Carry On Camping

After our first child was born, my wife, Anna, said 'never again'...two years later, out popped number two. The memory is short. So it was with our latest camping trip. We perused our road atlas and La Tranche-sur-Mer was our agreed destination. 

The campsite was booked, tent and inflatable mattress lobbed into the back of the Dacia, the cat's rotating feeder filled and we were off ...to the seaside. 

I thought our last campsite was plush, this one was even plusher with swimming pool complex, café, boulangerie, gym ...there was even entertainment laid on in the shape of Clown Camembert (the French do love a clown), all for 28€.

It was such glorious weather we decided to only erect the internal section of our tent, allowing for air to circulate as well as a view of the night sky through the netting. Beautiful.

La Tranche-sur-Mer is north of La Rochelle and the golden sandy beaches give a panoramic view of the Ile de Ré. The town itself is quite nice but does have a touch of Skegness about it, with its shops selling the usual seaside paraphernalia. 

After a wonderful afternoon of people watching and drinking too much it was moules-frites o'clock. We walked up and down the high street several times, eventually finding somewhere that passed every criteria on Anna's choosing-somewhere-to-eat list, moules-frites was ordered. We waited for half an hour, with not so much as a bit of bread given to us, before the waitress apologised and said they had run out of moules-frites...they didn't have any red wine either. Instead we had to watch everyone else enjoy their crustaceans as we pushed our disappointing galettes around the plate sipping our rosé. Nice one Anna!

As we staggered back to the campsite Camembert the Clown was performing his tight five in front of two children and a dog. 

We enjoyed a balmy evening sitting in our newly purchased camping chairs, eating our body weight in crisps and drinking our emergency bottle of Les Ormes that Anna carries with her in the car for emergencies ...like a defibrillator.

At six the next morning we were awoken by an almighty bang and water hitting us in the face. I staggered outside and threw the waterproof cover over the tent. But the thunder and lightening increased in intensity and it started chucking it down. Emergency action was needed and it was decided we would lob everything in the back of the car and go home early. There followed a mad ten minutes of Anna and me slipping around, like the Keystone Cops, shrieking as we dismantled our tent in the deluge. I could hear all our smug neighbours in their state of the art motorhomes being smug. Note to self: always check the weather forecast when camping.

As we drove home in a steamed up car with water running down my back I remembered another 'Carry on Camping' moment from my distant past. My brother and I were on a cub camp in Ross-On-Wye. We were having a great time making bows and arrows, playing with fire and whittling stuff. The only very large cloud in an otherwise blue sky was a morbidly obese boy called Nick May, whose only pleasure in life was giving boys half his size dead legs and kneeing them in the groin. A thoroughly disagreeable bully who nobody liked. We were sitting round the campfire drinking mugs of tea whilst toasting dough balls made from flour and water, stuck on the end of a stick, burnt to a cinder and then smothered in jam...heaven. After giving the small boy next to him a Chinese burn May wobbled off to the WC tent to relieve himself. Quick as a flash my brother jumped up and relieved himself into Nick May's mug of tea, which he had left on the grass. 

On his return the collective pleasure was intense as twenty cub scouts watched Nick May down his frothy night cap. From all the sniggering and smirking he knew something was up. Nigel Beaumont, his creepy sidekick, shouted “Shaw pissed in your tea!”. 

As I sat in the car, soaking wet, driving back to 79 I chortled to myself at the memory of Nick May chasing my much faster brother around the cow field, for what seemed like hours, screaming “I'm gonna kill you Shaw!”