Like wearing high heels and rustling up a three course Ottolenghi-inspired dinner, camping involves a triumph of hope over experience. Even I was nearly tricked into trying it again after seeing pictures of a friend on holiday in Norfolk.
She updated her Instagram followers with envy-inducing snaps of her brewing coffee as the sun rose over a field, washing her face in a fresh water stream like a woman in a skincare advert and dancing around the campfire under the stars in a silver dress (who said going camping means you have to wear a fleece?) Now is the summer of her disco tent.
Perhaps Boris Johnson and Carrie Symonds follow my friend on Insta — it’s the only explanation as to why they are braving camping in Scotland with a baby right now.
This Norfolk set-up is the grown-up version of the Famous Five camping utopia that made me desperate to go camping as a child. My family vetoed it, making the argument I understand now that a holiday is meant to be relaxing, why would you put yourself in any discomfort? A friend put it more bluntly: “Camping is for refugees.”
Like wearing high heels, going camping involves a triumph of hope over experience
Then I started going out with a man from a family of happy campers and because the first flushes of love do strange things to you I decided to give it a go, in Dorset. Any visions of it being just us and nature were instantly shattered.
The field we pitched up in was full of obnoxiously large tents. That’s when the fighting started. My boyfriend and I rowed about where to pitch our tent, how to put it up and why his sleeping bag was wet (for all his braggadocio about the camping trips of his past he hadn’t learned the basic Duke of Edinburgh Bronze lesson about waterproofing your bag).
His incompetence aside, the worst part was the other campers. There were loads of them, queueing to use the taps and staying up all night dissecting the merits of camping stoves. Full-kit w*nkers in other words.
This is where real camping differs to camping at festivals: when you are, as Pulp sang, “somewhere in a field in Hampshire”, it doesn’t matter that the person in the tent next to you is either snoring or discussing their work nemesis until 4am — you’re out listening to music. But when you are in a glorified parking lot in Dorset trying to get some sleep on the cold, hard ground, wearing three jumpers, it can break you. That’s if the logistical challenges haven’t got to you first. Those tents that are meant to pop up in seconds? Fine but how do they pop down? Not when you want them to, that’s the answer.
On that fateful trip to Dorset, once I was finally asleep, the tent landed on my head. I tried to pop it up again by the light of my iPhone and some wag who was still up couldn’t resist making a quip about how nifty his £20 tent was.
It took considerable effort not to attack him with a tent peg. Other camping carry-ons include a friend woken by a hedgehog interloper. Cute but not at 4am when you don’t know what the grunting is (she thought it was her partner snoring).
The best part of our trip was when we came home. I’m happy that my friend has managed to enjoy camping in Norfolk. Actually I’d encourage anyone considering it to go camping, so that it frees up space in a comfortable Airbnb for me.
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