10:42am Friday 3rd July 2009
By David Barnett
I spent Sunday night in a tent, my two companions absolutely spark out from the excesses of the weekend, me staring at a fly that was trapped between the two skins of the canvas, listening to the strains of Blur floating on the warm breeze.
Ah, the Glastonbury festival. I would have loved to have been there, but this being Real Life, my tent was in the back garden, my camping mates were my kids Charlie, six, and Alice, four, and the Blur was coming from someone’s telly nearby, tuned in to the televised coverage of the festival.
I’m not what you might call big on camping. The first time I went camping properly was about seven years ago. It was the last time too. It wasn’t that it was a bad experience, far from it. It’s just that in the subsequent years I’d remembered about those things called ‘hotels’.
Still, needs must and with one eye on future recession-busting weekends away, we unrolled the tent, for the first time since we’d taken it down to Cornwall in 2002.
Apart from the odd tiny patch of mildew, it seemed in pretty good nick, so we decided to put it up in the garden to air it out. Of course, as soon as they saw it, the kids wanted to play in it. And then sleep in it.
“You can if your Dad’ll sleep with you,” said Mum, playing a trump card that ensured I couldn’t actually say no without dashing their camping hopes.
At first I thought it was going to be an utter disaster. Because we weren’t ready for a regression to an utterly primitive lifestyle, we took some luxuries, including a portable DVD player. We also had delivered to us, courtesy of Mum (who was relishing the house to herself for the evening), a plate of toast and pate, which is a very luxurious thing to have when roughing it.
The first row was over what we would watch on the DVD player, with High School Musical and Barnyard losing out to Indiana Jones And The Temple Of Doom. So, result there.
The second row was who would sleep in the middle, which is the prime spot for multiple-occupancy tents. When it was decided that Alice would sleep in the middle, in case of nocturnal attention from monsters, there was then a disagreement over who would sleep next to the remnants of the pate on toast, which might well attract rats.
Just when I was about to give it all up and go hammering on the door to be let in, things calmed down considerably. We watched the night growing darker through the transparent portions of the tent, and after a whispered ad-hoc adventure story, one by one, fell asleep.
It was quite magical. I woke up periodically to make sure the kids hadn’t done a runner, but they slept like logs and had to be roused the next morning. We’re now thinking of venturing further afield, next time.
Perhaps even as far as the front lawn.
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