Carry On Camping

I love camping. There’s something about sleeping under canvas, being freezing cold yet lying in a pool of your own sweat, trying to get comfy in a twisted sleeping bag and of course the inevitable wee roulette (do I absolutely have to go outside and walk for 2 miles through the elements to get to the toilet or can I hold off until the morning?) that I find really exciting.

So as the weather was fine this weekend, I decided the kids and I would camp out in the garden together. It came in a flash of inspiration. It’s totally free and what could be more exciting to a three and a five year old than getting close to nature and sleeping under the stars? I was a little nervous, I have only just got used to sleeping in the house alone at night, how would I fare being outside? But the kids were excited so I was determined to be brave.

I spent the daytime working in the garden. I have recently admitted to myself that far from the Barbara from the Good Life I had expected to be, I actually do not enjoy gardening very much. I can appreciate gardens when the weather is nice but the rest of the time they just seem to be a drain on resources and energy. Because of that my garden looks like the outside of a trailer park, discarded and broken toys litter the “lawn”, patches of rough ground, untended plants and a jungle burying the vegetable planters The Dad had kindly put in for me. So, in a bid to stop dragging down the house ceiling price of the road, I painted a couple of ugly walls, while the kids begged me to hurry up so they could put the tent up. Kids Auntie came round for a cuppa so I asked her to help them erect it, to get them off my back while I was otherwise engaged (covered from head to toe in paint, perching precariously atop a step ladder, sloshing paint onto walls).

The tent had been festering in its bag for well over five years, and, given that it was my old festival tent and all manner of unsavoury activities had taken place in there, it didn’t smell particularly fragrant. But this didn’t seem to put the kids off, who excitedly got all their camping essentials, bedding, cuddly toys, a Ben and Holly magnifying glass (I have no idea) and my bedside clock and set it up ready for bed. After supper I read them a story and told them to go to sleep and that I would be outside until my bedtime when I would come into the tent and sleep in between them.

I suppose I should have added to the fun by staying in there with them. But at the end of the day I do need some time to myself to recover after a day unsuccessfully wrestling kids away from paintbrushes (and if I’m honest, I wanted to spend as little time in that stinky tent as possible). So I sat on the patio with a shandy and read my book. The children, unsurprisingly, did not settle. The tent from the outside looked like a cartoon bag of frantic cats. Son One eventually got sleepy, but Son Two (aged three) was far too excited to do anything other than play with his Action Man, loudly.

I started to get cold. So I lit a fire in our barbeque pit perched in the middle of the garden table, which warmed everything upwards from my eyebrows. At this point I was really hoping that they would get bored and want to go back inside, so that I could sit on my comfy sofa and watch X Factor. It began to get dark, and I was totally unprepared, so ended up reading my book by the light of a Lego wind up torch. Eventually it got so dark and so cold that I decided I may as well go to bed myself. At 8.45pm. So rock and roll for a Saturday night.

I squeezed in between the boys and realised why it had taken them so long to fall asleep. It was bloody uncomfortable. The two cushions I had used as a mattress had separated so that my head was off the ground, as were my hips and legs, but everything in between was lying on bare ground sheet. And I couldn’t sort it out without disturbing the kids. I had the wee roulette (I gambled and won, darting desperately into the house in the morning to relieve myself) and wrestled with my twisted sleeping bag. At one point Son Two woke up and complained that he was cold, grasped me round the neck and fell asleep strangling me. Son One woke up at 5am and complained that he was wet from the condensation drips falling from the walls of the tent, went out for a wee then returned to declare “I hate camping!” before falling back to sleep.

That afternoon Big Bro popped round for a cuppa, I proudly told him that we had camped out all night and I wasn’t even scared. “So did you like camping?” he asked Son One, “No. It was wet and horrible.” Son one replied. Still, least I enjoyed it.