We are all born bored and seek to busy ourselves, which is much easier when young, as novel things abound. As one ages, you become aware of the absolute absurdity of life and are more fervent in avoiding idleness. One extreme preventative to madness is to curate it ourselves.
Welcome to my favourite form of madness.
Camping.
Camping is one of those terribly British things, in that it is a terrible idea.
I am sure some of my Chinese friends must think we are quite mad because, when you really think about it, camping is essentially taking all of the things human civilisation has spent thousands of years trying to protect us from, weather, cold, damp, darkness, insects, uneven ground, having nowhere sensible to go to the toilet, and then paying money to put ourselves back among them for a weekend.
Let me explain. You take a tent, usually badly erected, and the only thing separating you from the outside world is about one millimetre of nylon. You go to sleep freezing and wake up sweating. It barely keeps you dry, and it rains a lot in the UK.
You spend the week before camping packing a car full of things designed to allow you to survive forty-eight hours without access to the house you already own or rent and which, importantly, already contains a bed, bathroom, kitchen, electricity, doors that lock and a roof which has been professionally attached to the walls.
We take a life in which warmth, shelter, electricity, cooking facilities, plumbing and somewhere soft to sleep are already available to us, temporarily remove all of them, then spend an enormous amount of time and money recreating noticeably worse versions in a field.
The effort involved is extraordinary. You have to remember everything you might conceivably need to cook, clean, sleep, wash, dress, entertain yourself, protect yourself from rain, protect yourself from sun, protect yourself from cold, protect yourself from the ground, protect yourself from yourself.
First up, the sleeping arrangement. The great invention, the sleeping bag, a bed in a bag what more, oh, wait don’t forget the roll mat, the air mattress (the pump), the pillow, and then, because apparently a pillow is no longer enough when you are sleeping outdoors, the cushion.
Then there is your throw.
Your snuggly.
Your onesie.
Your slippers.
Your dressing gown.
And I only have put myself to bed. There are people who bring children.
Children.
Actual dependent human beings. I have seen families arrive with so much equipment that you begin to wonder if they are auditioning for a part in Carry on Crazy. I once saw a family bring a television during the World Cup.
A television.
Just stay at home!
Then there’s the business of eating. Modern campers bring electricity now. Some bring fridges, some bring electric pumps, lights, heaters, fans, chargers and various devices specifically designed to recreate all of the conveniences they drove two hours into the countryside to escape from.
Except. Damnit, we forgot the tin opener. Someone is taking the biscuit.
‘Dave, why didn’t you pack the tin opener?’
‘Why is that my job?’
‘Because I packed the food.’
‘Yes, but you packed the tins.’
‘Exactly. Which is why you were supposed to pack the tin opener.’
‘I didn’t know I was supposed to pack the tin opener.’
‘Well who did you think was going to open the tins?’
‘I assumed you packed it.’
‘Why would I pack it? I packed the tins.’
Isn’t nature wonderful?
You have packed fourteen things specifically designed to prevent you from experiencing nature while telling everyone you have come here to experience nature, but somehow it is keeping us all busy and the show must go on.
And then there is the campfire. The campfire is important because this is where the idea of camping really starts to make sense, or at least where you convince yourself it does because you imagine the campfire before you go, don’t you?
You imagine yourself sitting peacefully in front of it, beer in hand, watching the flames, surrounded by friends, reconnecting with something ancient and elemental inside yourself. Right then, best remember the firewood.
The kindling.
The fire pit.
The firelighters.
The lighter.
Another lighter because someone will lose the first lighter.
The wind guard.
The marshmallows.
The skewers.
The chocolate.
The beer.
A bag for the rubbish.
Something to open the beer.
Something to carry the wood.
Something to stop the fire scorching the grass.
Something to pick up the things you have dropped while carrying the other things.
And eventually, after half an hour of crouching over a small pile of increasingly disappointing sticks you have a fire.
Excellent.
Now you can relax.
Except by this point you have been operational for so long you have forgotten how. You sit down in your camping chair, don’t forget the camping chair!
Right.
This is it.
Relaxation.
Look at the flames.
Lovely.
Except the smoke is going directly into your face.
You move slightly to the left.
Much better.
Right.
Relaxing again.
Except now you are cold because you have moved further away from the fire.
So you move the chair closer.
Smoke.
Move back.
Cold.
Move sideways.
Smoke follows.
Of course it does.
The smoke has selected you personally.
Eventually you find a position where you are warm enough to remain alive but not so smoky that your eyes are streaming, and for perhaps twelve seconds you achieve something approaching inner peace. Ah! living in the moment. Better put another log on to preserve the moment.
Anyone got the tongs?
No?
Where are the tongs?
Did we bring the tongs?
I thought you packed the tongs.
No, I packed the firelighters.
Well, what are we going to poke it with?
A stick.
Yes, obviously a stick, we are in nature. Except somehow, in an entire field surrounded by trees, there is no stick. So somebody goes looking for one. It is getting dark now. You had better go get your coat.
And your hat.
And perhaps your blanket.
Because the temperature in a British field can fall six degrees in the amount of time it takes you to say, ‘It’s actually quite mild tonight.’
Now, finally you sit down.
You have a beer.
You look at the fire.
You relax.
Or rather you begin actively monitoring yourself for evidence of relaxation.
Yes.
I am relaxed now.
This is relaxing.
I can feel myself relaxing.
You yawn because the outdoors really does make you sleepy. All that fresh air, your circadian rhythm has suddenly rediscovered itself.
Someone tells a story you have heard before but listen anyway and you laugh in the places where you laughed last time.
Somebody finishes their drink.
‘Another beer?’
You offer one to anybody foolish enough to make eye contact.
Then, inevitably, somebody says:
‘Look at the stars.’
And everybody looks up.
And for a moment, actually, it is beautiful.
You are away from the street lights and the houses and the televisions and the Wi-Fi and all the little boxes we normally live inside, and above you is this enormous black sky full of stars.
‘Wow.’
‘Yeah.’
‘Amazing.’
‘Beautiful.’
And then, approximately eight seconds later, everybody looks back at the fire because it needs another log. ‘Yeah, Yeah’ unanimous agreement feels good doesn’t it. You pile up the fire
Eventually you decide you are tired but the fire is now roaring.
‘Right. Bed.’
You announce this with the authority of someone whose responsibilities have ended, abandoning your fire duties like the captain of the Costa Concordia and leaving whoever remains behind to deal with the thing you have all spent the evening congratulating yourselves on creating.
You head towards your tent.
Your damp, cold, dark nylon bedroom.
You unzip it.
That noise.
ZZZZZZZZIP.
Anyone who has ever camped knows that noise. You can hear a tent zip from approximately seven fields away. You become extraordinarily alert to it at night because, unlike your house, your tent does not have a lock. Think about that. You are asleep in a field behind a zip. That is your security system.
A zip.
And yet somehow, lying there, if you hear another zip at two in the morning you suddenly become MI5.
Whose zip was that?
Was that my zip?
No.
Definitely left side.
Two tents over.
Probably Dave.
You get inside your tent and now the true absurdity begins because you are freezing and the thought of taking your clothes off seems completely ludicrous. Relishing the madness, you climb into the sleeping bag fully dressed and attempt to remove items of clothing from inside it, performing a nocturnal nylon metamorphosis until eventually a bra emerges from the neck hole of your T-shirt and you feel you have achieved something.
Now you are settled, warm-ish and comfortable-ish.
You lie there and think:
Nature is wonderful. I am so glad I came.
Then, naturally, you reach for your phone and there they are, the city slickers sitting in bars wearing actual shoes, drinking cocktails somewhere so warm the glasses are condensing. Meanwhile, the beer you drank beside your beautiful elemental fire has now completed its journey through your body and your bladder makes the announcement.
No. Absolutely not. You are not getting up.You can wait.
You definitely can.
You lie there knowing perfectly well there is only going to be one winner.
Eventually you accept defeat and that is when you remember something else. You have chosen to sleep on the ground. Not metaphorically, the ground is right there, your face is perhaps five centimetres away from soil. You could probably have a meaningful conversation with a worm.
So now you have to put all your clothes back on inside the sleeping bag in the dark find your shoes find your coat find the torch unzip the tent.
ZZZZZZZZIP.
Alerting everybody in the field that Tent 14 has activated.
Then begins the walk across the field in the dark to the toilet block.
‘Block’ is perhaps overgenerous because the roof is not entirely committed to the walls, but it is nevertheless marginally warmer than the fabric sack you have just left.
You piss.
You wipe.
You decide while you are here you may as well brush your teeth.
Toothbrush.
Yes.
Toothpaste.
No.
Of course not. The toothpaste is at home. Probably next to the tin opener.
So you brush your teeth with whatever microscopic morning remnant remains fossilised among the bristles and curse yourself then you step outside.
And there they are again.
The stars.
Right.
Yes.
Nature.
Wonderful.
You make the long march back to Dampsville.
You unzip.
ZZZZZZZZIP.
Back inside.
Shoes off.
Coat off.
Back into the sleeping bag.
Shuffle.
Arrange pillow.
Rearrange pillow.
Is the air bed losing air?
Ignore it.
And now, finally, silence.
Except it isn’t silence.
Because the extraordinary thing about a tent is that it gives you visual privacy while providing almost no acoustic privacy whatsoever, you are basically sleeping inside a shower curtain. I might not be able to see you, but I can hear everything, every conversation, every cough, every laugh, every whispered argument, every midnight crisp packet.
Somebody two tents away says something you cannot quite hear and you immediately strain to catch the rest of it. This is your entertainment now, or the curtain call, so somewhere around this point, cold, slightly damp, with your mattress slowly deflating beneath you, you begin to understand what camping actually is.
It is not really getting back to nature. Most of the time we are doing everything in our power to stop nature touching us.
It is not simplicity either. There is nothing simple about requiring three bags, two chairs and six layers of bedding just to drink a beer beside a fire.
We invent solvable problems because the unsolvable ones are unbearable. Better the air bed losing air, the fire needing another log, the missing tin opener, than the deathly silence of the vacuum of space where you could scream until your lungs bleed and nothing would answer. The universe remains indifferent to our attention seeking behaviour. The entropy of our uselessness is undeniable, so we invent folly.
I think I am quite like men in that respect: make a problem, then busy myself inventing the solution. I moved to China and made my life twenty times harder, just so I could spend my days finding workarounds. Apparently, that is progress.
And once we have successfully made ourselves cold, damp, smoky, tired, slightly dirty and unnecessarily concerned about whether somebody packed the tongs, we look around at one another and say:
‘This is the life.’
Which is completely mad so welcome to the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party.
Now excuse me, I’m late for a very important meeting rearranging my furniture.
