It started innocently enough. I walked in, paid my £3 and told myself ‘just one drink’.

A glass of wine to unwind. No big deal, right? Just one. That was the plan.

But this plan was not executed. Like the Senior TT race, this plan was abandoned. As everyone who has waited in that queue knows, one drink in Bushy’s, is never just one drink.

Ah, Bushy’s. A magical land where time stops, beer flows like a Manx stream after heavy rain, and people hand over the monetary equivalent of their first-borns, in return for a lukewarm hot-dog with plastic cheese.

Bushy’s not so much a beer tent as it is a parallel universe where your phone dies, your dignity disappears, and your last known location becomes ‘on a random guy’s shoulders’.

At closing time, I wobbled my way to the kebab shop, and while I was savouring the culinary delight that is a cheesy garlic bread calzone, I reflected on how much I had enjoyed that ‘one drink’.

After declaring, along with hundreds of others, that ‘Jesus Is a Friend of Mine’, I hoped he still would be when I woke up tomorrow morning, as I had a feeling I was going to need some divine intervention to make it through…

a night in Bushy’s

laughing with mates on a warm evening

sitting atop the slope, back to the banners

occasionally shifting positions

on the well-trodden dead grass

trying to stave away the pins and needles

in my pasty legs

though for the last hour

I’ve been dealing with a totally dead ass

whether the ground underneath me

is wet from my spilled wine

or another unidentifiable fluid

I am unsure

I hope very much that it’s the former

but I see the sozzled men slink out of the queue

and over to the back tree line

I smell the ammonia

and accept it’s probably p***

but there are so many things to enjoy here

on a sunny bank holiday, it’s bliss

beer, builders bum cracks, bucket hats,

tourists sporting their new three legs tats

and t shirts with fairies and manx cats

chunky vomit, chicken wings and

shedding tears over £7.50 cheeky vimtos

people strike a pose for aesthetic photos

to post on their insta later

with the caption ‘jesus is a friend of mine’

my trek to the toilet for a wee

was an assault on the senses

no bog roll in the dispensers as usual

but a scrunched-up napkin from earlier donuts

found in my jeans pocket does the trick

scran from the food vans scoffed

to assuage the insatiable half-cut hunger

everyone flocks to the stage as the night ends

dancing, laughing, vibing with friends

in this moment we are happy

not a thought in our heads

I am twirling around without a care

the fella next to me sends his pint up in the air

and now as well as my heart

I’ve got Bushy’s in my bloody hair