The Great British Camping Trip

This is a story about rain.

Being collectively tighter than a duck's arse, the Wife and I have long been associated with going on camping holidays. The Wife will comment that she loves the taste of camping tea, and that the food always tastes better but in truth we do it because we're skint. Otherwise we'd be in five star hotels, drinking Chateau Le Pin and eating grapes off each other. Or in my case, peanuts. I don't like grapes.

So we go camping A LOT, and consequently have a tent approximately the size of Madison Square Garden. Admittedly I've never been to Madison Square Garden, but I did see it in the film Highlander and it seemed quite big.

In spite of what I'm about to say, I love camping. However the Kids love camping. It's a "going back to nature" thing. As in - not washing and acting like animals. So last week we shoved every blanket we owned into the car, hitched up the roofbox and headed to the New Forest.

Now... I was a bit worried about the weather. For the previous week I'd been looking on every weather website I could find, unable find a forecast that I liked. The best of them said; "Torrential downpours, temperatures just above freezing, outbreaks of hypothermia, occasional shark attacks." But based on the fact that a) we couldn't get our money back and b) neither of us wanted to deal with the Girl's reaction to a cancelled holiday (BOOM!), we went.

We pitched up in the early afternoon with the sun shining, managed to get the tent up without divorce being mentioned, chatted amiably with the friends that were with us. As ever in my life, things started swimmingly, before going a bit wrong.

Going camping is not the most relaxing of holidays. For a start it's the only sort of holiday where you have to build your accommodation on arrival. Also, the Kids are generally so excited that they don't manage to fall asleep until several hours after their bed time. When they do go to sleep it's not long before someone shouts "I NEED A POO!"  forcing you to negotiate a number of zips, hurdles, tent pegs and guy ropes in the pitch black, trudging across to a hole in the ground someone has creatively called a toilet and watching the apple of your eye crap on a hedgehog (true story). In fact, most camping holidays I've been on have been dominated by the logistics of having a crap. Hence I spend a lot of time drunk.

Then there are the camping beds. It takes a particular person to go into the design of camping beds. The sort of person that wanted to go into dentistry or vivisection but thought they were a bit "soft." 

• Example 1; the inflatable mattress that you spend three hours inflating on arrival. Net result; waking up in the early hours to discover it has a puncture and you're lying on the freezing ground with paralysing backache

• Example 2; the child's "Readybed" which consists of an inflatable mattress and zip-on sleeping bag. Net result, you're awoken in the early hours because the Boy has flipped over and capsized for the fourteenth time in the night and is being suffocated by the mattress

• Example 3; self inflating mattresses which, for reasons best known to the freak that designed it, are frictionless. Net result; you wake up on the other side of the tent. Or someone else's tent

This means you spend the holiday constantly exhausted and paranoid about your next bowel movement. Or at least I do.

Day two arrived and brought with it the sort of weather you can only expect when you're on a camping holiday in England and GOD HATES YOU. The rain was falling like Facebook shares (topical!) and bouncing off the ground. And just to compound matters, halfway through the day there were gale force winds. So we went off to the National Motor Museum which was brilliant for me because I love cars.

On entering the dimly lit hanger full of cars the Boy suddenly excitedly yelled

"Look! Shaka laka boom boom!"

"That's Chitty Chitty Bang Bang."

Naturally being a car enthusiast I took to explaining to the Boy the history behind the cars such as Bluebird, or Graham Hill's 1967 Lotus formula 1 car. The Boy responded to this with

"Ha ha, that car looks like an orange!"

Or, when I was explaining how the internal combustion engine worked yelling

"Suck! Bang! Blow! Squeeze!"

"It's 'suck, squeeze, bang, blow' and for Chrissake's stop yelling that!"

We also went on the monorail - except the Girl who climbed the two story building to board it, decided it looked like a roller coaster and galactically shat herself. It was a grand day out. Save for the fact that as the day went on the rain got harder and the wind picked up. Later we got back to the camp site to discover the awning for our tent had been rescued from inside our tent by our friends. And then they went to the pub and all their tents fell over. I rushed around, re-constructing everyone's tents before assisting a French couple who's tent had actually turned into a hot air balloon. Much fun was had as their tent canopy dragged us face down around the field. Oh how we laughed and swore. Fortunately, our tent stayed up, and when our friends had decided (wisely, since their tents had holes or bits missing) to go home, we decided to brave the night. I'm pretty convinced the people in the Titanic's lifeboats had a better night's sleep than we did that night. It sounded like an Apollo mission was launching in our tent.

However I'm pleased to say that the next day the weather improved and we got to spend two days wandering around the New Forest, communing with nature and seeing thousands of wild ponies.

I hate ponies.