Nine years out

Camping’s crap isn’t it. Someone had to say it. Yes there are magical moments, and an occasional sense of getting back to a more pared down, essential way of living away from the guff and distractions of modern life in a reasonably affluent western country yadda yadda, but they’re few and far between.

It’s a tough one to own up to. You may as well own up to having a small knob, loving the Nolans or being a dab hand at butterfly cakes for all the manpoints it awards. Don’t like camping: you’re half a man. It kind of implies you’re awful in bed. I maybe* awful in bed, but it’s got nowt to do with camping.

Actually, it’s not that I don’t like camping. I DO like camping. I just don’t like packing to get ready to go; the setting the sodding thing up; the hot nights; the light mornings; the inability to sit in any way that might be regarded as comfortable for the duration of the holiday; the need for a strategic peeing regime (SPR) starting at 6pm, that will give you some hope of not having to get up in the night; the niggle in the bladder that says you need a pee around 35 minutes after you went to bed despite having stuck to your SPR; and finding that pee was perhaps two thimblesful and almost entirely the result of an overactive mind telling you that despite having adhered to your SPR you need a pee. This is the same part of the brain that swears they always score when you go for a wee in the middle of big football matches.

And, I forgot, that weird wax that your body always feels coated in after one night’s sleep in a tent…like you’re gently seeping beeswax from the moment of sundown to sun up. Showers can’t touch it…only a hot bath, in your own bath, will remove it.

Camping is apparently simple living. Try going with even just a wife and one child – your car will be full of guff that is essential for making this simple living possible.

A couple of days near the Dorset coast are enough to make anyone happy. It was blazing with a cool breeze, lots of lovely food, lunch with Ray Smith and his wife Mary that involved very much in the way of cured pork. And a bit of champagne. With Ray and Mary you are in the company of greatness and a knowledge that is held by very few others. I made my very first sausages, salami, chorizo and airdried ham with Ray, butchering my first pig with him 7 years ago or thereabouts. I’ve met very few cheerier people, and very few less willing to live with laziness and incompetance – it’s a combination I like very much and he’s been a very good friend ever since. He’s also never short of an opinion about anything, especially what it is that you do for a living. He knows best. I like that too. He’s also very good at swearing. This may make him the complete human being.

A lunch and an afternoon spent with Ray and Mary, sunny paddling at Burton Bradstock, woodpeckers flying about being replaced by hawk moths when they went to bed, fish and chips on the beach at West Bay. All fabulous. All in the two days we were away. And that’s a lot of loveliness for two days. It’s also a lot of neckache and lack of sleep. Gristle grumble.

I think what I’m partly moaning about is wishing I loved the palaver that comes with camping more than I do. I want to be Grizzly Adams**, or at least on the odd weekend and sunny week I do. I also feel a calling to go to a hotel by the sea, sit outside sipping cocktails and eating stuff someone else has cooked and know I don’t have to queue if I fancy a chod.

It makes me feel slightly older not loving camping. Or rather loving camping in the less than unconditional way that I do. I may be slightly sensitive to feeling older this week as it’s my birthday. I really couldn’t be arsed about getting older, not in that ‘oh my God I’m 21, life’s over’ kind of a way. Even in my teens my brain always thought it was cobblers – surely it’s about how long you have left (and the quality of that time) rather than how long you’ve had. I may live to be 67, 97, or anywhere in between***, and without knowing which, it really is entirely irrelevant whether I’m 21 or 51. I may have 46 years left either way.

Life has got incrimentally lovelier for the most part. I do, however, get fed up with life’s creeping ignomies as the years shuffle by. For a man, these mainly involve body hair and its increasing propensity for poking out in places it was never fashionable to show. When having my haircut about 7 years ago the hairdresser made a wafty movement and asked ‘Shall I tidy these up for you?’ I really didn’t know what he meant. Mishearing or misunderstanding a hairdresser gets me instantly embarrassed – it recalls a day when as a young lad I went to get my hair cut with my dad. He had his cut, went off to by some fags and a paper while I had mine cut…and the barber asked me if I wanted something for the weekend. I was left utterly confused. I must’ve only been 12 or so. I also wouldn’t let it lie. ‘What sort of thing?’ ‘What do you mean?’ I carried this on even when my dad returned, genuinely wanting to be let in on the secret. I was carted off to much giggling between my dad and the barber and was not in any way enlightened on the X57 home. The blushing came years later when I remembered the event now fully acquainted with exactly what that ‘something’ was. Now if he’d have asked me if I’d wanted a seagulls welly I might have known what he was on about.

So, reddening, I asked him what he meant. My eyebrows. He had that look of a man familiar with the self-deniers. I genuinely hadn’t noticed the odd lengthy one sticking out – but deny it and you sound like an arse, compelled to over-explain your surprise. Which makes you sound like you’re making your ignorance up. That day was the start of the nasal and eyebrow hair war. Tweezers entered my world for something other than the infrequent nipping out of splinters. For a fleeting moment I understood what it must feel like to be a woman, to feel compelled by society to wax this, pluck that, cover those…but within a microsecond that vanished under a cloud of self-obsession. I just felt older. This shit happens to old men. I felt like Ursula Andress in the last minutes of ‘She’.

There is still the odd day I wake up and think I’m in jail, before realising it’s just dangling eyebrows, and winding the offending hairs around the doorhandle and slamming the door to pluck them free – but that’s it: the sum total of feeling older. As it goes, it beats colostomy**** bags and arthritis.

There was a very lovely piece about Otter Farm in the Independent on Saturday by Anna Pavord. She came here a few weeks ago. I was a tad nervous. Anna is one of the queens of garden writing and Otter Farm is nothing if not rough around the edges. Very much a smallholding rather than a garden. I tried to get her onside with a piece of strawberry and rhubarb tart before she saw the jungle and it may have worked. Having spent a good part of her life creating a garden and reinstating the former glories of a house herself she completely understood the wrestling match that is trying to create something out of an unrelated starting point, on a limited budget, with a whole load of other stuff going on. There are a couple of teeny inaccuracies in her piece that I spotted – a few plants mentioned as being in Veg Patch that aren’t, but most importantly she had my age wrong. 43 it said. I did the maths…but that would make this 2010. Oh balls.

It can’t be true…but even saying that makes me sound old. Being surprised by how old you are, saying you only feel 29 or something are defining characteristics of being an old sod. 34 looks about right. Nine years to be wiped off the slate then. There was a patch between 19 and 26 when I worked in the odd seasonal job in a kitchen and spent the rest of the time either training around Europe grapepicking and all that but essentially on the dole. That’s seven years. And I took 3 years getting an ‘E’ and an ‘O’ at A level. The last year of the three was reasonably dedicated to listening to music and trying hard enough to get that ‘E’. Some of the rest of the time was spent in the pub playing pool. A couple of us were given the keys for the pool table as we played in the team and the owner wanted us to win the league, so many a lunchtime became a long afternoon. Apart from that, those 2 years were wasted.

So I reckon that’s two years plus the other seven makes nine…perhaps that’s the reason for the mental discrepancy between 34 and 43. I think I only really started being energetic or vaguely driven by anything other than music at around 26, but thinking about it it was probably much later when it really kicked in, maybe only since I’ve come here to Otter Farm.

So, here I am, 43 apparently. At least for today. Tomorrow’s a different story but I haven’t been able to account for another year of discrepancy yet, hence posting this in a rush, today, so that the maths still works.

* I said ‘maybe’, ok

** Played by Dan Haggerty, not to be confused with Den Hegarty.

*** Or maybe even either side of that, but you get the picture.

**** My wife: Who’s this on the radio?…’The Cure’ I said…’Sounds like that bloke off Dexys Midnight Runners doesn’t he’ she replied…’Wha..!??!?! Don’t be dosy’….said I. Impossible. I’ve seen The Cure all over the place, the first gig I ever went to, I thought, but about three months later when The Cure was on the radio again, I noticed it. She was right. So close I couldn’t see the wood.

  • Ah, so you're a Leo. That explains a lot… *mystic face*
    My husband was in the barbers once when said barber suddenly whipped out a lighter and burnt off the hairs along the top of his ears. Surely worse.

  • Obviously I meant: ah, so you're Cancer, THAT explains everything… *hands in gypsy headband at the door*

  • I LOVE Anna Pavord…don't you wish she was on Twitter?
    I HATE camping…even faux-maharaja-style with Persian rugs and tassels on the ceiling. At my old school they plonked us in the middle of dartmoor with a map and told us to get home (that might be why i hate camping)…Welcome to the club.
    Long fuzzy eyebrows are distinguished…so don't touch them…
    Lovely post for a monday morning (am sad because I spilt hot tea on the Pug and can't shake the guilt)…thank you!

  • Happy birthday. I'm afraid I still don't get what your barber was going on about when you were 12. Have a nice day.

  • Ha, like Lialeendertz's huband, Sean has the experience of hairs on back on neck being burned off by a pirate-y looking Turk with a Bic lighter every Saturday morning. He claims this happens in the barber's. I don't enquire too closely.
    Happy birthday matey – my birthday this week too – do you think it's a coincidence that this is my most expensive birthday cardy presenty month? I know so many nurtuting Cancerians… Dx

  • I loathe camping, cant understand where the fun is in making life harder than it needs to be.
    Happy birthday, I'm only a year older.

  • Lia and LS – thank you for lightneing my emotional load with tales so similar hair-shame. I can step away from the dge now, safe in the special brotherhood. And Happy Birthday too LS, I have a feeling you'll have a very marvelous cake methaphorically up your sleeve.

    Laetitia – Sorry about Mr Pug, I trust his luxuriant pelt deflected the worst of the liquids heat. Alas, I fear Mrs P is not one about to join us on twitter. And I'm reasonably certain you're just trying to get me to grow the eyebrows to aging-politician proportions so that I may be roundly mocked.

    PG – thank you, and reassured to know I'm not the oldest person in the world too

    Kate B – it's cheering to know there are still people not acquainted with the less lyrical pleasantries prevalent in an old-stylee barbers. However, I suspect you are now old enough to know the truth: Something for the weekend=seagull's welly=condoms

  • The problem with camping is that basically it is very uncomfortable. The beds are narrow, a sleeping bag is like being put in an envelope, the ground is hard, the catering and lavatorial arrangements are primitive and the whole thing is only worth it for the sunset moment. And

    I also believe that unless you were brought up to camp from an early age you will never get the point: Either that or you need to be so hog-whimperingly drunk that you could sleep on pointy gravel and not notice.
    Ann-Marie Powell loves camping.
    'Nuff said, I think.

    When I was about your age (sonny) I bought a battery powered nasal hair trimmer from Argos. It was almost more embarrassing than buying top shelf magazines from attractive young female shop assistants (so I have been told ). I have the occasional unruly eyebrow hair: I know because either my wife or my daughter bear down upon me wielding pointy scissors. There is always a moment when I worry that I have transgressed wildly and they want to stab me.

  • Mark,

    I'm just back from a quite lovely holiday Park near Amsterdam (Duinrell – run, don't walk, there, if you want a good hol with kids) where we rented a bungalow, and in the morning we cycled past the folks who had slept in tents. I'm massively relieved to read your post because I thought it was missing the gene that's meant to make that misery of tarpaulins look attractive. Everyone looked as content and comfortable as backpackers stranded at an airport.

    I saw & liked the piece in the Guardian and at the time I specifically noted your age — because I'm 40, I'm always slightly relieved to find that cool people are around my age and not 25. Not very big of me, I know, but there you go.

    Sheila Averbuch – Stopwatch Gardener

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