Camping curtesy of Cl#rks*n
Interesting news from the quagmire. Sales of tents and camping equipment are up by 40% as the credit crunch bites and families appear to ditch their annual pilgrimage to the Mediterranean.
According to tenting enthusiasts, a fortnight in Mallorca costs a family of four about £3,000, whereas they can spend two weeks under canvas in Devon for as little as £500.
I don’t doubt this is true. But I’m not sure the comparison is relevant, because they aren’t really comparing like with like. Arguing that a holiday in Mallorca is more expensive than a holiday in a field full of cow dung is the same as arguing that a Rolls-Royce Phantom is more expensive than hitchhiking.
Tenting works well when you are in Afghanistan, fighting the Taliban, but I find it extraordinary that a family should say: “Well. Things are tight. So let’s spend our holiday this year soggy and quarrelling in a room none of us can stand up in properly.”
If you are that hard up, and you are so desperate for a change, then why not simply stay at home and cut your legs off?
It’s claimed by medical experts that we cannot remember pain, but that isn’t true, because 40 years ago my parents took me on a tenting holiday on the west coast of France, and I remember every little detail of it – so much detail that sometimes it makes me cry.
I remember the rain, and the way it cascaded down into the hollow where our tent was built. I remember the wind that knocked it down. I remember the Germans laughing at us. I remember the hateful food – mustard-encrusted salmonella entombed in the pungent aroma of Calor gas.
I remember the soggy sleeping bags, the sloping floor, the stones that dug into my back, the lack of sleep, the arguments, the discomfort, the pain, the misery, the mosquitoes, the desperation, the homesickness and my poor little sister’s confused face asking: “Why have our parents done this to us?”
At home we had headroom and walls. We had space. And when we wanted to go to the lavatory, we didn’t have to tiptoe through the ooze to a filthy shower block full of yet more Germans with faulty bomb-aiming equipment. I can see them now if I close my eyes. All those massive Germanic *****; some not even close to the centre of the 101 bogs they had in France in those days.
I don’t doubt for a moment that it hadn’t cost very much money, but even today I cannot work out why it cost anything at all. Nor can I work out why a fortnight’s holiday under canvas today could possibly cost £500. Killing yourself would be so much cheaper and more pleasant.
In every single walk of life technology has made things easier since the 1960s. We have dishwashers, computers and oven-cleaners that wipe away grime in a flash. So you might imagine tenting had come on in leaps and bounds as well.
It hasn’t. As I discovered on my trip to the North Pole, it’s still an impenetrable maze of zippers, flaps, straps, exploding cookers and tent pegs that have the structural rigidity of overboiled pasta. Oh, and the skin of the modern tent is still exactly one inch smaller than the frame over which it must be stretched. This means that when you finally get it up you will have no fingernails, no wife, no children, no voice and not a shred of dignity either.
And where will you be? In a wood? Then you won’t sleep because every noise at night, among the trees, is Freddy Krueger. In a field? Nope. You will wake up dead with a cow on your head. On a campsite? Ha. Well, then you’ve really had it because women, and I have no clue why, think tenting is erotic. Which means you’re going to have to spend the night listening to a hundred wizened ramblers bouncing around on the only pole in all of tenting that’s still upright.
"If you can't be a good example, then you'll just have to serve as a horrible warning."
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Originally Posted by Predictable Bob
). It's over 20 years old now but we love the freedom of getting out for the weekend. We always wild camp, we've never been on a campsite. We've put our favourite parking spots on our sat nav so we can always get back to them, as some of them are tucked out of the way. We save £80 a month in a special Hylo account so that we have money ready to pay for the diesel, MOT and our Saturday evening pub meal. The rest of the weekend food is cooked breakfast and picnics while caching! We can't imagine any other better weekends! :wub:
