As regular readers will know, after being bullied in my job and then kicked out of it, so facing having my house repossessed and now battling with lying buyers, I have been under a lot of mental stress. Each week I have to keep up a front so that I can apply for the required three jobs for week that the job centre asks for and then attend the interviews I am called to. I have had 9 interviews in the last 8 weeks, but seem incapable of saying what they want me to say. Of course, the approaches in each interview are different and there are a range of candidates, but clearly I am doing something wrong as these are all jobs I could walk into and start doing tomorrow. I imagine there has been some shift in the fashion of what is required for interviews that I have not caught on to. I have noticed that no-one wants PowerPoint presentations any more whereas just two years ago they were de rigeur for interviews. I was rejected from a job in 2003 simply because I did not use PowerPoint and at one in 2010 I was not allowed to proceed to the interview as it was felt my 15-minute PowerPoint presentation was 'not blue sky enough', so I am glad that fashion has passed, finally.
In such circumstances, I now start the day with a panic attack. Sometimes this is caused by having had a nightmare, something which is pretty common for me, sometimes with two nightmares in a single night. The variety is diverse with me finding myself in the First World War, being chased by zombies or mutants or slowly torturing my brother over a fire in my grandparents' living room of the 1970s. There is no point lying in bed once I have awoken as instead of these vividly realised fears I get nameless, shapeless ones. Sometimes this is difficult as I need to sleep longer. Tiredness simply feeds the concerns. I volunteered to work on a sustainable farm for a week, but turning hay exposed me to Farmer's Lung and swept me with a range of mental symptoms which are apparently among what the illness, caused by spores in the hay can provoke. My mind was literally numbed and I found myself staring into space with my mouth hanging open, then I was swept with complete paranoia which was topped off by me hallucinating that the trees around the field were unwinding like snakes and then walking towards me. So much for 'trying to get away from it all'.
Trying to keep myself in bed a little longer led to Somer. It is pronounced 'summer', rather than 'sommer'. The name came from somewhere in my mind and it certainly would not be the one I would have used if I was writing a story. I wondered if it simply derived from 'somewhere', something like Ecalpemos, i.e. 'Someplace' reversed, as used in 'A Fatal Inversion' by Barbara Vine [Ruth Rendell] (1987) or even Somerton which I have recently read is a place in Jamaica. I had tried to meditate and to focus on a single point or a rosebud, the kinds of things they advise in meditation classes. However, my mind likes greater complexity and once I slip off the single point it goes down the path of worry once more. I used to envisage the wargames I was playing and plot what I would do next. I think one difficulty is that with all the problems I have had with the Steam system, finding that old games cannot run on my new computer and not being able to afford subscription to 'World of Warcraft' any longer, it is very difficult to find something that I can lose myself in. I tried 'Crusader Kings' but one decision can lead to your kingdom being obliterated without you being able to fight back in a way you could with something from the 'Total War' range. I have written to Sega about the bug in 'Napoleon Total War' which means it crashes whenever an attack starts, but never received a response.
Back to Somer, and in my mind it is a place. It is an imaginary town. When I need to escape from stresses I go into it and think of a new building as if I was building something in 'Sim City' but seeing it from street level and for real. At the moment, there do not seem to be any people in it when I envisage it, but simply working on the architecture does wonders for calming me down. I had anticipated that it would be French in feel given all the days I have enjoyed on holidays in French towns, but for now it appears to be very English. The first structure that appeared, and it is not always me deciding what comes next, it often simply appears from my mind like the name, was the lighthouse in the South centre of the town; I have a feeling that the sea is South of that. This was clearly shaped by Southwold in Suffolk which I visited once for a wedding. Then appeared a book shop to the South-West of the town, based it seems on the music shop that used to be in Holywell Street in Oxford, though I do not know it is still there. Another refugee from Oxford appears to be a cinema, its setting is from Great Clarendon Street but the building itself seems to be more like the cinema, the Curzon Mayfair, compressed a bit. There is a park in the North-East part of Somer, which is quite small and has a sandstone rock sprouting out of it with a spiral path up the side to a viewing platform, though I have never climbed it. It reminds me of the outskirts of Freiburg-am-Breisgau and something I saw in the drama set in Edinburgh, 'Reichenbach Falls' (2007) in a park where a spring comes out. To the East of this was another bookshop which appears to have come from Westbourne in Dorset.
I have tried to envisage some restaurants and so far have produced only one, on a curved street close to this bookshop, it is Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's restaurant the Axminster Canteen in Axminster, West Dorset, but thrust into a street from Swanage in East Dorset. South of this is a small square with a cafe to the East side and a memorial in the middle; it is cobbled but I cannot place it. I think it is from France, perhaps using elements of the square in St. Omer but being more cramped than that one is. I guess Somer is developing from places I have been happy in or think I might be, as I have never visited Axminster and whilst I have been to Edinburgh, never went to the park shown.
Much of the town remains unfilled in and as yet has no residences that I might go to 'live' in. I have insisted that my mind puts in specific buildings and locations, such as the square in Bath where they play petanque, but it seems I cannot force things into the structure, they do not remain there when I revisit Somer. I guess I have to walk around and 'explore', though at present I simply tend to 'appear' outside one building; only able to face in one direction and see it becoming more detailed. I have read at least one science fiction story in which men's minds slip into an imagined city. I do wonder if this is doing me harm or exposing that I am suffering from some serious mental condition. However, for the moment it seems to be working and at least allows me to lie in bed that little bit longer without feeling drowned by all the worries pressing on me.
P.P. 05/08/2012
After finding for some nights that I could not call up any images into my mind's eye and even when I tried to think of Somer there were large gates blocking my 'entrance' back into the town, I found that finally I could begin to 'construct' more of it. My mind ran me through a host of new buildings and locations that it felt should be present. To the West, beyond the bookshop, appeared a large chunk of University Parks from Oxford. I imagine a lot of people quite like these. They have an interesting mix of sports fields and pleasant walks going down to the small River Cherwell. Interestingly, I did not envisage cricket being played here, there is another location for that right over on the East side, it is modelled on the ground at a small village near Thame in Oxfordshire. There used to be a railway running passed the village and you enter it through the remains of the railway bridge; the top piece has been removed so it is like passing through a gateway. The railway embankment cuts the village off from the busy road. I remember cycling through there and seeing a cricket match taking place as if it had come from some 1930s novel.
I have brought a chunk of the Cherwell into Somer, but North of the park it turns into the River Itchen which runs through Winchester in Hampshire and sitting on it, far closer than they do in real life are 'The Tun' and 'The Willow Tree' pubs; the former is now a Spanish restaurant but in Somer it retains the pub it was back in the mid-2000s. The small square to the East of the town has acquired a favourite restaurant of mine, 'Oscar's' from Leamington Spa, a French restaurant which is the closest I have found any restaurant in Britain to be to numerous small town restaurants in France that I encountered while cycling. If it still exists I recommend going there.
Just to the North-West of the square is the odd park which brought in elements of Freiburg-am-Breisgau and then suddenly acquired a tall, slender round tower, a bit like a Europeanised version of a minaret and I have no idea where that came from. The square which has opened out to the East of this park, however is more familiar it has been lifted with the market place clock tower, the Beffroi from Amiens. Between this and the park has appeared a place from a dream that I remember years after I had it. It is a branch of Woolworths, the lamented store that used to be in every British high street. This one has an added element, two cylindrical funicular railways, going up from the shop floor to the top of the park's rocky outcrop. The branch of Woolworths seemed to be a mix of the one in Guildford, Surrey, and I think the one in Hayes in Middlesex, that I visited as a boy.
So Somer continues to grow and I wish I was an artist so that I could capture its wonderful eclectic growth. It seems to be doing its job. However, my mind got so busy with this latest round of construction that I found I could not get to sleep. It now has two residents, though so far both of them were facets of me. The first was me as the puppeteer from 'Masquerade' by Kit Williams (1979) which seemed rather appropriate, but then I stepped out of him to become more myself, dressed in my 18th century brocade suit over a loose white shirt and wearing my favourite ski-hook knee-high laced boots. I suppose I have always had fun when dressed like that. I do hope other people start appearing in the rather empty streets of Somer soon.
P.P. 07/10/2012
By chance I came across an article that mentioned the Japanese book about a man whose consciousness ultimately becomes drawn into a constructed city. It is 'Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World' by Haruki Murakami (1985); the English translation came out in 1991. I read it in hard back version that I bought from a remaindered bookshop so it must have been pretty new to the UK when I read it, though I was not aware of that because I picked up on the 1980s feel to the story. The book has a whole Wikipedia webpage about it. Whilst I would not recommend it as an enjoyable read, it is certainly a book which can trigger off some thoughts. Perhaps my unease with it comes from it taking a Japanese rather than Western perspective so making it harder for me to engage with. Maybe I read it when I was too young, though saying that I think I am a lot less experimental in what I read than I was at the time, twenty years ago.
Showing posts with label Swanage. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Swanage. Show all posts
Tuesday, 31 July 2012
Wednesday, 1 September 2010
Camping in the 'Me First' Era
In many ways I am a middle class person. My parents were certainly middle class, having risen from the skilled working class through study and hard work. I did not go to private school, but I went on foreign holidays through my childhood and attended university at a time when probably a seventh as many people did as do these days. My parents were certainly not wealthy middle class, they always drove a second-hand car and owned a black-and-white television when many neighbours had moved over to colour; most of their furniture was second hand and refurbished. They grew their own vegetables at a time when this was a predominantly working class activity, despite the popularity of the television series 'The Good Life' (1975-8) [about a couple trying to live a self-sufficient life in suburban Surbiton] and certainly not filling the prime time television programmes and bookshelves that it does today. Despite being a graduate, through bad luck, bullying landlords and bad judgement over buying a flat, my income is far lower than my parents' equivalent was back thirty years when they were my current age. Being made redundant twice in twelve months has not helped this, especially at a time when we are rushing headlong into a even more unpleasant remake of the 1980s.
I have always subscribed to E.P. Thompson's view that social class is not a structural thing but a relative thing. We define our class by comparing ourselves to our 'referents', the people we think we are like, those we want to be and those we want to avoid becoming. I do have middle class aspirations: that I can replace the things that wear out, that I can own a car newer than 15 years' old and especially that I can continue to have the foreign holidays that I had in my youth, but none of these things seem likely. According to 'The Guardian' the middle class is dying, though the attributes that the newspaper sees as being the defining ones for that class are well above anything I could aspire to, let alone possess. Maybe I misplace myself, I am just bumping along certainly in the lower middle class (though eschewing the aggression and chauvinism still associated with such people) and in terms of income, worse of than many working class people. Of course, skills these days are very different and are as much about computers as using a lathe. In addition, we have 'labouring in a suit' or 'machine minding at a desk', in other words a lot of jobs look middle class but in fact are just the modern version of factory work; most notably in call centres. Of course, even in revolutions, a class does not disappear as a mass, it is made up of the failure of family-by-family, individual-by-individual as we each lose the fight to retain what we need, let alone what we want under economic policies which seem to be charging headlong in destroying huge swathes of economic activity in the UK just because it is felt by Cameron and his henchpeople that Thatcher did not impose monetarism hard enough for the good of the wealthy.
Anyway, this is the socio-economic context of now. What is interesting is how in the past decade at a time when we were all supposed to be becoming middle class and leaving working class jobs to migrants, the middle class may have lost some of its traditional attributes, but has also absorbed much of what was once the preserve of poorer people. The classic examples have often been commented upon: football and large families. Large families were once the reserve of rural people and the poorest in cities and yet since the 1990s it has been the sub/urban middle class that has started having the large families and 'family' has become a middle class hobby in a way it was not, say, in the 1970s, when private schools and nannies/au pairs were there to deal with the children while middle class adults went on foreign holidays, to cocktail parties and 'wife' swapped. There has been so much said on the gentrification of football spectating that I will leave it to others.
In 2010, we encounter another example of middle class absorbtion of working class culture. I am not the first to notice it, all I am doing here is highlighting my personal experience of it. As you will have guessed from the title the 'in' holiday this year is not to go to a Tuscan villa or a small Greek island, but to camp in the UK. Of course, there has always been the 'nerdy' strand of the British middle class, quite often teachers and civil servants (and their conscripted children), who have been the backbone of camping (in the UK this means staying in tents) and caravanning. However, their ranks, this year, have been swelled by a much broader slice of the British middle class and this is where a lot of the problems are beginning to appear and this stems from a clash of ideologies.
Having laid the background at length, I will explain how I ended up camping. Like many young British people I experienced camping predominantly as an adjunct to attending festivals (ironically never in the UK) and in the back garden. I did have friends whose parents were of the 'nerd' middle class who camped as well and my parents experimented with one year of using a tent and one year of using a caravan before settling on renting holiday houses instead. When I used to cycle on holiday I had enough cash that I stayed in youth hostels rather than camped. Given how I would struggle with my panniers, I imagine my holidays would have been even more constrained if I had had to lug a tent around as well. So, that is my personal background with camping, not overly experienced, but not a total beginner either. The woman who lives in my house, is extremely experienced in camping on two continents and the 8-year old who shares our house, had camped in a rear garden but was certainly up for a proper camping experience.
One reason for picking camping is because it is cheap. We had managed to get a tent to accommodate us for £35 in a sale and had picked up odd items throughout the year, at a price far less than the travel insurance for just one of us would be if we had flown abroad let alone an aeroplane ticket. The campsite space cost us only £15 per night, about the same as we would spend for burgers for all three of us. We had inflatable beds, but no luxury sleeping bags (we took bedding from our beds, pretty necessary to have a lot of it, plus thick socks and jumpers as the woman in my house knows from experience in a British summer it can become bitterly cold at night) and the most high-tech piece of equipment was a wind-up torch and radio. We drove for an hour to reach our campsite in Dorset. The one we had intended to visit (which you could not book ahead at) was full and the next one could not accommodate our 3-person tent. The third site, however, one of four new ones in the area, could fit us just precisely for the period we wanted. Despite battling the wind while putting the tent up, we got it all sorted and felt immediately to be on holiday.
The camp site is attached to a working farm and it certainly appears that for some little investment a farmer can kit out some fields and then have a solid revenue through the summer. I think the field of possibly 100 tents probably, even at the rates, we were paying brings in far than a herd of sheep or cows on the same plot. What was striking was that we so soon felt on holiday. I realised that having had four days of diarrhoea in Bath and two stressful days in Belgium in the past five years was an insufficient quota of holiday for a properly healthy life.
The other thing which struck me immediately, though I do not know why I forgot it, given my sensibilities, especially seeing it has been discussed by the commentators of the new middle class enthusiasm for camping, was the communal nature of the activity. I suppose it is more the surprise for Britons, used to keeping behind closed doors and only interacting with our neighbours when they do something 'wrong'. However, on a camp site, you cannot avoid having to collaborate with the society around you. Even on the best equipped you have to share the communal facilities. I know many caravans have their own showers and toilets but they still have to come out to replenish water supplies, and certainly anyone in a tent has to go and use the communal toilets, showers and dish-washing facilities. You have to take your rubbish to central points and these days sift the recycling. No-one seemed to be needed to regulate these activities. People waited patiently to take their turn with the each particular facility, not elbowing in. There was sharing of washing up liquid, scrubbing sponges and anything else others seemed to have forgot. Perhaps simply not having so much of everything was in itself healthy. It was incredibly easy to slip into this manner of behaviour and I found it incredibly relaxing, though in fact, having to walk 5 minutes to urinate should have made it tiresome.
Unsurprisingly there were an immense number of children in the camp. That may have been a facet of the particular site which had facilities appealing to children. The first one we had visited had more teenaged people and the second one seemed almost purely adults. Camping for children will always be a challenge. There is the excitement of doing something different, going on an adventure, but there is also a lot of sacrifice. In one big leap they are suddenly cut off from their television programmes (though most caravans seem to have television aerials) and their games consoles (bar the odd Nintendo DS or other hand-held), their own beds with most of their soft toys, the place where they usually wash in favour of one with tens of strangers in it, food cooked in an unusal way and probably tasting pretty different, and generally new smells and noises. However, bar a few tears, usually from people not taking turns properly in the games or children falling over, there did not seem to be despair. I could imagine teenagers being less impressed which may explain why most of the children there were younger than 13. Certainly for the one child in our party it was an excellent adventure and he seems to have come back seeing the experience camping as different, but not less than the delights at home, and perhaps, more appreciative of those things. Not a bad lesson in this age of consumerism.
What was striking at the camp site was the autonomy the children had. They were running around playing everywhere, conscious of cars coming in and out and often warned about knocking over barbecues with their balls, but there was not that every-second concern that they were going to be abducted or injured. This created a far more relaxed attitude compared to the usual attitude of mewing up children in suburbs. I assume it does not work all the time, but it did while we were there. Conversely, children are also set to work. They tend to dominate the washing-up facilities in the evening and even primary school children are sent to accompany even younger siblings to the toilet and especially to fetch water. I am not saying that we should try to get children to ape what their counterparts in the Third World would do nor go as far as my parents did in assigning chores that filled the weekend, but there seemed to be benefit in having children do these little jobs. I suppose it is the 'all mucking in' attitude that has been commented on in the newspapers, in force. Certainly it restored the woman who lives in my house's faith in humanity to the extent she now wants to go and live in a commune.
When you are living day-by-day with 'walls' as thick as your fingernail, privacy and respect for those around you becomes vital. You see this in shanty towns and refugee camps. Whilst it is good to live communally, you also need to be able to absent yourself from it and not have the voice of your neighbour intruding into your conversation and similarly not to think everyone can hear your discussions. Thus, in line with camp site rules (well, more guidelines, we later found out), people had spaced themselves out properly, leaving 6 metres between tents. There were a lot of people there, possibly something over 400, but it did not feel crowded or oppressive. It worked through 'unwritten' rules and the fact that if some was asked to be a little quieter they did not take offence or turn aggressive, they seemed to know that if they were upsetting people it would put a chink in the dam and the structure they presumably were enjoying could crumble. It was no idyll, but it worked better than society does in most streets I have lived in (the current one is an unusual exception).
Of course, as anyone who has been a regular follower of my blog, something always goes wrong very soon into my holidays and this one was no exception. We spent a wonderful day away from the camp site in the town of Swanage which is as much of a time warp place as any I have been to. It seems stuck not in the Victorian era but something like the mid-1960s. There are some modern eateries and we had some really excellent sea food at a very unassuming cafe, but a lot of architecture and things like dedicated toyshops seem to date from when I was born. It only has a steam railway (diesel in the evening) running into it so I suppose that adds to the feel. Families fish by unwinding fishing line sitting on the hard and there is a punch and judy show on the beach assisted by a PA system.
Arriving back from a day in Swanage and seeking to have a doze before firing up the barbecue for dinner we found that four families had moved right into our area. Rather than the six metres between our tent and theirs, there was less than 10cm. They had a wide assortment of tents, two of which could have housed our one inside it three or four times over. I have no problem with large tents, in the 1970s they all used to be heavy metal framed ones with plastic windows and always high enough to stand up in. The more pod-like strutures of the 1990s are still the norm, but now have grown so the average adult can stand erect within them. Some now have an atrium with wings off it; one looked like a chapel. I imagine these appeal to the new category of middle class campers wanting to bring as much of home to the camp site as they can. I have no problems with that as long as it is not erected, rather than parallel to the already pitched tents but at an angle which leaves the residents bare centimetres from where my head is going to lie. I could hear them more clearly than the child in the other part of our tent. These people seemed to have no understanding of what they had done wrong, they seemed to think that because their door faced in a different direction to ours that was fine. However, they clearly had not paid attention to the numerous signs about spacing nor the pattern that every other tent in the field was laid out along. The woman from my house was bitter and complained quietly too them. One offered a bottle of wine as recompense, the others still did not seem to understand what the problem was.
The camp site authority came and like us, realised that with their four main tents and their smaller storage tents around already they could not be compelled to take them down and re-align. The regulations plastered on numerous signs were revealed to be only 'guidelines' anticipating expected EU legislation.
There was no option but for us to leave which we did in record time, feeling that all that we had enjoyed about the mutual respect had been violated by people who could not see anywhere beyond their own wishes and certainly had none of the communal spirit everyone else seemed to operate by. I swore at them as we left, because though I had not wanted to let my temper show, I realised that I had to do something to at least raise some attention that they had upset us. It seemed to beyond their comprehension that they had done anything wrong that I despaired that they would understand. It is painful for me that these people probably no doubt the children of very selfish parents, cannot even recognise when they have upset others and broken the rules which made the site such a nice place to be. I suppose it is unsurprising. I see it every time I go driving. No-one signals, they drive around dangerously and park carelessly because their own concern is their own ease. There is no recognition that when you drive or camp or simply live in a town you impinge on others whose rights (though they fail to even comprehend this) are as legitimate as yours.
Given that the current political culture based on the creed of a woman (Margaret Thatcher) who said (to 'Women's Own' magazine in 1987): '...you know, there's no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families. And no government can do anything except through people, and people must look after themselves first. It is our duty to look after ourselves and then, also, to look after our neighbours.' It is ironic she mentions looking after neighbours, because I think that aspect has been left behind too. The horizon of far too many people in British people is only 'there are individual men and women and there are families'. Yes, you see that on camp sites, everyone in their own tent or caravan but they are still inter-linked we cannot live in isolation, The trouble is that too many take the 'people must look after themselves first' and see that as the justification for not taking any consideration of not only the needs of others but simply how their own behaviour impinges on the human and physical environment around them.
In the space of a couple of days I saw the best and the worst of British society. I had found an oasis of respect for others and the benefits of communal living and yet it could not keep out the pig-headed inability to comprehend that other people have a right to enjoy facilities too and that means you have to sacrifice a little, just a little of your desires, and think before you act rather than assuming everyone you do, however inattentive it is, is perfectly fine because it gives you the outcome you want. I hope that next year the selfish middle class move on from camping to some other activity, possibly even one they have not comandeered from other sectors of society to distort to their own tastes and then contaminate with their self-centred perspectives on things. For myself, realising that I am too unfit to return to cycling, have my eye on hiring a canal boat, but please do not tell the middle class idiots, I want at least one holiday per decade that selfish morons do not stamp all over.
I have always subscribed to E.P. Thompson's view that social class is not a structural thing but a relative thing. We define our class by comparing ourselves to our 'referents', the people we think we are like, those we want to be and those we want to avoid becoming. I do have middle class aspirations: that I can replace the things that wear out, that I can own a car newer than 15 years' old and especially that I can continue to have the foreign holidays that I had in my youth, but none of these things seem likely. According to 'The Guardian' the middle class is dying, though the attributes that the newspaper sees as being the defining ones for that class are well above anything I could aspire to, let alone possess. Maybe I misplace myself, I am just bumping along certainly in the lower middle class (though eschewing the aggression and chauvinism still associated with such people) and in terms of income, worse of than many working class people. Of course, skills these days are very different and are as much about computers as using a lathe. In addition, we have 'labouring in a suit' or 'machine minding at a desk', in other words a lot of jobs look middle class but in fact are just the modern version of factory work; most notably in call centres. Of course, even in revolutions, a class does not disappear as a mass, it is made up of the failure of family-by-family, individual-by-individual as we each lose the fight to retain what we need, let alone what we want under economic policies which seem to be charging headlong in destroying huge swathes of economic activity in the UK just because it is felt by Cameron and his henchpeople that Thatcher did not impose monetarism hard enough for the good of the wealthy.
Anyway, this is the socio-economic context of now. What is interesting is how in the past decade at a time when we were all supposed to be becoming middle class and leaving working class jobs to migrants, the middle class may have lost some of its traditional attributes, but has also absorbed much of what was once the preserve of poorer people. The classic examples have often been commented upon: football and large families. Large families were once the reserve of rural people and the poorest in cities and yet since the 1990s it has been the sub/urban middle class that has started having the large families and 'family' has become a middle class hobby in a way it was not, say, in the 1970s, when private schools and nannies/au pairs were there to deal with the children while middle class adults went on foreign holidays, to cocktail parties and 'wife' swapped. There has been so much said on the gentrification of football spectating that I will leave it to others.
In 2010, we encounter another example of middle class absorbtion of working class culture. I am not the first to notice it, all I am doing here is highlighting my personal experience of it. As you will have guessed from the title the 'in' holiday this year is not to go to a Tuscan villa or a small Greek island, but to camp in the UK. Of course, there has always been the 'nerdy' strand of the British middle class, quite often teachers and civil servants (and their conscripted children), who have been the backbone of camping (in the UK this means staying in tents) and caravanning. However, their ranks, this year, have been swelled by a much broader slice of the British middle class and this is where a lot of the problems are beginning to appear and this stems from a clash of ideologies.
Having laid the background at length, I will explain how I ended up camping. Like many young British people I experienced camping predominantly as an adjunct to attending festivals (ironically never in the UK) and in the back garden. I did have friends whose parents were of the 'nerd' middle class who camped as well and my parents experimented with one year of using a tent and one year of using a caravan before settling on renting holiday houses instead. When I used to cycle on holiday I had enough cash that I stayed in youth hostels rather than camped. Given how I would struggle with my panniers, I imagine my holidays would have been even more constrained if I had had to lug a tent around as well. So, that is my personal background with camping, not overly experienced, but not a total beginner either. The woman who lives in my house, is extremely experienced in camping on two continents and the 8-year old who shares our house, had camped in a rear garden but was certainly up for a proper camping experience.
One reason for picking camping is because it is cheap. We had managed to get a tent to accommodate us for £35 in a sale and had picked up odd items throughout the year, at a price far less than the travel insurance for just one of us would be if we had flown abroad let alone an aeroplane ticket. The campsite space cost us only £15 per night, about the same as we would spend for burgers for all three of us. We had inflatable beds, but no luxury sleeping bags (we took bedding from our beds, pretty necessary to have a lot of it, plus thick socks and jumpers as the woman in my house knows from experience in a British summer it can become bitterly cold at night) and the most high-tech piece of equipment was a wind-up torch and radio. We drove for an hour to reach our campsite in Dorset. The one we had intended to visit (which you could not book ahead at) was full and the next one could not accommodate our 3-person tent. The third site, however, one of four new ones in the area, could fit us just precisely for the period we wanted. Despite battling the wind while putting the tent up, we got it all sorted and felt immediately to be on holiday.
The camp site is attached to a working farm and it certainly appears that for some little investment a farmer can kit out some fields and then have a solid revenue through the summer. I think the field of possibly 100 tents probably, even at the rates, we were paying brings in far than a herd of sheep or cows on the same plot. What was striking was that we so soon felt on holiday. I realised that having had four days of diarrhoea in Bath and two stressful days in Belgium in the past five years was an insufficient quota of holiday for a properly healthy life.
The other thing which struck me immediately, though I do not know why I forgot it, given my sensibilities, especially seeing it has been discussed by the commentators of the new middle class enthusiasm for camping, was the communal nature of the activity. I suppose it is more the surprise for Britons, used to keeping behind closed doors and only interacting with our neighbours when they do something 'wrong'. However, on a camp site, you cannot avoid having to collaborate with the society around you. Even on the best equipped you have to share the communal facilities. I know many caravans have their own showers and toilets but they still have to come out to replenish water supplies, and certainly anyone in a tent has to go and use the communal toilets, showers and dish-washing facilities. You have to take your rubbish to central points and these days sift the recycling. No-one seemed to be needed to regulate these activities. People waited patiently to take their turn with the each particular facility, not elbowing in. There was sharing of washing up liquid, scrubbing sponges and anything else others seemed to have forgot. Perhaps simply not having so much of everything was in itself healthy. It was incredibly easy to slip into this manner of behaviour and I found it incredibly relaxing, though in fact, having to walk 5 minutes to urinate should have made it tiresome.
Unsurprisingly there were an immense number of children in the camp. That may have been a facet of the particular site which had facilities appealing to children. The first one we had visited had more teenaged people and the second one seemed almost purely adults. Camping for children will always be a challenge. There is the excitement of doing something different, going on an adventure, but there is also a lot of sacrifice. In one big leap they are suddenly cut off from their television programmes (though most caravans seem to have television aerials) and their games consoles (bar the odd Nintendo DS or other hand-held), their own beds with most of their soft toys, the place where they usually wash in favour of one with tens of strangers in it, food cooked in an unusal way and probably tasting pretty different, and generally new smells and noises. However, bar a few tears, usually from people not taking turns properly in the games or children falling over, there did not seem to be despair. I could imagine teenagers being less impressed which may explain why most of the children there were younger than 13. Certainly for the one child in our party it was an excellent adventure and he seems to have come back seeing the experience camping as different, but not less than the delights at home, and perhaps, more appreciative of those things. Not a bad lesson in this age of consumerism.
What was striking at the camp site was the autonomy the children had. They were running around playing everywhere, conscious of cars coming in and out and often warned about knocking over barbecues with their balls, but there was not that every-second concern that they were going to be abducted or injured. This created a far more relaxed attitude compared to the usual attitude of mewing up children in suburbs. I assume it does not work all the time, but it did while we were there. Conversely, children are also set to work. They tend to dominate the washing-up facilities in the evening and even primary school children are sent to accompany even younger siblings to the toilet and especially to fetch water. I am not saying that we should try to get children to ape what their counterparts in the Third World would do nor go as far as my parents did in assigning chores that filled the weekend, but there seemed to be benefit in having children do these little jobs. I suppose it is the 'all mucking in' attitude that has been commented on in the newspapers, in force. Certainly it restored the woman who lives in my house's faith in humanity to the extent she now wants to go and live in a commune.
When you are living day-by-day with 'walls' as thick as your fingernail, privacy and respect for those around you becomes vital. You see this in shanty towns and refugee camps. Whilst it is good to live communally, you also need to be able to absent yourself from it and not have the voice of your neighbour intruding into your conversation and similarly not to think everyone can hear your discussions. Thus, in line with camp site rules (well, more guidelines, we later found out), people had spaced themselves out properly, leaving 6 metres between tents. There were a lot of people there, possibly something over 400, but it did not feel crowded or oppressive. It worked through 'unwritten' rules and the fact that if some was asked to be a little quieter they did not take offence or turn aggressive, they seemed to know that if they were upsetting people it would put a chink in the dam and the structure they presumably were enjoying could crumble. It was no idyll, but it worked better than society does in most streets I have lived in (the current one is an unusual exception).
Of course, as anyone who has been a regular follower of my blog, something always goes wrong very soon into my holidays and this one was no exception. We spent a wonderful day away from the camp site in the town of Swanage which is as much of a time warp place as any I have been to. It seems stuck not in the Victorian era but something like the mid-1960s. There are some modern eateries and we had some really excellent sea food at a very unassuming cafe, but a lot of architecture and things like dedicated toyshops seem to date from when I was born. It only has a steam railway (diesel in the evening) running into it so I suppose that adds to the feel. Families fish by unwinding fishing line sitting on the hard and there is a punch and judy show on the beach assisted by a PA system.
Arriving back from a day in Swanage and seeking to have a doze before firing up the barbecue for dinner we found that four families had moved right into our area. Rather than the six metres between our tent and theirs, there was less than 10cm. They had a wide assortment of tents, two of which could have housed our one inside it three or four times over. I have no problem with large tents, in the 1970s they all used to be heavy metal framed ones with plastic windows and always high enough to stand up in. The more pod-like strutures of the 1990s are still the norm, but now have grown so the average adult can stand erect within them. Some now have an atrium with wings off it; one looked like a chapel. I imagine these appeal to the new category of middle class campers wanting to bring as much of home to the camp site as they can. I have no problems with that as long as it is not erected, rather than parallel to the already pitched tents but at an angle which leaves the residents bare centimetres from where my head is going to lie. I could hear them more clearly than the child in the other part of our tent. These people seemed to have no understanding of what they had done wrong, they seemed to think that because their door faced in a different direction to ours that was fine. However, they clearly had not paid attention to the numerous signs about spacing nor the pattern that every other tent in the field was laid out along. The woman from my house was bitter and complained quietly too them. One offered a bottle of wine as recompense, the others still did not seem to understand what the problem was.
The camp site authority came and like us, realised that with their four main tents and their smaller storage tents around already they could not be compelled to take them down and re-align. The regulations plastered on numerous signs were revealed to be only 'guidelines' anticipating expected EU legislation.
There was no option but for us to leave which we did in record time, feeling that all that we had enjoyed about the mutual respect had been violated by people who could not see anywhere beyond their own wishes and certainly had none of the communal spirit everyone else seemed to operate by. I swore at them as we left, because though I had not wanted to let my temper show, I realised that I had to do something to at least raise some attention that they had upset us. It seemed to beyond their comprehension that they had done anything wrong that I despaired that they would understand. It is painful for me that these people probably no doubt the children of very selfish parents, cannot even recognise when they have upset others and broken the rules which made the site such a nice place to be. I suppose it is unsurprising. I see it every time I go driving. No-one signals, they drive around dangerously and park carelessly because their own concern is their own ease. There is no recognition that when you drive or camp or simply live in a town you impinge on others whose rights (though they fail to even comprehend this) are as legitimate as yours.
Given that the current political culture based on the creed of a woman (Margaret Thatcher) who said (to 'Women's Own' magazine in 1987): '...you know, there's no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families. And no government can do anything except through people, and people must look after themselves first. It is our duty to look after ourselves and then, also, to look after our neighbours.' It is ironic she mentions looking after neighbours, because I think that aspect has been left behind too. The horizon of far too many people in British people is only 'there are individual men and women and there are families'. Yes, you see that on camp sites, everyone in their own tent or caravan but they are still inter-linked we cannot live in isolation, The trouble is that too many take the 'people must look after themselves first' and see that as the justification for not taking any consideration of not only the needs of others but simply how their own behaviour impinges on the human and physical environment around them.
In the space of a couple of days I saw the best and the worst of British society. I had found an oasis of respect for others and the benefits of communal living and yet it could not keep out the pig-headed inability to comprehend that other people have a right to enjoy facilities too and that means you have to sacrifice a little, just a little of your desires, and think before you act rather than assuming everyone you do, however inattentive it is, is perfectly fine because it gives you the outcome you want. I hope that next year the selfish middle class move on from camping to some other activity, possibly even one they have not comandeered from other sectors of society to distort to their own tastes and then contaminate with their self-centred perspectives on things. For myself, realising that I am too unfit to return to cycling, have my eye on hiring a canal boat, but please do not tell the middle class idiots, I want at least one holiday per decade that selfish morons do not stamp all over.
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