Happy Campers
We went camping near Castle Howard in North Yorkshire recently. I am not yet convinced by camping - it seems an awful lot of hassle to make yourself voluntarily homeless - but, last year, Louise spontaneously bought all the gear anyone would ever need (from a man on Facebook) and will be damned if we don’t make the most of it. After returning home from our previous trip with a broken tent pole, a broken spirit, and three relentless days of washing cycles awaiting, I subtly suggested we might break even if we sold the gear on ASAP, but this was met with short shrift.
“The boys loved it, Andy.”
“Did they?”
“Yes.”
And that, I suppose, was that. We are now a camping family.
Prior to setting off, I’d worked from home, a gruelling shift which involved being called “a dopey dickhead” (by a man on probation, not Louise.) Marks for alliteration, I suppose. My final task of the week was a videocall with a prisoner, which I’d forgotten about when saying I would be ready to leave at 2.30 pm. Mid-call, Louise barged into the office room/general dumping ground to collect the remainder of the camping equipment and I imagine the prisoner will have been confused that my background contained a frowning woman carrying a gas canister. I chose not to mention it and put myself on mute.
“Do you mind getting the rest of the stuff after I’ve finished, Lou?”
She responded with a barbed comment about my lack of meaningful involvement in the packing, a theme which precedes most of our weekends away.
After the call finished, I headed downstairs where Louise was standing in the drive alongside numerous items which had not fit in our roof rack. It is, it turns out, the opposite of a Tardis. I glumly accepted my fate and clambered into the passenger seat while the items, including the gas cannister and a large camping stove were loaded onto my lap.
Following a journey marred by crawling Friday traffic and being unable to move any of my limbs, we finally arrived at the campsite and provided the boys with a Frozen sticker book while we set everything up. Although pitching the tent is still a monumental pain in the neck, it is getting easier. Or so I thought.
“Do you have the mallet, dear wife?”
“No, I thought you’d packed it?”
Instead of doing what a normal person might do and asking to borrow one from another camper, I started trying to hammer the tent pegs into the ground with a rock. When the first peg bent in half, I swore loudly and dearly wished I was sat on our nice, indoor sofa, drinking a can of IPA, and watching The Bear. With Louise stunned by my ineptitude, a kind lady ambled over, lent us her mallet, and saved an argument.
As the boys charged around, Louise opened a bottle of wine, and I felt the week’s stresses dissipating. Before taking my first sip, however, I started sneezing incessantly, eyes streaming. Along with the mislaid mallet, I had also forgotten my antihistamines; the one thing I cannot live without when spending a weekend living in a field.
“I need to find a Tesco Express urgently,” I said, getting into the spirit of being at one with nature.
I returned an hour and a half later, having been on a round-the-houses tour of North Yorkshire. I’d picked up a takeaway pizza as a softener but, given I’d left Louise to do the boys’ bedtime routine on a campsite by herself, it understandably did little to placate her. That it was one of the worst pizzas we’ve ever eaten didn’t help.
After I’d apologised, we had a glass of room temperature Pinot in plastic beakers and Louise informed me the boys had gone to sleep almost straight away. In a bid to quash their 5 am wakeups, she has bought them a small blackout tent to go inside our main tent. I’d initially dismissed a tent within a tent as a bonkers idea, but they slept a for a straight 12 hours, and I will happily swallow my words; Louise’s take on Inception has, it turns out, been a masterstroke.
Sadly, I didn’t fully benefit as I woke up to deafening birdsong at 4.45 am, and spent the next two hours tossing, turning, and sneezing.
“Shh, Andy!” Louise said from the other side of our deflated inflatable mattress. “For God’s sake!”
“Do you think I want to be sneezing?”
This is a conversation we’ve had, I would estimate, 7,000 times.
After the boys arose, I cooked some bacon sandwiches (my “first helpful contribution to the weekend”) and we had a pleasant walk around a lake, looking, at Joshua’s instruction, for dragonflies, and Jacob’s more ambitious request: lava monsters. By the time we’d got back to the tent(s), it was still, astonishingly, only 9 am. Time on a campsite goes at the same pace as time on a treadmill, it seems.
“What do you fancy doing for the next 10-12 hours, then?” I asked.
We decided to visit the grounds of Castle Howard, somewhere I haven’t been since an ill-fated teenage trip with my dad who attempted to explain the plot of Brideshead Revisited while I trudged around with my hood up, grunting, before insisting we listen to Rage Against the Machine at an unnecessarily high volume all the way home. I’ve been informed (by some sources) that Louise was no picnic as a teenager either so we are due our just comeuppance when the boys are older.
Back in the present, we had a lovely morning, riding the land train and exploring the grounds and, after a coffee and a coke, we mustered the energy to face the adventure playground. The sun had broken through the clouds, and, at the top of a rope bridge, the boys’ cheeks were rosy, with hair matted to their foreheads. I advised them to take their coats off and slung them off the bridge, towards where we’d been sitting.
A woman came charging over, looking frantic.
“Oh, thank God! I thought a child had fallen off the bridge!”
She laughed it off, but I felt terrible. That will be the last time I chuck any coats off a rope bridge.
We got back to the campsite at around 4 pm. With no fridge available, we were dismayed to discover our selection of meat was now both offensive and inedible, so tea was warm peanut butter sandwiches, Pom-Bears and marshmallows. Afterwards, Louise and I sat on our camping chairs and kept a loose eye on the boys as they played a lengthy game which involved little more than filling up a bottle at a communal drinking tap, pouring the water on the floor, and laughing. Not our proudest contribution to climate change but, in our defence, they were having a great time.
Speaking of rising temperatures, by the time we’d put the boys into their small pitch-black hole, our white wine was now as warm as a passable latte.
“I think we need to invest in a fridge for, Andy.”
I fear I’m going to have to free up some more space on my lap.
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