Where I'm calling from

I’m about to be away for three weeks on a French campsite with not much internet, so I thought to schedule a couple of posts from my backlist that most readers won’t have seen. Why not start with one about exactly where I am. Here’s a bit I wrote for that fine magazine The Oldie two years ago, which describes where I am as you read this and why I love it….

At home, I sleep swathed in a thick duvet aboard a deep pocket-sprung mattress and rest my weary head on the most luxurious pillows John Lewis has to offer. My linen has a high thread count and smells of White Company Christmas presents. And reader, I toss and turn every night like Lady Macbeth.

But put me in a tent in one of those old sleeping bags that smells a bit of hamsters, with nothing between me and the pebbly slope on which my tent is pitched but a half-deflated roll mat and my head on a rolled-up pair of jeans, and I sleep the sleep of the just. You can keep your six-star slave-built Gulf hotels with their acreage of fluffy towels, white beaches and swim-up bars in azure lagoons. Keep your Mediterranean cruises and your Tuscan villas. It’s a camping holiday for me, every time.

Glamping – of the sort which has enjoyed a huge boom in this country over the last couple of decades – is something I greet with a little suspicion. I, too, can see the attraction of a good solid yurt with a blow heater, a proper bed and duvet and a set of USB ports from which you can charge your phone and run the inevitable fairy lights.

But it’s not exactly camping, is it? Not camping like I have been doing it and you, reader, have been doing it since the 1970s. Not camping as described in Emma Kennedy’s likeable memoir The Tent, The Bucket and Me. Not camping as Barbara Windsor and Sid James would recognise it, or as my children -- who have spent hours playing “it” in confederation with an ad-hoc gang of children on a campsite, or amused themselves decorating pebbles with felt-tip pens – would recognise it.

For me, austerity is part of the appeal. The point of camping, in my view, is not to pretend you’re in a hotel. Camping should be cheap. You should travel light. For happiness you do not want a portable kitchen, a gazebo, a rack of chef’s knives, a fancy four-ring stove with overhead grill, adjustable table and set of six folding dining chairs, inflatable double-mattress with duvet, feather pillows and all that malarkey. You don’t want – and, for God’s sake, you can find these in camping shops – collapsible kitchen cupboards. Simplicity is the thing. A one-pot dish – a bean chilli, or a potato-and-pea curry, say – tastes the more ambrosial for having been cooked squatting on your hunkers beside a single blue tin of camping gas in a fold-out stand.

I’m no Luddite, though. I embrace, as we all should, the miraculous new technologies of the pop-up tent, or of the six-man which a single person can carry. The tents that we grew up with were nearly impossible to put up (all those clanking aluminium poles, those fly-sheets and buttons) and so heavy you needed at least one more person to carry a tent of any given size than it could accommodate. And remember how, if the flysheet so much as brushed the inner tent, frigid water would cascade into your sleeping area? Tents are not only more waterproof than they used to be, but they are cheaper. You need only visit a big branch of Cotswold Camping or Black’s to have your faith in human progress restored. These days you can stroll into the wilderness with your accommodation for the night in one hand, weighing little more than an umbrella. Freedom!

My hunch is that even though it’s nicer to camp in the warm south, it’s Northern Europeans who take the most pleasure in camping. We are still half in love with the austerities of the Reformation – and we show it by spending our leisure time making it harder to be comfortable than we do our working weeks. The compromise we make with the counter-Reformation is to go to the warm south, now and again, to do it.

For the last decade, my family and I have spent two or three weeks every summer in a blissful little campsite by a burbling river in the Cevennes (I won’t name it, because then you’ll all turn up and ruin it). There’s nothing to do but read, swim and potter into Florac for an ice-cream, your days given rhythm by buying bread, preparing and washing up your meals, and the passage of the sun across the sky.

When it rains – which won’t usually happen more than once a fortnight – it gets on with it. There will be an astonishing, a terrifying, an apocalyptic thunderclap from what seems to be a blue sky. A few fat drops will fall. Then, for an hour or two, the campsite is Bangladesh in the monsoon. Camping stoves, deckchairs, unattended children -- all are swept into the river. But then, bang, the sun comes out again and within an hour everything is bone-dry and it’s as if it has never happened.

When the weather is against you in England or (shudder) in Scotland, you have a problem. You’re damp. You’re cold. The tent fills with mud. The tent’s damp. The tent’s cold. You wriggle into your sleeping bag. Your sleeping bag is damp. Your sleeping bag is cold. The drizzle continues. Patches of the campsite become Passchendaele.and stay that way. Your wife books herself into a hotel. Depending on how you’ve performed over the previous 24 hours, she may or may not let you accompany her.

And yet adversity is what bonds us. On a jolly kids-and-parents weekend with other parents from school, I forged unbreakable alliances with the other dads attempting to barbecue frankfurters in a storm, while rainwater poured off the hoods of our macs. I’ve helped my wife dry out our nephew’s tent in a muddy field after his half-open water bottle fell over at 3am. I’ve bailed out of a field in the small hours of the morning after a posse of angry farmers in Land-Rover Defenders, lamping for rabbits, have woken us with roaring engines and full-beam headlights. Unable to leave my tent in a downpour, I have peed into an empty prosecco bottle at a music festival on the Isle of Wight. This is the stuff of which memories are made.

And just sometimes, there’s a gap in the rain. Sleeping under canvas not only connects us to our hunting fathers way back in human history. It can produce moments of peace and beauty like nothing else. You spend the middle of the day watching beams of sun lancing across a forest clearing redolent of the smell of pine and mulch. You drowse before sleep sitting on a log with a glass of red wine, staring into the still glowing embers of a campfire. Or you step out of your tent at dawn onto a meadow.glittering with dew, unroll your pillow and pull it onto your legs. And bliss it is, in that dawn, to be alive.

Hope you’re all on holiday somewhere nice too.