Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
you has clearly decided to stop fighting the elements and just give up on personal hygiene
and sartorial basics takes some doing, but is thoroughly worth the effort because everyone on
a campsite is smug about something. The retired couples are smug about their massive cara-
vans and satellite dishes so they can watch
Countdown
from the South-West coast of France,
the surfers are smug just carrying a board around the place with their wetsuits unbuttoned to
their waist, the youth are smug about being young, and it goes on. Camping, caravanning,
motor-homing is big business and the level of equipment and technology is staggering. On
the night we arrived, while I struggled to prevent our caravan from falling off the precipice, a
man opposite was manoeuvring his monster of a caravan with a remote control! He looked at
me when he'd finished: I was covered in sweat, my trousers covered in grease, my Fred Perry
shirt still stoically done up to the top and he with not a mark on him, just a patronising smirk
on his very slappable face.
'It's still only a caravan, mate,' I muttered under my breath.
There's a limit to how many twenty-something skateboarders, white blokes with dreadlocks,
youths pretending that baguettes are an amusing male-genital doppelganger, screaming kids,
days with sand in your pants discomfort, hurricane winds and nights sleeping at an angle near
a cliff top that I can put up with, and Natalie caught me snorting in derision as the tallest,
blondest, fittest family I had ever seen erected the world's most complicated tent in just under
two minutes.
'Isn't it tiring being you?' she asked.
And despite my obvious discomfort on the fraught journey back she was already planning
the following year's camping trip. Already she had invited her parents and her sister, her
brother-in-law and their children to spend time with 'us' at very same campsite.
'But who'll look after the animals if your parents are with us?' I asked. We had roped in
Natalie's mum and dad to mind the menagerie whilst we were away and so I sensed an op-
portunity.
'Oh,' she replied, 'I hadn't thought of that.'
'I'll do it...' I ventured innocently.
'You mean you'd stay at home while we go camping, Daddy?' Samuel asked.
'Well, I don't see any option if we can't find someone to look after the house and animals,' I
replied, pretending to be dejected at the thought.
'OK,' he said. Oh.
