2p? (“No, it’s my real hair”)

Coastal holidays in Britain are, let’s face it, crap. The weather is rubbish here, and Scarborough and Blackpool are hardly Venice Beach, are they? A miserable week spent wandering round identikit towns (“Ooh, they have a Smiths and an Argos too!”), and trying to muster the enthusiasm to set a single foot on a dog-shit strewn shingled beach.

The only saving grace is, ironically enough, the weather. The weather means you don’t have to be outside avoiding chavs, when you can be inside and the glory of The Arcade.

For some people, the arcade meant playing brand new games, using light guns to shoot at cartoon zombies or racing in barely realistic cars, sat next to the other drivers.

That sort of reckless abandon wasn’t for me though – not at a pound a go. A pound! In my day, that was enough to go to the cinema and get the bus home, so long as you didn’t pay for either.

No, I preferred the miniature games, the cheap, cheesy and cheerful ones.

The horse racing, where you could bet on plastic horses that ran along in front of you. They were fun, and none of them got shot.

Or those crane things that hilariously couldn’t pick up a single fucking thing that had been placed inside. Y’know, there used to be a hint of ‘maybe I could win this’, when the prizes were a small cuddly Pooh Bear toy or something. Now they have little boxes withiPods and ten-pound-notes inside. Yeah, you’re going to win that off a 20p outlay.

I was, and still am, drawn towards the 2p machines. Those ones that have no other name that “those 2p machines in the arcade”. Say that, and everyone knows what you’re talking about. The money-sucking littlesodhandlers that are full of 2p pieces and have a metal tray pushing the newly inserted ones ever closer to the edge.

The machines that have horrible internal gravity so that the coins at the very end seem to be levitating right before you. And you drop one more coin in, just to edge everything closer to the gaping hole that shits copper at you like a demented anus.

Of course, you never win. And at 2p a pop, even if you did win, you wouldn’t exactly be walking away with Brewster’s Millions. You’d end up with a cup full of coinsthat’d be more of a hassle to lug around than it was actually worth. So in a way, you expect to lose money and you want to. And lose money you do. For every quid you drop in, two pence at a time, you end up walking away with about three coins. Which instantly go back in the top. So you walk away with nothing. Every time.

There’s no ‘hilarious’ Vegas-movie style moment as you walk away, someone behind you bowls in and inserts one coin, winning the jackpot, because they’re equally doomed to spunking coin after coin into the slot, and walking away with a vague sense of disappointment and hands that smell vaguely of copper.