Bring out your tent pegs and poles: camping is back

It was at this point the car battery ran out, and the wind started to pick up.

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Two hours later, working in a gale and total darkness, occasionally shouting at Jocasta to bring me an octopus strap or some gaffer tape, I had created a ramshackle affair, leaning precariously to one side, while missing most of its tent pegs, and being positioned atop every single rock in the Great Dividing Range.

With a flourish of triumph, I finally indicated the doorway to Jocasta. She approached warily. “An inadequate erection,” she muttered, “no doubt the first of many.”

Somehow our relationship survived. Later, we teamed up with friends to buy a block of land on which we could go camping most weekends. I bought my own tent and even learned how to put the thing up.

I purchased a car with a battery that worked. A few years later, a child arrived. Some months on, we decided that mid-winter would be the perfect time to go camping.

This was the occasion of my second inadequate erection.

I don’t know if you’ve ever been in a tent when it has collapsed under the pressure of heavy snow and high winds, but if you want to savour the full horror of the experience, do make sure you have an eight-month-old baby in there with you.

The baby was crying, Jocasta was crouched over the child, trying to hold up the tent with her braced back so the wet canvas wouldn’t smother him, while I tried to get out the door to achieve a repair.

Alas, when a tent collapses, what you assume is the door is actually the window, and the real door is somehow under the baby.

Oh, and you have bare feet, so once you finally escape the tent, you are hopping from foot to foot in the snow, trying to heave the tent poles upright, while attempting to ignore the sounds of howling wind, howling baby and your own pathetic whimpering.

Somehow both my feet and our relationship survived. Then a second child arrived.

As the children grew older, they loved the romance of cooking on an outdoor fire. Again, this is best experienced in mid-winter, when the southern wind comes whipping over the ridge. If you build up the fire to the required level, you can achieve a situation in which your front side develops third-degree burns while your back half freezes with hypothermia.

You then start cooking. This involves throwing food in the general direction of the flames, at which point it will incinerate as if in a nuclear explosion.

The resulting meal is then consumed in a gale-force wind, while perched on a log, the smoke miraculously heading towards the exact point at which you’d decided to sit.

“Just delicious”, we’d all say with reality-defying sincerity, as we chewed through the various sections of charred corpse.

What’s strange is that I find myself smiling with misty nostalgia when I think about these weekends under canvas, even though – at the time – I wondered quite what we were doing.

I must speak to Jocasta and the boys. Come Monday, maybe we could give it another go.

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