Apropos of nothing: camping

Last week we went camping. I love camping. All that rootsy, muddy, singing round the campfire cooking Celebrity Pork Luncheon meat and stuff totally stokes my inner hippy. Of course, taking a wife and kids along totally extinguishes my inner hippy. They require comfort, distractions, airbeds, warmth, entertainments, warm food, early nights, conveniences of every shade and hue. And rightly so.

Naturally, that always puts a tiny bit of colour into camping trips. I constantly mutter under my breath about how a family of 4 could easily fit in my 5-man dome tent if we just didn’t bother with any packing and just sat around stinking together, whereas my wife (rightly) adopts the infinitely more wise position that two small children require clothing and sources of heat, nourishment.

Anyway, this trip got off to a typically calamitous start. We arrived in sunlight, albeit on a muddy pitch, and began to erect the tent. No worries. Groundsheet down and pegged, flysheet stretched out, awaiting poles. Ah. What’s this – the poles have somehow come unattached from the elasticated string thing that holds them together. OK – let’s thread them together again. Hey – this is a bitch of a job… and look: here comes the fucking rain.

So now we have half a tent, rapidly sinking in mud and getting more soaked by the second as we reassemble the poles. Now this causes my wife to get pretty well fucked off – because this is our second camping trip this year and our main family holiday and here we are again with everything under threat before we even get the fucking tent up. So we start to argue as the kids get restless in the car and we still can’t thread the damn poles together.

Boiling point is reached, upon which I have a brainwave: the tent is covered enough so that the interior won’t get wet – so let’s forget this, drive into town, have a beer and a pie and wait for the sun to return before we put the inside stuff up and get the gear in. A truce is reached!

Still, tempers are flared so we get in the car amidst harrumphing and suppressed expletives and slammed doors and drive off. Some minutes later, the car behind us starts flashing us. It’s a narrow country road so we have nowhere to stop for a while, but the flashing carries on until we find a side road where we can park. The lady winds down her window: “I think I’ve got one of your bags stuck under my car….”

I don’t quite follow, but find myself on my knees looking under her chassis, where I see our tent bag and the inner living compartment of the tent hanging disconsolately from her axle in shreds. In our angry departure from the campsite, I hadn’t locked the top box. Shit.

Luckily the damage was limited in such a way that we only had to impose a semi-perforated sleeping area on my sister, who is young and can therefore afford a night or two of discomfort. Luckier still, there are no quickie divorce courts in Derbyshire. And best of all, the weather cleared up and we enjoyed 4 days of blissful – if a little muddy – fun.

I’d show you the photos, but my baby girl deleted everything from the camera. But that’s another disaster for another day.