We were staying in Cornwall at the Third Best Family Campsite in Britain, don't you know, and it was packed to the rafters with - strangely - people from Liverpool. Nothing wrong with that, just a little dislocating. In fact, it was like a suburb from Liverpool had been transported to a few coastal fields, except that in this neighbourhood, the walls were paper-thin and the dwellings contained no running water or loos.
Given that the Eurotents had televisions with a DVD channel, it meant that visions of lying under canvas listening to the hooting of owls and the crashing of waves on the shore quickly evapourated and were replaced by seven nights lying in bed listening to Avatar and Doc Martin being blasted out in unison via some sort of make-shift, 4-directional, tinny-TV-speaker-generated, surround sound system.
The only other snags were the rapid realisation that:
- I'd forgotten to buy a towelling dressing gown which I could wear not only in the mornings, but also in the tent at any other time of the day when I felt a bit cold
- I don't smoke fags
- I don't have an obese three year old whom I ply with large bags of Monster Munch and icecreams smothered in hundreds-and-thousands and chocolate flakes sticking out at jaunty angles
- Our tent was on top of a hill and a good 200 metres away from the loo and shower block at the bottom of the hill
- It rained. A lot.
- The boys loved it, and made great friends with boys in the tent next door
- I reconnected with the joys of snuggling up in a sleeping bag
- I discovered I quite like corned beef hash
- Sitting on the beach surrounded by scantily clad, ridiculously fat people does wonders for one's own self esteem
- And we did get back to nature a little bit ... the night a mole decided to burrow under our tent
