… The Great Outdoors.

So; the boy and I have been camping.

You are probably expecting some light-hearted whimsy about the disasters that befell us and the scrapes we got up to.

Fortunately, however, I am neither a novice (having read at least two Tarzan books) nor a simpleton.

There were no disasters.

The scrapes were much more Yogi Bear than Stephen King.  We didn’t have to eat one another, fend off wolves or escape banjo-playing rednecks. And I have the same number of children, each in possession of the same number of eyes, limbs and digits as when we left.

So a successful trip?

Well, yes and no.

A short word, if I may, about preparation:

They say a bad workman, or indeed woodsman, blames his tools.

Well even Bear Grylls might struggle in bear-infested wilderness, in brown paper boots, with firewood made of ice and a tent made of meat.

I’m just saying.

A good estate agent might have described our tent as cosy or compact.

If I offer one tip for less experienced woodsmen, consider spending a little more money on a tent where the long diameter of the internal groundsheet is greater than the long diameter of the taller of the two campers.

In short – make sure your tent is longer than you are.

Otherwise you run the risk of looking a little like your pet tortoise, with head sticking out one end and feet the other, with your house in between.

The second tip is the same as the first, but applies to the width of the tent.

The boy complained that once I had folded an air mattress into the tent there was only enough space for him to have his pillow “portrait” rather than “landscape”.

Fortunately I was able to point out that since his head is portrait rather than landscape, this was no great hardship.

Then we have the mattress issue.

The drumming of the rain on the canvass drained out the sound of the hiss of a slow punctured air bed.

So I only became aware of this when I woke up lying in pitch darkness on a mattress which was providing all the cushioning of a piece of tracing paper.

And it was only then that I realised that our pitch had previously been occupied by a geologist who specialised in the study of pointy triangular rocks. And he had kindly left a number of his pointiest specimens for the next camper, covered over by the thinnest layer of wood chippings. 

I still have the indentations in my softer bits.

Then, in the morning, we had the matter of … packing the tent. 

I don’t know if you’ve tried to dry a large sheet of nylon with a walking sock in persistent Mancunian drizzle lately, but it’s not an easy task.

I’d have had about as much luck trying to get the smoke back into a cigarette, or a pint of semi skimmed milk back into the cow.

We arrived home tired but happy (or, at very least, tired).

But I couldn’t help but remember why, in spite of the joys of bonding with the boy under canvas in the great outdoors, several years ago we had had the foresight to spend several hundreds of thousands of pounds…

on a house.