I read recently that, because of the credit crunch, more and more people are planning to spend their summer holiday in the UK this year, which is bad news as far as I’m concerned.

Watch out! They’re coming!

You see, each year I take my sons camping in Cornwall for a week – they go surfing and I either sit on the beach or stroll around the backstreets of St Ives or wherever. And if more people are planning to forgo the delights of the various Costas this year, it means it’s going to be more crowded in the UK’s favourite holiday haunts.

Selfish of me, I know, but that’s the way it is. I started going camping in order to have a cost-effective way of taking the boys on holiday when things were a bit financially strained (they still are, but that’s another story). The thing is, kids love camping. It’s something completely different. And they don’t seem to mind being separated from the television or computer either, though these days they can still keep in touch with the outside world via their mobile ‘phones or latest generation iPods.

It could be a nice place to stay….

If you go camping expecting it to be a relaxing holiday though, then you’re kidding yourself. Or at least I was. After a seven or eight hour drive, depending on how much you break up the journey, you arrive at a campsite with the prospect of erecting the tent in front of you. By this time, it’s usually the middle of the afternoon and you’re quite tired from the journey but you’ve still got to muster up the strength to pull all the camping gear out of the back of the car (because you stupidly packed the tent and all the poles in first, thinking that as it was the heaviest item it should stowed on board before anything else) and then set about putting up what is to be your home for the next week or so.

I had got it all off to a fine art after three or four years with the same old tent, but last year I decided to splash out and get a new one. The old tent was getting a bit threadbare and we looked a bit like the proverbial country cousins on the campsite with our tired but still functional offering. You see, camping is all about being fashionable and having the latest model and style, to say nothing of colour, of tent. Some of these things have got more facilities than I have at home. They are positive mansions compared to the old canvas and metal pole structure we were inhabiting. These days tents are made of lightweight polysomethingorother and all the poles are colour coded, flexible things that have to be bent almost double to form a dome.

So I went out to buy one. I looked in a couple of local camping shops – I say shops, these were large, out of town facilities that stocked everything, and I do mean everything, for the dedicated camper or caravaner. I found a tent I liked in one place but it was a bit expensive. A few miles down the road I found the self same tent, but in last year’s colour, at almost half the price. Can you believe that? I looked at the two models, read the spec in the brochure, but could find no difference apart from last year’s was green and this year’s was a sand colour. Green it was then and I felt particularly smug as I drove away, confident that this year’s camping holiday was going to be one to remember.

The other thing I was looking forward to was the ease with which one could supposedly put up one of these modern edifices. It’s all incredibly quick and easy to do, according to the sales brochure.

Like hell it is. Despite having had a dry run at home to familiarise ourselves, and spent two hours scratching our heads trying to make sense of the hopeless instructions before we finally got the thing up, we still struggled once we were at the campsite. It didn’t help that we were attempting erection of a flimsy, lightweight structure in something approaching a force nine gale and the bloody thing just wouldn’t do what it was meant to. Every time I inserted Pole Three in Sleeve C, or whatever it was, poles one and two would suddenly jump out of their moorings in sleeves A and B and we’d have to start all over again. Eventually, two fellow campers came to our aid but it says something about the design of a modern tent that it took three adults and two youths to actually put the thing up. Even in a mild breeze we would have had trouble but that thing wasn’t designed for the sort of winds we had in Cornwall last summer.

Where are the instructions?!

Finally, it’s up, if not completely straight or aligned as it looks in the catalogue, but it’s up and hopefully water-tight. It’s got ‘pods’ off the sides of the central area which you sleep in and the whole thing looks very space-age and modern. At last, I could hold my own with all the other fashion-conscious campers and not fear a visit from the style police (unless they were checking for last year’s colour, of course).

Two days later and half the bloody thing blew down. We came back from a day on the beach to discover one of the side pods completely flattened and one of the poles snapped in two. I was beginning to lose heart.

A twenty mile drive enabled me to locate a stockist of spare poles but on getting back to the campsite I realised that I was going to have to cut them to size, reassemble the piece of elastic that goes through the middle to hold all the pieces together and then re-erect the tent. Bugger that. I wasn’t going to spend the best part of a day engaged in a DIY project. I was meant to be on holiday for goodness sake. So we just evacuated the collapsed pod, pegged it down firmly so it didn’t flap in the wind and the boys slept in the central area.

Unbreakable!

I don’t know if you remember last summer, but it was bloody awful weather wise. Every night I lay in that tent listening to the wind tugging at the guy ropes and wondering whether it was about to take off or not. At the end of that week I vowed and declared to myself that I was never going camping again.

But of course we are. We’ve booked the campsite and I’m praying that the forecasters are correct in their promise that there’s going to be a heatwave this summer and not the monsoon conditions we endured last year. And I just hope that all the other people who are planning their holidays in the UK this year have been put off camping by reading this and are opting for a nice guest house with a sea view instead.

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This entry was posted on Friday, June 19th, 2009 at 10:25 am and is filed under Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.