Part-time camping – it’s the future

Posted by Katy Regan at 09:01 on 1 Jul 2009

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Matt Black and I are no more. I’m not going to go into detail, but suffice to say, it’s rather sad, but I am really glad I had the experience. It taught me that caring about someone and someone caring about you, even if it doesn’t work out in the long-term, is a lovely, enjoyable experience – something I’d closed myself off from, for far too long.

Anyway, I was supposed to be going to a party in London on Saturday – Egg was taking Fergus camping to Norfolk with some friends of his for three nights. However, as I was feeling maudlin, I decided against it. At 35, I am old enough to know that me + moroseness + binge drinking at parties + no distraction in the form of a child for the rest of the weekend pretty much always ends in tears.

In the end, I decided to get a lift to Norfolk with Egg, but not wanting to gate-crash the father and son bonding weekend (that’s my excuse anyway) , I checked into a B&B in the same village as the site.

Oh yes, I have withstood much mockery about this, but laugh as you might, I think I may have happened upon the ultimate short-break experience.  

I have outlined in previous blogs, my problem with (full-time) camping and this weekend only cemented my feelings. For starters, after having loaded the car with everything minus a hoover, as far as I could tell, Egg being the experienced camper that he is, and not wanting to embarrass himself in front of the hardcore set, had to stop off at an outdoors shop half a mile from Berkhamsted to buy a camping stove and table – which put about an hour and a half on our time. This meant  we didn’t even arrive at the campsite till 8pm on the Friday.

Admittedly, it was a beautiful spot: a vast, sun-drenched campsite in Stiffkey, north Norfolk, with views of the marshes stretching out to sea and nothing else but yellow fields, all around. However, whilst on a normal holiday one might now check into their hotel to enjoy this view on their terrace avec biere, we had to erect a tent  - and build a stove -  before we could have any biere at all.

I have thought about it and I think that this start to a holiday may actually be my worst nightmare.  It brought back horror stories of Duke of Edinburgh Award (ahem, Bronze try out weekend, I don’t think I made it any further…) and people (my age, the ultimate shame!) shouting at me for my general ineptness and lack of team spirit. (There is a reason why I have such a solitary job!)

For one, there were instruction manuals involved. After a five hour drive. I swear it took me about fifteen minutes to work out which page were the English instructions - and that was before I tried to follow them (are the people that design these manuals actually the same sadists that work for Ikea flat-pack department, I wonder?)   Then, there were about two hours of wrestling with swathes of canvas and bits of steel rods (the stove thingy) and lots of me shouting at Fergus who by then, had reached mania levels of tiredness and was just making a noise like a bomb going off and hurling himself at the billowing tent, making it nigh on impossible to put up.

THEN, even after we’d got the damn thing up and had something to cook on, we had to cook our own tea – can you believe it!  (This is not strictly true as the very lovely friends whom Egg was meeting there invited us over to their tent for tea, but anyway, in normal circumstances, we would have had to make our own tea, so I am sticking by this for dramatic effect….)

By the time we’d sat down to eat and got ourselves a glass of wine, it was 10pm! We were knackered and Fergus was shouting from the tent, “I’m cold! I want my cuddly hippo!” All this, and I hadn’t been in the most upbeat mood to start with.

By 11pm everything had sort of become damp and cold and covered in sea-mist.

But I had become smug!

This is because, after having enjoyed the best (only good thing if you ask me) about camping:i.e. getting drunk around a fire, I toddled off to my lovely, crisp, double bed for eight hours solid sleep.

In the morning, after a hot shower and a full English served up in a dining room where I was the only guest – like the Queen or something, my newspapers strewn out before me -   I joined the camping party again.

They may have mocked and they may have laughed the night before, but now they were all,   “Wow, you look well rested!” (it had to be said I looked marginally better than the wreck that arrived some twelve hours earlier.)

“That’s because I’ve had eight hours sleep in a lovely, double bed” I said, with more than a hint of smugness. .  

There was a lot of groaning and “I was up at 5am!” But really, my sympathy was limited.

Admittedly we had a great day – we went crabbing with Fergus and the other kids on the site where they covered themselves in mud like little hippos. There was swimming in then sea and I even got some writing done at my own personal B&B retreat. So this is my point:   Why actually sleep under canvas when you can just enjoy all the outdoorsy activities and wholesomeness of camping, without the actual camping?  

It’s a bit weak and it’s a bit sneaky, but the answer  is screaming at me: gate-crash someone else's camping holiday!  Join in the fun, by all means, but then take yourself off to your nice B&B a healthy distance from any washing up, come bed-time. Simple.

Ok, so it costs a little more. (I should point out that my B&B was v nice and v cheap) but what’s a few quid when you get to wake up without feeling like you’ve been involved in a minor car accident?

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