There are two words in the English language which compete for the accolade of being the most vile. One is ‘daddy’ and the other is ‘camping’.
Camping should be a punishment for young offenders. Imagine the deterrent of knowing that the sentence for armed robbery was life under canvas. I am convinced that this would cut violent crime significantly. Consider the similarities between camping and prison; the lack of privacy, no flushing toilets, appalling food and a long list of rules that must be adhered to the letter. The major advantage to a stay in prison is that it doesn’t cost money.
Of course, there are degrees of hardship both in the prison system and the campsite. There are many points on this continuum. Each of them are equally horrific for different reasons. At one end of the scale there is the Himalayan expedition where victims must endure weeks huddled inside a sleeping bag in freezing temperatures, a kind of maximum security gig. At the opposite extreme, there is the family frame tent holiday in the South of France, more like an open prison, but it can still be grim. Imagine serving out a sentence of fourteen days within yards of a family of five from Essex, separated by only a few microns of canvas.
Of course, there are those people who camp of necessity and those who fool themselves into thinking that they are doing it for recreation. I would concede that a lone fell walker can extend a pleasant long distance walk over rugged country by carrying a lightweight tent for one night. At least then it is possible to carry a couple of bacon sandwiches and a carton of orange juice for breakfast. At least there is a degree of privacy and genuine adventure inherent in this activity. With the correct equipment, the inconveniences are likely to be minor if you can cope with the odd grass-snake. Some people don’t mind finding a slimy black shiny millipede with huge mandibles inside their sleeping bags. I can even understand that the best way to get in touch with one’s inner self is to defecate under a rock somewhere. When I was under thirty-five I used to think that this sort of camping was fun.
This is because I could walk thirty miles in a day across areas which were too isolated to have the benefit of pubs. Now I realise that I camped simply because I didn’t have any money; because, actually, the nicest thing about mountain walking is the beer and steak and kidney pie in the evening. After ten hours walking you have earned it.
The beauty of this system is that all the rich food is walked off. Consider this equation; fifteen miles multiplied by three thousand feet of ascent equals six pints of beer, a shepherds pie and a full English breakfast the next morning. You may die of a heart attack from the cholesterol but you won’t get fat.
Every time that I eat a rasher of bacon in a Cumbrian hotel I think of those tiny little clogged apertures that are called arteries. It quite puts me off my fried bread and runny egg. I hate to think of my blood being forced through those tiny tubes one hundred and thirty pounds per square inch. The heart rate increase caused by a two thousand foot ascent is similar to playing squash with a bag of building sand on your back. Surely this can’t be good for you? I can’t help but wonder at the engineering miracle that is the heart pounding out this pressure at three beats per second. You wouldn’t abuse your car in such a manner. A heart should be regarded like an internal combustion engine. It has a finite service life, a predetermined number of beats before it seizes up. The harder you run it the quicker it will deteriorate. Mine was built in 1963. I hope to God that it wasn’t made by Rover, or I’ll be lucky to type to the end of this page. Take my advice, if you want to look after your heart, have a good lie down on the sofa.
So let us assume that you have chosen to eschew rugged camping for a holiday break on some sort of campsite. On-site camping is a lower-middle class obsession for hapless couples. To compound their misery, they always camp with two or more children under fifteen years of age. This is probably the worst form of camping experience. The only reason for taking a family holiday under canvas is financial. People go on family camping trips because they are too skint or miserly to enjoy a proper holiday.
The indisputable proof of this can be found by examining the imagined reasons for wanting to camp and comparing these with the actuality of the situation. The anticipated pleasures of camping, in no particular order, would probably be listed as follows:
A) Fresh air and open space.
B) To ‘get way from it all’, i.e. not being in close proximity to others.
C) A change in routine.
As you can see, there are probably more Yorkshire-based philanthropists than there are entries on the above list. This doesn’t bode well. Here is what actually happens:
A) Forget the fresh air and open space if you’re not a single traveller. If you want these commodities you must revert to camping in the middle of nowhere as discussed above. For a family this is an extremely bad idea, because it means managing without a car. Most teenagers can’t be bothered to walk further than the local corner shop to buy alcopops and cigarettes. How are they going to react when forced to walk for around ten miles? Mother will want to bring several hundredweights of luggage. She will moan about the lack of things that she hasn’t got and the weight of all the things that are in her rucksack. Above all, those of us who truly enjoy the great outdoors can well do without the aural and visual pollution that every family inevitably brings with it.
B) Your idea of ‘isolation’ is soon a distant hope, because families are best left on organised campsites. These places are a worse version of hell than anything that you can imagine. They are owned by bitter curmudgeonly miserly old farmers. These people have no interest in anything other than to extract the maximum amount of cash from the camper in return for next to nothing. Farmers constantly whine on about foot and mouth, tourists and set-aside. Actually, these things are their biggest forms of not inconsiderable income. Whatever disease is this year’s favourite, farmers claim millions of pounds in government compensation for killing animals. It is these diseased creatures which have already saved them money, as it is very cheap to feed dead animals. To further swell their coffers, farmers run campsites.
A tourist family usually pays about ten pounds per night for a minute piece of ground on a campsite. For this they are entitled to pitch their tent, park their car, and make use of the ‘facilities’. The pre-marked pitches are hemmed in tighter than the show homes on a Barratt housing estate. There is more chance of finding privacy on a family campsite than a politician has when he’s discovered by the tabloids shagging a supermodel.
C) The ‘change in routine’ that any satisfying holiday should involve, well no-one would deny that camping involves a different experience from any other form of holiday. The only drawback about this particular change in routine is that it is unbelievably unpleasant in every regard. From the moment of arrival on a campsite, nothing can prepare any family for the utter torment that they are about to undergo. This is how a typical day pans out:
Both parents of the group of five, let’s call them the Jenkins family, are already stressed-out before their arrival at the campsite. This is because the local young farmers get drunk every weekend and swivel all the local road signs in crazy directions. Any signs that haven’t been peppered with buckshot are all pointing the wrong way. This means that the Jenkins family have driven an extra seventy-five miles down twenty-odd back lanes to find their campsite. Their Volvo estate car is so heavily laden with camping paraphernalia that the rear bumper gets stuck on a speed-bump at the entrance to the site, a totally unnecessary three-foot high concrete lump recently constructed by the campsite owner, Josh Bastard. Bastard had a load of spare wet concrete left after re-rendering the toilet blocks, and the idea of building humps which were taller in the centre than their outsides amused him greatly. He still has quite a collection of mangled catalytic converters in his barn. The miserable old sod comes out of his ‘reception’ building. He is wearing his obligatory cloth cap and leather patches on the elbows of his tweed jacket. His collie dog Mauler is at his heel. He remonstrates with Mr Jenkins over the scratches on his speed-hump, and of course, asks how long the family wish to stay on his site. He takes the non-refundable seventy-odd pounds for seven nights with a frame tent and hands over a ‘tent pass’ along with a list of site rules:
No Fires.
Barbeques must be at least two feet from the grass.
No dogs.
No single-sex groups.
No group sex.
No group sex with dogs.
No radios.
No noise after 10.30pm.
No noise before 10.30pm.
No parking next to the tents.
No parking in the car park.
No loud shagging.
No quiet shagging.
No one is to enjoy themselves in any way.
No camping.
The Jenkins family are late. It is already getting dark when they arrive at their allotted pitch. The panicked assembly, for the first time, of the Jenkins’ brand-new frame tent defies any description. You can imagine the nightmare scenario. The kids are moaning because they are hungry. Mrs Jenkins is crying because her husband has totally lost his temper. He called her a ‘stupid fat cow’ at the top of his voice in front of ten other families. They were tending their barbeques and using the Jenkins’ as their evening entertainment over their Asda red wine. After about three hours the tent is erect. Mr Jenkins certainly is not. Putting up a frame tent will be the only erection that Mr Jenkins will experience for the next seven days. After this holiday, the only thing that will go down on poor Mr Jenkins, probably for the rest of his life, will be his Millets airbed.
By now it is now ten thirty pm. They all go to the local pub for dinner, because Mrs Jenkins is too upset and exhausted to cook. It is past last orders for food, so everyone eats their packs of dry-roasted nuts in silence. Anyone uttering one word of discontent will cause Mr Jenkins to murder his entire family with a steak knife from the cutlery trolley.
It is not just the hapless Jenkins family that is affected by the misfortune of camping. Deep down, if you have ever been to a family campsite you know how this goes. You are Jenkins and I am Jenkins. We are all Jenkins. No one is exempt.
The next morning everyone queues for the toilet and shower block. On reaching the end of the queue they can part with a further fifty pence by depositing a coin into a slot-meter which will allow them a shower. The water temperature in campsite shower blocks is totally uncontrollable. It will either be freezing cold or scalding hot. Often these extremes of temperature will fluctuate at random dependent upon the number of people using them. Having claimed a cubicle it takes fifteen minutes to get the temperature correct. Eventually you will venture under the spray. There is nowhere to hang your clothes so you have piled them onto a wooden stool. They are already damp and becoming wetter by the minute from the shower’s overspray. Your underpants have already fallen into the pool of stagnant water which sits permanently in one corner of the cubicle. Slipping over the cracked floor tiles, you stand under the spray. Looking up at the fifty year old wiring that leads to the electric water heater, you wonder whether you will manage to complete your shower before being electrocuted. When, and only when, your eyes are covered in soap your fifty pence runs out and the water goes freezing again. You fumble around in the cubicle, cursing like a lorry-driving squaddy as you stub your little toe on the doorstop sticking out of the floor. You find your towel and dry your eyes. Half of the towel has been soaked from the same stagnant pond which has claimed your underpants. You have no more fifty pence coins in your trouser pockets. You take a deep breath and go back under the freezing spray for the few seconds that it takes to remove the soap from groin and armpits.
You return to your tent and then discover that you have left your expensive after shave on the shelf above the sinks in the toilet block. There is no point in going to retrieve it as it will have been picked up by another camper.
The day has started badly but this is just the beginning. The kids have nothing to do and they hate camping as much as you do, but children will vocalise their discontent. Parents for their part must attempt to grin and stifle the pain. All the equipment that you bought for about five hundred pounds last week at Millets is a mystery to you. The pain becomes all the more acute because you know that you will have to sell the lot on eBay at one-tenth of the amount that it cost; secure in the knowledge that the person who buys the equipment from you will gain decades of enjoyment from it every weekend.
The instructions for everything are terribly mis-translated from Mandarin Chinese, so you can’t understand why the air beds won’t inflate, you can’t light the gas barbeque, and how the batteries on all three of your torches go flat simultaneously. The campsite shop sells everything except torch batteries. When you do manage to light the barbeque you must eat off plastic plates surrounded by midges and flies. All the food is placed on collapsible tables, which do exactly that at precisely the wrong moment.
The coup de grace comes when one of the kids has to be rushed to casualty because he has swallowed a wasp with his alphabet spaghetti. On the frantic drive to A&E you will crash your Volvo into a dry stone wall. You will have already put away six cans of Boddingtons with your sausages, mash and beans. If you are lucky the police will understand the mitigating circumstances.
I hate camping.
