with the scissors for him to cut the ribbon from around the ballcock, and he swore and then dropped them, - not surprising really as we had heated em up two minutes before with a blow torch.
It was a bit embarrassing really as we didn´t actually have any disabled employees at that time (we tested pogo sticks for the toy firm “Chad valley”), and when Charles insisted on seeing the facility in operation our foreman Charlie Pickering had to pretend to only have one arm, which meant that when he sat on the pot he couldn´t reach the toilet paper. I was delighted when the Prince remembered this and told him of our plight with the presentation night. He said he would be delighted to help out, just as long as I took him for a game of Bowls later.
Although many of our members were hugely disappointed that Mr. Little couldn´t attend, they were grateful that Charles took the trouble to step in, even though they didn´t recognise him.
Trophies were handed to the members of our Dominoes team who reached the play-offs by finishing in 8th position. Their plight was helped somewhat by the bottom 2 of the 10 teams in the league dropping out pending an inquiry into match fixing allegations. Also, hats off to our ladies football team who collected the bronze medal in the “St. Miguel Tri-Team Challenge”. Other notable achievements were the winner of “Guess how many pork pies we sell on Friday night” competition which was won by Bob Wickes (The Butcher), and Harry Snodgrass who won “The Worst Dressed Snooker Player Of The Year” when he played against the “Spread Eagle” B team wearing a vest and a bald cardigan.

www.benidormclassbceleb.blogspot.com

www.kevinholt.net

Easter Holidays

Dear member,
It has been a quiet week this week down at the club – because it´s been closed. We close every year at Easter as it tends to be a bit sparse, - plenty of Spanish folk mind (don´t know where they all come from), and anyway our Elsie has her work cut out organizing the pensioners Aussie Rules football 5 a-side tournament which takes place every Good Friday on the Levante Beach.
I feel I must apologize for my absence from my post on stage at The Cumberland Ex-Servicemen´s last Tuesday as I was accidently locked in my potting shed by my old friend and domino partner Charlie Barrett. Charlie obviously thought that I had gone home and left the door open, and slammed it shut and snapped shut the lock, when I had in fact popped back inside to use the chemical toilet during an emergency brought on by a pint of Charlies home brewed “Old Peculiar” earlier. I tried to raise the alarm by banging my spade against the coal scuttle but when this proved inadequate I waved my Y-fronts out of the window on a long handled trowel. (I was desperate, as the light was fading fast, most of the allotment dwellers had gone home and I´d run out of toilet paper). This caught the attention of next doors Jack Russell who managed to chew the underpants free and this in turn caught the attention of his owner Mrs. Sarawack when she found him retching and whimpering in his basket some time later. It was this kindly old lady who phoned the fire brigade. (Elsie still wants to know how come Mrs. Sarawack knew they were MY underpants).
The Club re-opens this Tuesday with the Quiz night followed by Karaoke with our Steward Nigel if you´re desperate
for all the latest club news see this month´s Cumberland Claptrap – out now.

Download my books "Chasing The Cheese - A Year In The Life of A Benidorm Class B Celeb", "Are You Affiliated" and "The Best of The Cumberland Claptrap" for FREE over on www.kevinholt.net (you can leave a review on the guest book)

We had our inaugural coffee morning up the allotment last Tuesday – well, we didn´t have coffee exactly, not me and Charlie Barrett at any rate, and it wasn´t in the morning either but it was a good turnout nevertheless. Charlie who is famous for his home brewed beer very kindly brought along some of his very own “Credit Crunch Dark Mild” for us to try (Lidl´s own brand) and I brought some of Elsie´s Parkin Pigs (leftover from bonfire night). Our chairman Alf Cattermole addressed the meeting from the top of his compost heap and told of how there had been some serious vandalism over on his plot. Some lettuce seeds had been left strewn across the floor of his potting shed and when he had complained to the bloke on the next plot, he was verbally abused and attacked with a slug pellet. We had previously decided on constructing a life size scarecrow as we have had problems with local cats digging up radishes and distributing them amongst their friends. When it was pointed out that cats aren´t generally scared of human beings, Ron Chivers suggested that we make the scarecrow more mean looking by giving it a beard and attaching a toy gun to its hand. This was agreed upon, but then proved impractical. We didn´t have much raw material from which to construct the thing, and had to make use of some of the recreational gear from our sheds, however, with a bit of imagination and help from an old 1978 “Why Don´t You...” annual, I think it´s far to say we made a decent fist of it. Well done everybody!

"Across The Years" - 1971

The following piece is from an article from our club journal "The Cumberland Claptrap"

It was way back in 1971 when a magician rolled into town wearing a tattered suit, a cheery smile and a Fez, his name was Tommy Cooper, he was a big star and booked to appear at our club as a favour to our then president Alf Scroggins. Alf knew his mother from a dirty weekend spent at Pontins in Prestatyn in the fifties (that´s Tommy Cooper´s mother, not his own), and when we were let down by our advertised turn “Bulging” Bobby Braithewaite, Alf was straight on to the phone to her. Our Concert Chairman takes up the story.
“I´d heard of Tommy Cooper, - sort of, he was a name that cropped up quite often on the radio, - I think he was on “Workers Playtime” or summat from way back when, and I think he might have been on “Educating Archie” an all. What a carry on that was by the way, - a ventriloquist – on the bloody radio!! What the hell´s that all about? He wouldn´t have lasted 5 minutes in our club, I´ll tell you that. We had Rod Hull and Emu on one Christmas, and he was a top turn – you couldn´t see HIS lips move – a true professional, mind you the Emu never spoke come to think of it, so that might have made it a bit easier, I don´t know. Anyway, this Tommy Cooper bloke turns up, and gets all stroppy just because I asked him where his trilby was (the truth was that I thought we´d booked Tommy Trinder). He said he was a magician, so I thought fair enough, we´d not had one of them since we´d booked “Small Daniels” (Paul Daniels tribute show), and variety was the name of the game in those days. I remember we used to have this bloke and this weasel thing that he kept inside his truss, “Stan and his Stinking Stoat” was his name but Stan died and the Stoat struggled a bit after that.
So this Cooper fella comes shambling on stage wearing this red hat thing with black tassles on, and it was clear from the off that he hadn´t a clue what he was doing. Believe me, I know a decent turn when I see one and this bloke was all over the place. His first two tricks went wrong, but he just kept laughing in this deranged manor, and sort of clearing his throat all the time, maybe he wasn´t well I don´t know. The audience were laughing, but they weren´t laughing with him, they were laughing AT him and things went from bad to worse. He did this thing where he wore different hats and played different characters, but he kept getting mixed up, and not only that but he scowled at me every time I pointed out his mistake, I could see where he was going wrong, but then again I´ve been in the business a long time and know by instinct what makes an audience tick. He did that trick with the rings, but he couldn´t get that right neither, he kept dropping them and at one point he got one caught round his neck and seemed to be losing consciousness so I phoned an ambulance. Unfortunately he seemed to have full recovered by the time it arrived making me look a complete fool and they had to leave empty handed. To be honest it was one of the worst turns I´ve ever seen and couldn´t believe it when the audience screamed for more. They must have been drunk. After the show some of his showbiz friends turned up strutting about as if they owned the place, there was this blonde haired woman who I didn´t recognize (somebody thought it might have been Diana Doors, and somebody else thought it might have been Anne Aston from The Golden Shot) and Jimmy Tarbrush who´d just been on at the Palladium. (That´s the “Benidorm Palladium”).
I was later introduced to Roger De Coursey who I didn´t like either.

See www.kevinholt.net

Member Attacked By His Own Pigeons!!

I can hardly begin to describe my horror at the events of this week, Ernie Spencer who is a lifelong friend, long standing member, and vice chairman of the pigeon club was rounded on by his own stock in an unprovoked attack in his loft at the back of his allotment which left him badly shaken and covered in feathers. His wife Norma found him laid on his back flapping about fighting for breath and covered in millet, she takes up the story.
“I’d been shouting for Ernie that his tea was ready but when I got no response after about a quarter of an hour, I started to get worried, it’s not like Ernie isn’t that, not on a Wednesday anyway, we always have homemade steak pie of a Wednesday it’s always been his favourite has steak pie. Well, I always get down to the butchers good and early and get the choice cuts of meat, if there’s any fat on it I insist he cuts it off, but he’s very good like that is Mr. Toadman, - he’ll do anything you ask him to – within reason. His wife is a lovely person as well, she’s done wonders with her garden has Edna, especially when you consider the operation, two months she was in hospital you know, and the funny thing is that nobody really knows what she was in for. I mean, she said it was for laser eye surgery, but as far as I know she’s never worn glasses and when she came out she had a stoop and breasts like a couple of bowling balls, certainly nothing like what they looked like when I last saw her in the boxercise class that we go to of a Tuesday night, - they were swinging about like a couple of dish cloths in a polythene bag that night. I’m not saying she’s had plastic surgery or anything, but she can certainly afford it, that’s all. Let’s face it, she’s not short of a few bob isn’t Edna, not since her first husband left her all that money when he died sudden like. Fell off the ladder whilst painting the guttering, a bit strange that, - I mean, who paints the guttering wearing just his underpants and slippers? – Anyway, when I got to Ernie’s allotment I could see all his birds flapping about and making that horrible noise that they make, and I looked down and saw him writhing about on his back trying to punch his pigeons.”
After treatment by emergency services at the scene Ernie was eventually well enough to tell his story (and eat his steak pie). “By, it were a rum do were that, aven’t known owt like it, not in 35 year of keeping birds. I normally keep me cocks and hens separate, - in the off breeding season at any rate, but one of the cocks had somehow managed to chew through the little door in the loft and broken in to the girls quarters. I must have turned up just as he was coming into heat and he just went for me. I’ve spoken to Ron Spigott who’s been at this game even longer than me and he reckons that he’s NEVER known a bloke be attacked by his own cock before, - not in the middle of the day. Normally a cock of that size would just hang there unless provoked, but this thing just stood up and spat at me!! – so that was it, I was a villain of the peace and before I knew what had hit me they were all on me, - that´s gratitude for yer – I´ve given them birds me life”.