BUTLINS Filey, 1977. A family holiday for a week. Mum, dad, my sister and me. We went self-catering. Which I was glad of, really.

The brochure showed a photograph of a huge hall with rows and rows of tables peopled by rowdy families troughing down pie, chips and peas and, no doubt, suet pudding for afters.

The huge windows filled with grim northern rain and there were three sittings.

It looked just like school dinners but on a post-apocalyptic scale.

I loved the place when I got there. Swimming pools with windows in the side where you could dive down and wave at people swigging Fanta and pints of Double Diamond (or they could look up and watch you release giant gaseous bubbles into the turquoise chlorine – those suet puddings came at a price).

There was a monorail that went round the camp, four-wheeled pedal bikes like in Bugsy Malone and ballrooms decked out with rubber plants and Juju statues, like Tahiti.

Everything was going great – slot machine arcades, James Bond films at night, all-day outdoor swimming pools with cascading fountains and knobbly knees contests.

Then, about three days in, my mum and dad said: ‘Let’s try something different’.

We all marched off to this huge hangar that had thousands of seats and a boxing ring in the middle.

There stood a bunch of Redcoats – the entertainment wing of the camp – and they were recruiting dozens of excited kids to some kind of club called The Beavers.

‘Do you want to join?’ asked mum.

‘What do they do?’

‘They go off and play games and activities and have fun and competitions.’

It sounded like hell to me.

Even at such a young age, I had my own ideas of fun. And none of them included searching for coloured plastic balls in damp sandpits to win cuddly toys, fancy dress parades, swimming galas or befriending a 13-year-old brother and sister singing double act from Humberside.

I would have been happy to just wander around the camp by myself.

My mum and dad weren’t happy. And looking back I could see why.

All year they had us kids and all they wanted to do was have a few fancy cocktails in the Jungle Room, maybe go off- campus and hit the thronging seafront of Filey or perhaps just do mum-and-dad things in a locked, blinds-down chalet.

And I’d put paid to those things.

But what if I hadn’t?

I was always doing impressions of popular figures of the day – Kojak, Eric Morecambe and, strangely, Max Wall.

It could have been the boost I needed to have become the new Lenny Henry.

What if I’d joined The Beavers and become so inspired by the Redcoats’ sheer enthusiasm for life that when I left school, I wanted to become one?

This dream could have taken me down the same path of stardom that launched Jimmy Tarbuck, Michael Barrymore and Sting – all ex-Redcoats.

I could have become a household name and guested on Blankety Blank and Celebrity Squares.

Then again, maybe not.

There’s a shed at the bottom of the garden of a house in Oxenhope, West Yorkshire. It’s there that a bunch of 16-year-olds used to play music in a highly disorganised, ramshackle kind of way.

In a press release to the Keighley News, circa 1983, the band described themselves as ‘a cross between Muddy Hooker and B. B. Wolf playing Dr Thorogood and George Feelgood’.

Hardly surprising that we – for indeed it was the band that I was in –  found ourselves in the Pseuds’ Corner of that particular paper (but come on, eh, it was my first ever piece of published copy).

We were called Drunk Again and we had a 27-year-old guitarist who had shattered knees following a motorbike crash.

We wrote all our own songs except Hoochie Coochie Man. We had all the right credentials.

Then, in the grand tradition of every single band that ever existed, we began having more line-up changes than Leeds United.

At one point we had a guitarist called Charlie who was the same age as my dad. The cracks were beginning to show when he and the sax player started playing Send In The Clowns.

‘That’s a lovely song,’ he said. ‘Maybe we should do that in the set.’

I remember thinking at the time: ‘Did John Lee Hooker adapt Stephen Sondheim songs to play next to Boogie Chillun? Or did Dr Feelgood have a part of their show where they did Songs from the Shows?’

No they did not.

We were never going to hit the top 10 or even top 100 but perhaps minor cult status might have been ours.

Gradually, though, all our original stuff got replaced by covers. Our rough edges were sanded off and we became all tight and slightly bland.

Our sax player had already been in a band in the 1970s: a blues rock outfit called Moon which had brought out two LPs (this will mean nothing to anyone except for one bearded man in Torteval who still lives with his mother and never passed his driving test).

He wasn’t interested in recording or doing anything but play in pubs.

So that was another dream out of the window.

We could have been contenders.

In 2004 I won a national poetry competition, the prize of which was a week’s workshop in Scotland with two famous poets.

I thought I’d done really well until one lass there read out Homer’s Iliad as her favourite poem – in ancient Latin and modern English.

Then one of the famous ones said that most poets get their work published in their own book of poems at the age of 34.

I was 38.

The year after I won another competition and my poem was put into the Forward Prize (which, honestly, is quite massive).

But have I done anything since? Not a sausage. Not even the proverbial dickie bird.

There were affairs of the heart that I should never have started. There were just misses, lost opportunities, missed connections, hands never shaken, meetings adjourned long before I’d entered the room and an empty cabinet that should have been full of trophies.

Shoulda, woulda, coulda.

But you grow out of all these regrets. You move on and perhaps create new ones or you just get on with it.

The last thing anyone ever wants to be is some bar clown who rolls out the same old story to every stranger who passes through.

By the way, did I ever tell you that I once signed on with singer P. J. Proby?