A guide on how not to do cheap holidays under canvas
When Love Is In Tents
Kids, camping and copulation is a recipe for trouble
‘Give it to me Sheldon.’
I don’t know why Billy Crystal popped into my head from that scene in When Harry Met Sally, but he did.
Even the most tranquil of starlit nights can be suddenly thrown into stark relief by the sound of fucking in an adjacent tent.
But this is a family camp site!– well, allegedly. Fortunately, my two girls, then 12 and eight, are in their usual deathly comas in their own tent.
Without a 9/11 scale event they are going to sleep through this.
My boy, just four, is a different story and is suddenly bolt upright and ramrod straight.
‘Dad, dad! Wh..what’s that?Are there animals fighting?…… I’m scared.’
Pause
‘Is it squirrels!?’
‘No love, it’s not squirrels, let’s get you back to sleep. They’ll stop fighting soon.’
But Harry and Sally have other ideas. He’s yelling, she’s howling (it’s a gender thing). She’s moaning, he’s shouting.
The louder they get, the quieter the hush in the field.
Is everyone listening to this? Maybe everyone wants to listen to this?
It’s like a Quaker picnic out there. But these two are oblivious and loud. Loud as can be, but even their noxious noises can’t drown out the sound of my blood boiling.
I can either disembowel them in the morning with a spare tent peg (if I had packed one) or drub them both to death with a mallet.
But then I remember: this isn’t just any old campsite, this is an Osho community which, in the need to drum up some business, has diversified from dynamic meditation, free love and hollerin’ at thy neighbour into family-friendly fun.
Harry and Sally clearly didn’t get the memo. My blood pressure begins to cool and my fury begins to elide into a stony resignation, if not acceptance.
I decide to ride it out (you know what I mean), drumming my fingers until, a few peaks and valleys later, it’s finally all over.
It has given me time to think, to understand how we had landed here, in the middle of rural Dorset, England, and why it isn’t my best decision, rather one born of desperation.
While I was living and working in London, my daughters were four hours west in Devon, my son with his mum just two hours west of London.
This seems like a sensible plan, the Osho community being not far from my boy. Although no sannyasin, I have lived in community before and it doesn’t faze me.
But clearly, in my desperation to corral my three kids and have time together within our complex nexus, I have screwed up.
Every time I see a bewildered single father — and I mean those who only see their kids at weekends — sitting in a café at seven in the morning with his two bored offspring, I recall why I made some of the decisions I did.
We men may look like unflappable stalwarts, but in truth many of us are drowning in the yawning weekend hours after the kids spring out of bed for a dawn frolic.
As day breaks and one eye opens — this is 212 minutes later — recent events seep in, as if I have been on a night’s drinking, the full ugliness of my behaviour appearing, mercifully, only in chapters.
Except it’s not my behaviour, it is someone else’s. And at that time, I haven’t had a drink in 14 years; now 30 and climbing.
I want to cosh them with a piece of my more serious writing, but when I see them at breakfast — him dopey with hair sticking up, her smeared in mascara with labels inside out — I just can’t get the words out. In any form.
‘Morning!’
Long pause.
‘Morning!’ I try not to splutter.
I am angry and I need to express; I need to cathart. I need to listen to Oasis playing Fucking In The Bushes. It’s the only thing to do.
My other revelation is this: I’m no camper. My attempt at its dark arts always borne of impecunity.
My camping lexicon is brief: tent pole, tent flap, mallet and, of course, tent. My love language is a little more sophisticated, and although I can suddenly see where they can overlap, wonder about the merits of combining the two.
I recall two incidents from early adventures under canvas, both while at school in the scout troupe which, perhaps uniquely and happily, incorporated girls.
In the fiercely cold Black Mountains in Wales, I awoke freezing on some rocky outcrop OUTSIDE of the tent, the mystery of which remains a tale passed from generation to generation in school legend.
On the second occasion, after getting lost in the fog on Dartmoor while listening to the eerie psychedelics in Pink Floyd’s Echoes on the radio, I burned my hand with boiling oil while cooking sausages.
But there were always the girls, the tent-to-tent midnight runs, the illicit excitement of it all and the inevitable sticky fumblings, wide and innocent grins the next day during morning prayers.
It really should all end here at Osho, where I ought to sign a no-camping declaration, a treaty drawn in unstoppable Cyrillic and witnessed by all three kids.
For despite missing the earlier melee, they are clearly not happy with the oddballs, sex addicts and trauma victims that seem to cluster in Osho communities like dirt on a skirting board.
I appear to have a peculiar myopia when it comes to both camping and communities.
My son, his mother and I had gone to a community camping event just six weeks after her caesarean operation.
And so, foolishly, I press on and next time up both ante and stress levels, bringing along a new girlfriend, daughters but no son.
The disaster that ensues is another long story, suffice to say that my daughters’ honest clamour for their father’s attentions stoops to blatant skulduggery.
This happens with several would-be partners who are forced both to run a gauntlet and walk a gangplank.
Hair is pulled from the back seat of cars, accents are mocked, and the destiny of Debbie’s walking stick (she has M.S) is never discovered, my yew carved replacement utterly rejected.
It is only years later while walking across Spain on The Camino (see below) that my camping adventures are put into perspective.
High on the meseta, my fellow walkers bring me fragments of a story about a doctor who is carrying his wife from Germany in penance for a series of affairs.
Finally, I see a picture of a wiry man pulling an enormous woman in a red-and-white striped cart. He is harnessed like a dray horse.
Suddenly, this bloated Bathsheba — for reasons I haven’t yet fully fathomed — allows me to let go.
It is easier now my children are 29,25, and 21. But I am left with a single ambition.
I will never camp again.
© simon heathcote
