Camping Revisited

View from the bottom of our pitch

Nobody wants to be ‘that’ guy, do they? That fussy, prissy, joyless idiot. Too neurotic to enjoy the simple things in life, squawking theatrically when they see an insect. Shuddering at the slightest inconvenience. The worst character in a film or a sitcom; uptight and unable to let go. 

However, this, unfortunately, seems to be the character I seem to adopt when I go camping. This character is always there - in a less amplified state, worrying about where she is sitting in a pub or a restaurant, but she becomes a bit of a monster when tents are involved.
I’ve written about my feelings about festivals before and my feelings about camping are very much wrapped up in that. https://msmuddles.blogspot.com/2016/06/the-disparity-between-real-and-ideal.html

Glamping seemed to offer a whole different outlook - the tents, yurts or teepees are already put up for you, the campsites aren’t as crowded and you bathe under a wondrous waterfall of mountain spring water, warmed by the tropical, British sun. (I may have made that last bit up). The toilets and waterfall have mute men servants, ready to dispense Egyptian cotton towels, wrapped in sprigs of lavender. After your shower they pummel the city tension from your shoulders on a massage table…

Our bell tent

O.K, so I might have had unrealistic expectations of glamping, a genuine one was that our campsite would be comprised of four other families and we’d all be spaced at least two miles apart so we never saw or heard each other. I was also expecting our tent to be perched atop a hill, overlooking a beautiful valley... Although I saw those valleys on the drive there, Reader, I really did, the reality wasn’t quite like that. 

I had to reckon with glamping within lockdown which meant that they’d closed the regular showers and you were only permitted to use bucket showers. Imagine what a bucket shower is, that’s what it is. It involves filling buckets, which in turn involves good upper body strength. I never used one, preferring instead to resort to the festival wash method of baby wipes in the tent. I took dry shampoo as well, another festival staple, but to be honest I barely looked in a mirror the whole weekend so that didn’t get used. 
My husband* had not one but two bucket showers over the course of the weekend, and was keen to highlight how great they were but it felt like he was trying to prank me into having one. 

*Note - if I’m the joyless, neurotic idiot, he’s the gung ho, Bear Grylls-esque, hero. He threw himself into wood chopping, fire lighting, even dish washing with enthusiastic gusto. His boyish ebullience rubbed off on the kids and they enjoyed burning things just as much as he did. They weren’t so keen on the composting toilets.

Oh, the composting toilets - sawdust, minimal lighting and the smell! The indescribable smell. My husband said that, after this weekend, we’d never get rid of the smell of wood fire from our nose, I’d say that the composting toilets provided a strong contender for this role. Still, to be fair to the campsite, they were always clean, they always had toilet roll and the sink outside, at which you washed your hands, was always stocked with hand soap and hand sanitiser. You were instructed to tip a cup of sawdust into the chamber of horrors if you’d done a poo and this made for an experience which was marginally nicer than a festival portaloo. You had to spray the seat with antibacterial spray after each use and while this made paying a visit more labour intensive than normal, it probably meant that the toilets were generally cleaner than your average public convenience. It’s just the smell, the sweet smell that nearly made me boke on my very last visit. My main problem with camping is not having a toilet nearby. That first night, kept awake by the sound of revelry and the demands of my bladder, I eventually made the journey to the toilets, on my own, in the pitch black, with a head torch lighting my way. It felt like a hero’s journey. 

Camping usually makes me want to cry and this trip was no different, however I have to give credit where it’s due and list the plus points of glamping versus regular camping.

1. Although we weren’t at the top of a hill, overlooking a lush, verdant valley, we did have a lot of space around us. You couldn’t really see anyone else and they couldn’t really see you. Thus we were able to caper around with unselfconscious vim. (You could hear other people - the forest resounded with the sound of strident, confident, middle class voices calling their children or the music coming from the large crowd of yoofs in the corner field but you couldn’t often see them.)
2. The tent is already put up, which cuts down on rows. You could stand up in our one, a bonus for when giving oneself a baby wipe shower.
3. The fires - the fire pit and the little stove we made tea on. I’m not as enthusiastic as Bear G the second about this but it was pleasant to sit around one of these with a glass of wine or cup of tea. No T.V, no P.C, no phone coverage, just the fire. 
   
4. Family Time. OK so this largely consisted of bonding over our shared disgust at the smell of the composting toilet BUT it was also time spent assembling halloumi kebabs and showing them the correct way to cut a pepper. On holiday they revelled in assisting us, fetching things and carrying logs, saying ‘Can I help’ or ‘I'll get it’. At home this ceased abruptly, it was nice while it lasted though….

Lovingly prepared kebabs

Am I now a convert to the whole camping thing? Not quite.

Swimming and the Body

One of the things that I love about swimming, particularly swimming in the sea, is that it is an activity which is not so much ‘how do I look doing this?’ as ‘Oh, I love this!’  If you’re someone who carries around a yoke of (probably mildly irrational) self consciousness with you, this is a very big deal. Not always imagining that constant, critical audience; ready to jeer at your every move. When swimming somewhere that’s not too crowded, looking out at the horizon, I cease worrying about how I look and merely focus on how I feel.

I’ve tried to evangelise about this down the pub; about not worrying how something makes you look - how sweaty you become or what it does to your hair, I’m sure I’ve sounded tiresomely bogus but I’m just trying to spread the good news. Swimming makes me feel marvellous; at one with the world and more at peace with myself, it could do the same for you! 

Marazion Beach

From a young age I waged war against my body; I cruelly seized bits of it between my fingers and wished it away, I pinched it and hurt it. I starved and berated it, ignored it and tried to pretend it wasn’t there and still it served me as all of our bodies do. My body served me well - carrying me around, healing wounds and nurturing the human beings who grew within it. Why are we taught to hate our bodies so much? To try and mould them into some kind of impossible faux Platonic ideal, when the goalposts keep moving anyway? When I was young the ‘fashionable’ body shape for women was a flat chested, half starved ‘waif’, at this moment it seems to be a cartoon, Jessica Rabbit, hourglass figure.
I read somewhere that wanting to lose weight was very rarely about wanting to be thinner, it was about being acceptable to other people. And that is probably true of anything we want to change about our appearance - the wish to be acceptable to others - that invisible audience again.  At the heart of this is wanting to be lovable. 

I recently entered a micro story competition, the challenge was to write a 100 word story based on a picture. The picture was of a lighthouse, with the sun setting on the sea. It was a peaceful image filled with soothing colours. The sea was calm and still. I tried to banish the prosaic reality of the function of a lighthouse being to warn sailors away from the rocky shore and write about swimming instead! The image reminded me of an evening swim I’d had at Marazion Beach in Cornwall, near St. Michael’s Mount. The water had been wonderfully cool and silky - not bracingly cold and I’d managed to get to that happy state of Zen-like contentment. We were all sticky from our visit to a tropical garden that day and a swim was a perfect way to end the day. 

Light on the Water

Nowhere to park in the whole of Southport. Trapped like wasps in our hot car. We get to the rocky beach at five and unpeel ourselves from sticky clothes. I wrestle with the shame of my bulging outline. 

Picking over the painful pebbles we run into the sea. I plough through the oily shallows; gentle waves tugging playfully.  The kids splash behind me and I pretend we're a family of seals. 

Cool water. I send a silent prayer to my body - I’ve been so busy absorbing the disapproval of others that I’ve forgotten to appreciate the pleasure it can bring.

I didn’t win the competition - maybe mine’s not a story at all and more of a poem or a vignette but I enjoyed writing it and I’m grateful to it for reminding me of how much I love swimming!

First attempt at capturing the scene in pencils