The Social Lampoonery of Camping or I Don't Know What I Did Last Summer...

This is an account of a camping holiday I took with my girlfriend last year and incorporates more people watching and character assassination... why? Because I can ;-)

     The tent blew up like an oversized kite, billowing out like Death's cape and dragging me across the wind swept plain. Honestly, who the f**k situates a campsite on a hilltop overlooking the sea?
Now I'm a man/boy of measured patience but even I was beginning to lose it in the face of windy adversary; taking a wayward tent peg to the mouth didn't help matters either. I stood on one corner and snapped at Mouse who was giggling and rolling around on top of it, "a little help?"
     As if by magic, a cretin appeared.
     He was wearing a deerstalker hat in the style of a crap Sherlock Holmes. "Hallo," he said with a chipper wave, "looks like the sou' westerly's got you chasing all around there."
     He actually referred to the wind as a 'sou' westerly' � what a prick.
     "Yes," I said through gritted teeth as a guy rope whipped me merrily across the eyes.
     He clasped his hands behind his back and rocked back and forth on the balls of his feet. It made his Wellington boots creak. Annoyingly.
     Smiling vacantly, he watched me battle with the tent for a few more minutes before saying, "need a hand?"
     It didn't take a meteorologist or even a West Country soothsayer to tell me that as soon as the last peg was hammered home, the wind would drop and that the sun would start to shine. Sure enough, this was exactly what happened. I thanked the man for his help, or rather what little help he had actually been. His version of help had largely resulted in him standing at the side and directing me whilst puffing contentedly on his pipe and intermittently stamping on bits of errant canvas. At one point, halfway through the evolution and when the tent was balancing at its most precarious he shouted, "that's it, that's it Caesar, you've crossed the Rubicon!" Twat. (I later saw him beating up his children outside a shop� okay, I didn't� I just made that up so you wouldn't like him either�).

     Finally the tent was up, it was facing the wrong way, but what mattered was that it would serve us well in the event of a torrential downpour. Mouse and I cracked open a couple of bottles of Kopparberg's finest Pear cider and ensconced ourselves in our sun chairs to watch the world go by:

     The first thing you notice about camping is the social hierarchy. It's not abject snobbery but a class system is definitely there, seething under the surface of fixed smiles, suntans and swingball. Oh and that's a thing, swingball. I assume that there is some archaic decree that requires one in two campers to bring along f*****g swingball � possibly THE most pointless game in the history of recreation. You'll see the kids play it for about 10 minutes, realise that it's s**t and leave it out in the rain for two weeks. Anyway, I digress�
     Firstly you have the Mobile home owners and the Caravan'ers. They will sit there under their hugely sweeping ornate awnings, observing all who lay prostrate before them (in the camping sense), like Kings. They'll espouse the great outdoors, a night under the stars, roughing it, at one with Mother Nature. They'll say all this as they drink Palo Cortado sherry from crystal decanters, watching Sky Sports via an eight foot satellite dish and waiting for their meals to go ping in the microwave. It may not surprise you to learn that pipe-smoking, officious arse Mr Deerstalker is one of these people; if you knew him like I knew him, it would speak volumes.
     Beneath them are the Camper-van'ers who are divided into two equal groups, the young surfer-types, swilling beer and smoking blow and the slightly hippy type families who are all tied-dyed clothing and smoking blow. They seem nice enough but still can't help from exuding a little bit of a yeah-f**k-you, we're-not-sleeping-on-the-floor kind of aura.
     From there we get into tent-city. Again this is divided up into different classes of campers based usually on the size / make of your tent; thankfully Mouse and I fit snugly into a medium sized tent so we suffer no delusions of grandeur nor are we subject to down-the-nose stares or public spitting. The order of things is also equal to the amount of equipment you have, inflatable beds, tables, chair, windbreaks, barbeque, solar lighting, standing stoves etc etc.
     Just casting your eyes around the site gives you a most variable cross-section of people. You have the Newbies � Mr & Mrs Newbie and their ginger-haired offspring, one of whom is so pale he is almost translucent. Mum and Dad are fighting with a tent they bought from Tesco for �4.97, it's true! (Of course should there be so much as a heavy dew tomorrow morning, I fear they'll all be swept to their deaths). Amidst much head scratching and turning the tent plans upside down they seem to have failed to notice that all the poles and sleeves are clearly colour coded. Rocket science it is not.
Opposite them were the Vango-Berghaus family � hardened campers with chiselled features and windswept hair, Christ even the children were rugged. They were the kind of family you'd find traipsing back down the north face of the Eiger on a Sunday morning. They seemed to stand facing the wind a lot, feet set heroically apart and fists on hips staring into the distance with steely eyes.
Just down from them were two lads who looked very at home, huddled together in a little two-man tent with a disposable barbeque, a bottle of Jack Daniels and a guitar. Mouse christened these poor unfortunates, the Brokeback boys� hey, that's what you get when you wear check shirts and leather chaps.
     Your ranking in camping society can also be gleaned by how noisy you are or how many children you have managed to spew out onto the earth. I use the verb 'to spew' justifiably with regards to the bloody horrible kids who spent the whole week assaulting three of my five senses (a restraining order forbids me to touch or taste� I am joking, of course).
     It seems that the suffix most widely used in any exclamation by a parent camping is 'NO!' with 'STOPPIT!' and 'I'LL TAN YOUR BACKSIDE FOR YOU!' limping in, in second and third place respectively.
     Kids. Jesus Christ. It would be in poor taste to say that they are good for little else but organ donation, but there you go, I've said it. I'm pretty sure some kids are okay, just not the ones who turned up at Lanyon Holiday Park last week. Take one case in point: One whiney kid seemed intent on trying to fake-cry the whole way through the week, he complained bitterly that his younger brothers were teasing him and that he just wanted to come on holiday 'to get away from everything' � this bi-polar little s**t was about 10 years old. A serial killer in the making if there ever was one; I'm sure he just wanted 'to get away from everyone' so he could set fire to squirrels and masturbate to Guns & Ammo magazine. His parents, for that matter, were the most NAUSEATING people you could ever wish to meet, wetter than an Otter's pocket both of them. They simpered and p***y-footed around the boy so much that it was little wonder that he was a complete basket-case. And, to punctuate the point perfectly, the day they were packing up to leave, the whiney little b*****d actually said �

     -Author pauses to retch into a bucket beside the PC. -Forgive me-

     He actually said, "Daddy, if we behave on the way home, can we all get Nintendo Wii's?"
To my abject horror the Dad ruffled his son's head, laughed and said, "We'll see, we'll see�" (This is in spite of the fact that they've had to cut short their holiday because he was unhappy� I think the mother used the word malcontent).
     WTF! How about, "No, you've been a thoroughly repellent little f****r all week so your mother and I have decided to put you into care."
     Bah, no chance.
     Oh yes, kids, we had them all, the teenagers, the toddlers, the bullies, the chickens, the tearaways, the pasty-faced kids, the BMXers, the arguers, the fighters, the shouters, the singers, the pukers, the sporty-types with their tent-magnetised football and the crying baby with the broken volume switch (I had offered to smother the child with a pillow, though for some reason I have a feeling the mother didn't quite see the funny side�).
     And then, there were the dogs � the yippers, the yappers, the barkers, the growlers, the shitters, the ludicrously over friendly ones who seemed to love my leg and were intent on showing me their lipsticks (think about it� there you go!)
     Good grief, the things you see when you haven't got a gun, eh?

     Anyway in spite of this secretive internal battle for dominance, everyone appeared to be in mighty fine spirits, the sun was beating down on us and I could feel skin cancer just lurking behind my epithelium � still my tan was coming along nicely�
     To cap it all the 'club house' had posters for 'BBC Radio Cornwall's very own Freddie Zapp doing a Showaddywaddy tribute with the tagline � The Rock Never Stops!' Enough said about that I think; suffice to say Mouse and I stayed in our tent, drank cider, then cocoa and read our books like right old b******s.

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     On day two, the hay fever kicked in� sigh. Regardless of the fact that I lost half my electrolyte count in tears and mucus, the week went swimmingly with Mouse and I spending most of the time avoiding our fellow campers and heading out to some of Cornwall's finest beaches.
     We undertook a trip to a little town called St Ives, partly because it was a place we used take holidays to in my childhood but largely because there had been reports of a Great White having been spotted off shore. Apparent sightings had caused quite a furore in the papers and I badly wanted to see someone being savaged twenty yards from safety but alas, it was not to be. To be honest, this was probably not a bad thing as the chances are I would have found it, I'm that unlucky. I could have been sitting in Costa Coffee only to have the f*****g thing surface in my Mochachino and rip off a limb.

     And so that was pretty much my holiday, a nice break but sleeping on an inflatable bed in a tent is not exactly two weeks in a five star in Thailand � that's my planned next-stop.
     Other than finishing, 'The Life of Pi' (buy it or I will have you all killed) � I felt that I had taken a few life-points from this week:

1.��������Food rarely tastes better when it's cooked on a portable stove on wet grass.
2.��������Should Mouse give birth to ginger-haired, see-through children, ensure that you have easy access to sacks and heavy rocks and you are within walking distance to a river or stream.
3.��������Sex in a tent is difficult when you're surrounded by screaming kids, shouting mothers and swearing fathers. (Note: My legal representatives have advised that I point out that all these people were outside the tent at the time).

     See you next year campers and remember:
     The world is a dangerous place; only yesterday I went into Starbucks and punched someone in the face.

.....................................

Reviews

[Legion]

What a trip. :) Oh, and never put up your tent in a gorge that is notorious for high winds at night. Ripped it up pretty good it did and had to spend the night in the van instead. I think that place was called Chicken Gorge somewhere out in California I believe. Been a long time ago. Anyway, great write and a great warning for us all (at least the campers without Winnebagos and such). Glad to see you survived. LOL

[T. Blake Braddy]

First of all, great similes. 'Like Death's Cape' is one of the best I've ever heard!

One of the things that always gets me about your writing is how effortlessly you convey humor. Black humor, granted, but humor nonetheless. I'm jealous.

[JP thinks the WC is apt..]

Laughed very hard at the 'heavy dew, swept to their deaths' quip and rather enjoyed the rest of the story as well. Nicely observed and bloody funny.

[Carla (trying to make e..]

oh, so brings back the memories.....thanks for that......
great read....
Carla