Why is it that so many men have this huge desire to go camping? They seem to love the idea of taking their families into the wild, protecting them under a damp sheet of canvas and providing for them with a tin of ravioli warmed up on a gas stove. Personally, I have resisted the whole camping experience for the last year or so on the grounds that camping and nappy changing do not go hand in hand. However, next year when The Baby is firmly ‘potted’, I might have to give in and join the merry camping fraternity and submit to nights spent in cold and damp sleeping bags.
With this in mind, I decided to buy my husband a tent for his recent birthday. I thought he could practice camping in the garden this summer in preparation for next year. Given the current wet weather conditions, this would be the perfect rehearsal. He was delighted with his two man tent, the sleeping bag and the blow-up mattress – together with the pump given to him by the dog. With no time like the present, he was eager to time himself erecting his tent in the garden ready for his first night camping with our four-year-old son. Half an hour in, he waved the instructions at me. “These are wrong! They make no sense at all,” he said. I followed him outside to find tent parts sprawled across the garden. The first step said to identify each piece of the tent equipment, in conjunction with a diagram. My husband assured me he had already done this. We moved on and started hammering in pegs. The result of our efforts was a large piece of canvas lying pinned to the ground like a flattened spider. “It’s utterly ridiculous. Take it back to the shop and tell them that they’ve given us the wrong instructions,” he barked. I just could not accept that two relatively bright adults were defeated by four steps of instructions. We kept on trying different angles but just before we gave up, I reverted back to step one. “Are you absolutely sure that this bit of canvas is the ‘inner tent?” I asked. We both glanced at the other piece which my husband had identified as “the ground sheet.” As we unravelled it, it was obvious that this was the tent and we had been trying to erect the ground sheet. We dissolved into a fit of giggles and five minutes later, the tent was standing in all its glory in the middle of the lawn.
I left my husband to pump up the mattress and a while later he was still pumping furiously. He mouthed through the window, “It’s broken.” I just wonder how he will cope with the whole family standing in the pouring rain on a campsite next year.
