After a successful premiere on BBC4, Britain Goes Camping will be shown on BBC2 at 10pm on Sunday 8th August, a sign of both the documentary’s and the subject’s appeal.

Earlier this year, Cath and myself spent a day filming with Brian and his small crew, and some of that interview footage is included in the programme. This is my favourite section as it includes a close-up of my Dad as a young man

The crew accompanied us on an early Spring camp in March. The ground was hard with frost and the trees were bare. The first camp of the year is invariably disorganised and fretful, but in this particular case, circumstances were against us; Cath seemed shivery and weak and I was aware of a sickness creeping upon me. But Brian and his crew had travelled from Ireland for the filming and there was no way I would disappoint them so we pressed on, prepping and packing for a cold night outdoors.

“Had the TV crew  stuck around, they would have witnessed horrors”

The crew put us at our ease, thanks to Brian’s careful and friendly manner. But due to our growing illness, any hope we might have entertained as to putting on good front was quashed; we undertook our child and tent tasks with our characteristic stoicism, but we lacked the energy to brush our hair and scrub the crayon from the walls for their arrival. After a brief interview at our flat, we headed into the outdoors.

At the campsite, we erected the tent and then conducted separate interviews with Brian. Once filming was done, the crew departed for their bed and breakfast. The night fell quickly, and the land grew cold. Cath shivered. I broke out in a sweat. In any other circumstances, I would have broken camp and headed for home. But I couldn’t. The scandal about television fakery was uppermost on my mind, of people pretending to do things and then not. I would not go on camera eulogising camping and then break for home at the first sign of trouble.

Had the TV crew stuck around, they would have witnessed horrors.

“No, I would not be a TV faker. We would stick it out”

I lit a fire and the barbecue but was unprepared for the overwhelming blackness of the night. The barbecue has a lid and so was effectively invisible to the small children swarming around me. The fire made no inroads into the dark. For safety’s sake, I decided to tip the barbecue into the fire, burning my fingertips in the process. Agony! I ran around in the blackness wailing my lot, cursing my condition, chased by hungry screaming children. A handful of sausages survived the crisis. The two toddlers wolfed them down. Neither Cath nor myself felt like eating, and our eldest child was swaying and sickening.

Surely I should drive us home.

No, I would not be a TV faker. I would not join the ranks of the pampered presenters who had cut and run. The honour of camping was at stake.

In retrospect, I was far too mad at this point to drive. Mad with the night, and the sickness. We attempted bedtime. A fitful hour of sleep was had, and then the vomiting began.

We had swine flu.

One unexpected consequence of inoculating the toddlers against swine flu was that they were bursting with energy and wanting attention and activity at the same time as Cath, myself and our eldest daughter, Alice, were crawling around the groundsheet in a hallucinatory condition of perpetual evacuation.

At four in the morning, the only one of our party still awake, I spent a tense five minutes thinking I was about to die. Ever considerate, I did not wake Cath to inform her of this, reasoning that it would be better for everyone if they slept through my death, and then cleared up after me in the morning.

Could I drive home now, I wondered? Waking the children and loading them into the car was easy. Driving along dark field and the night lanes less so. And there was the risk, what with my impending death, that driving might be beyond me.

No, I would not be a TV faker. We would stick it out. The swine flu wrung me out like a wet cloth, then dawn arrived with its meagre gifts, a weak grey haze and two spoonfuls of warmth.

The sickness abated. I took the family to a National Trust cafe. The toddlers fell ravenously upon the cakes while their filthy stinking parents ignored the quizzical looks from the other families, so immaculate in their unstained skiing jackets.

I look forward to watching Britain Goes Camping, and to discovering what Brian and his team have unearthed concerning the history of camping; Hopefully, in my brief appearance, I do not come across as unduly deranged.

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Totem Pole at Abbey Farm campsite in the Cotswolds

As satisfying as well chosen gear is, objects and consumption are not the point of camping; while a newspaper is not the right place to admit to feelings of mysticism in the night woods, I will give full vent to camping mysticism at my forthcoming event at Port Eliot Festival, We Are Camping.

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Luke had foraged wooden stakes for fuel; they were laid flat upon the long, dry grass, their tips aflame in the fire pit. As the stakes burned, he got up and adjusted their length. It was not the safest of arrangements; the edges of the pit smouldered as the fire spread along the stake, and visitors tripped over them in the dark. But he seemed to know what he was doing. For the weekend, he was the keeper of the flame.

The conversation turned to meat. Rupert had been to St John’s Market in Liverpool and watched a man auction off bags of assorted meats. Five quid a bag. Ten quid for a bigger bag. No indication of the contents. Just meats, a variety thereof. Cath remembered the tripe and tongue stall at St John’s. Then Luke mentioned the grill steaks advert that made a grand claim of their “pocket of juice”. Other processed burgers lacked this pouch of indeterminate fluid. They were dry. The design flaw of high fat content was made into a point of differentiation and that was why I was laughing, at the thought of all the meetings and money that had gone into marketing the advantage of a “pocket of juice”.

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It rained all the time. It rained in the morning when the children screamed for breakfast. It rained in the car when the children fought over pencils like old lags bickering over snout. It rained when I pitched camp and it rained when I struck camp.

On Twitter, I received numerous messages requesting my tips for wet camping. I had two, and have since added a third:

1) Hide in the car.
2) Never go to the local museum.
3) Let the children get wet and muddy. And give them more biscuits than they require.

Three small children, seven days and seven nights of rain: not an arrangement that springs to mind upon hearing the word “holiday”. The British people were promised a “barbecue summer”. We got the usual monsoon. The Daily Mail ran photographs of flooded campsites in the Lake District alongside stories of midnight evacuations. Campers muttered darkly to me about government conspiracies: was the weather forecast faked so that we holidayed at home to help the flatlining economy? Was Gordon Brown, in a headdress of turquoise feathers, leading the naked cabinet through the ancient ritual of bringing down the rains to douse the joy of the electorate lest sunlight distract us from our lot of hopeless, ill-rewarded, desperate, pointless, hated toil?

Seven days and seven nights of rain can strip a man of his reason. It’s the sound of the rain against the tent: an unending ovation of sarcastic applause with the occasional catcall of children. Parenthood is a performance. I had a tough audience. In the tent, no-one requested an encore.

Previously I have been cavalier about rainy days camping, based on my now discredited conviction that it rarely rains every hour of the day. I maintained that there is the odd shower, an hour of downpour, and then the clouds move on. In Thomas H Holding’s The Camper’s Handbook from 1908 he shares the delight of a walk he undertook during two wet days: “I put on my waterproof and strolled onto a pulpit of lofty rock. Gazed across Loch Erne; saw the whirlwind gathering a column of water under the steep mountain opposite. This spiral pillar of water towered up, scattered and broke, and gathered again until it came and spent itself at a little point of rock five hundred yards away in the bay.”

I envy his solitary wet walk. Holding was a confirmed bachelor who identified one of the uses of camping as “It enables a man to get away from his family; or his family to get away from him for a spell”. Notice he did not write “It confines a man with his family, and prevents his family from gaining any respite from him.”

Complaining about the rain when you are camping is like complaining about traffic in central London: what else did you expect?

I devised the rule about local museums during a late Spring deluge at Tom’s Field in Dorset, when we headed out to Dorchester, mistakenly seeking refuge in the “attractions”. Other families in steaming waterproofs formed a forbidding queue outside the dinosaur museum. I refused to queue in the rain for an experience I would – under normal conditions -have paid good money to avoid so we ended up in a deservedly less popular museum dedicated to the Chinese Terracotta Warriors. Here replicas of the statues created by “museum and conservation technicians in China” were pompously positioned behind velvet ropes and security devices. Dad anger consumed me. Perhaps one day I will go down to the garden centre, buy a bunch of replicas of Michaelangelo’s David and stick them behind a velvet rope and charge the thick end of twenty quid so that families can experience the wonder of the Italian Renaissance.

That difficult week when the British people were betrayed by the Met Office

Rain is a part of camping. Complaining about the rain when you are camping is like complaining about traffic in central London: what else did you expect? And if you take children camping, you must expect them to get wet and perhaps if you let them run around baptising each other in the muddy waters, then they will learn for themselves the importance of protecting their gear from the rain. So much of our troubles stemmed from resisting the children’s natural inclination to run around heedless of the weather. I devised the third rule while lying in my bed, back at home, wondering what could have been done to improve that difficult week when the British people were betrayed by the Met Office.

Soon I will take our wet tent out to a playing field to dry. We struck and pitched camp in the rain frequently on the holiday, working with silent efficiency to slide poles into sleeves and peg out while our little audience in the steaming car brayed and threw food. There is nothing to it. Pitch the outer tent first. Keep your groundsheet dry. At the entrance of the tent, fold back a yard of groundsheet so that – as you enter the tent – you step first on grass, which will absorb the water running off yourself. Take your boots off here and then step onto the groundsheet. There, that is the only practical advice I have to offer for wet days at camp.

For consolation, I offer the thoughts of Jerome K Jerome on the subject from Three Men In A Boat, so that we are reassured that it was ever thus – with one exception: Jerome was spared the false hope peddled by the Met Office.
“It is evening. You are wet through, and there is a good two inches of water in the boat, and all the things are damp. You find a place on the banks that is not quite so puddly as other places you have seen, and you land and lug out the tent, and two of you proceed to fix it.

Instead of helping you, it seems to you that the other man is simply playing the fool

It is soaked and heavy, and it flops about, and tumbles down on you, and clings around your head and makes you mad. The rain is pouring down steadily all the time. It is difficult enough to fix a tent in dry weather: in wet, the task becomes herculean. Instead of helping you, it seems to you that the other man is simply playing the fool. Just as you get your side beautifully fixed, he gives it a hoist from his end, and spoils it all.”

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The serried ranks of tents at Glastonbury

We are heading to Glastonbury again this year. Math will be compering talks at the Free University of Glastonbury on the Saturday, 11am-2pm. Guests will include John Niven, Rob Chapman discussing Syd Barrett, and Joy Division and New Order bassist Peter Hook. The weather forecast for Glastonbury weekend is good, and Math is hard at work prepping for the festival. Here is his tip for pitching your tent at Glasto:

Pitching a tent at a festival

Since it is likely you will be returning to the tent at night and in a state of confusion, making the tent easy to find is your first concern. Some people make flags with distinctive homemade patterns. I can still recall the “horse, hand, star” crest used by my friends twenty years ago. Etch the flag with strips of fluorescent material. Others will pitch the tent in a memorable location, near to a thoroughfare or at the very back of the field. I disagree with this approach. The edges of the field, whether it be hedge or fence, will invariably become an improvised urinal – or worse – over the course of the weekend. And thoroughfares are absolutely to be avoided, as confused people are likely to blunder off the walkway into camp.

At a festival, the tent is only for sleeping in. Camp serves no other purpose. The enemy of sleep is noise. Camp as far away from the dance tent as possible, and steer clear of fellow campers bearing acoustic guitars or bongos, or indeed any individual who looks susceptible to paranoia, as nothing disturbs a good night’s sleep like a conspiracy theory concerning aircraft contrails and chemicals being sprayed over the city. Worse case scenario is a paranoid musician.

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1) Camp high
As a performer, I camped backstage at the Park, on a high pitch overlooking the festival, close to the fence. The effort involved in hauling the gear uphill was offset by the relative peace and quiet of the spot throughout the festival. If I was going there as a common-or-garden Dad punter, I would aim far away and high.

2) Take a wheelbarrow
Hauling your gear from car to site is a difficult and unpleasant experience if you’ve got a big family tent and all the extra beds and sleeping bags that come with children. Glastonbury has metal reinforced pathways that are wide and hard enough to take a large trolley or barrow. The walk from car to campsite for me was about half an hour. I would struggle to carry my tent more than ten minutes on my back. As ever, keep a tight rein on the amount of gear you are taking. Take some rope to secure your gear to the barrow.

3) Don’t cook
A few of our party brought stoves with them, but I maintain you are better picking up food at the festival. Not only does this save on the amount of crap you have to haul around, it also means you are not leaving loads of waste packaging behind at the festival.

4) Kids’ field
Bugaboo hell. None of the parents we travelled with enjoyed the kids’ field. First of all, who wants to sit around watching their children do stuff. Secondly, children aren’t going to learn to juggle in the hour or two you spend there. I’d rather see family experiences more integrated with the festival such as…

5) House of Fairy Tales
Established and lead by the artists Deborah Curtis and Gavin Turk, the House of Fairy Tales is “a child-centred artist led project which draws on an extensive team of artists, performers, writers, educationalists, designers, musicians, film makers, dreamers and philosophers to create magical, parallel worlds where learning is play and play is directed learning.” The people at the House of Fairy Tales were the highlight of Glastonbury – my three children got thoroughly involved – from my two-year-old boy modelling an enormous tower of clay to my seven year-old dilligently acquiring medals as she went through the set activities – and the setting was interesting and friendly enough to keep us adults entertained too. After-hours, a banquet and live performance was laid on (tickets fifteen pounds a head), for which I gladly bought tickets.

6) The Park
The House of Fairy Tales was located in the Park, the area of the festival established by Emily Eavis in 2007. To Dads, the Park is ideal. The bar is not so packed, the stage is full of interesting and alternative acts (all the bands I wanted to see – Animal Collective, Bon Iver, and M.Ward played the Park stage), and you are well out of the maddening throng.

7) But what about the headliners?
I didn’t see any of the big acts. I’ve been in those crowds without kids. I couldn’t face them with small children. One of the consequences of taking kids with you is that you are excused Must Seeing the Must See events. For the first time, I was free of festival fret – that feeling that something better is happening somewhere else and you must trudge off to see it. Before Glastonbury, I negotiated two passes out of the family – one to see Animal Collective – and that was enough.

You sound like a really dull man
I am speaking only from the Dad perspective here, from that portion within me concerned with the logistics of shifting a family around. But it’s a fair comment.

9) When should I arrive at Glastonbury, and when should I leave?
Judging arrival and departure is the real trick. This year, because of the recession and the poor rate of exchange with the euro, many people took Glastonbury as their holiday. This skewed the usual traffic patterns. About half the people arrived on Wednesday, which is quite unprecedented. We rolled in at 11am on Thursday morning and had no problems and barely any delay. We left on Sunday at about 4.30pm and likewise there was no queue. To put that in perspective, my mate spent six hours in the car park on Monday. Six hours! We couldn’t have coped with that.

10) Buggy?
We went for two backpacks in which to haul the children around, each packed up with wet and hot weather gear. Just don’t take a buggy that runs on casters, as I saw a lot of Dads digging the mud and grass out from the wheels. My reasoning was that a buggy would struggle in the really deep Glasto mud, but in the event, the weather spared us that.

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Phone box in the deserted village of Tyneham

We booked well in advance as Tom’s Field is relatively small, being a collection of fields divided by dry stone walls and covering four and a half acres. There is a renowned walk from the site down to a dancing ledge, a flat area of rock with a man-made rock pool at the foot of Jurassic cliffs. Unfortunately our children were too small to manage the descent.

We found Tom’s Field friendly but uninspiring. Campers are encouraged to park their cars in the field outside the site, which is a positive, as nothing spoils a camp like traffic. But fires are forbidden, so the nights we spent there felt suburban. A strict lights-out policy and allocated pitches contributed to the boredom.

The site in Langton Matravers is near to the popular National Trust destination of Corfe Castle; an iconographic ruin, beautiful from a distance but meaningless up close. On a rainy day, campers flee to Dorchester, which becomes crammed with soaked families seeking any distraction from the unrelenting rain, and some risible museums have sprung up to serve this need. The nearby town of Swanage is a dispiriting, down-at-heel seaside town.

I judge camping trips by the moments of intensity they deliver, and on that gauge, the best reason to visit Tom’s Field is as a base from which to explore the nearby deserted village of Tyneham. Dorset has strong literary connections: Lyme Regis was the location for John Fowles’ The French Lieutenant’s Woman and Ian McEwan saw in the tightly packed pebbles of Chesil Beach a suitable backdrop for a novel of sexual repression and misunderstanding. Unlike these well-visited places, Tyneham, the subject of Patrick Wright’s digressive history The Village That Died For England, retains an aura of poetic intensity.

Tyneham was a small village cleared by the army during the Second World War so that the area could be used as an artillery and tank firing range. The villagers were promised that they would be able to return once the war was over, but the military reneged on this promise. Today, access to Tyneham is intermittent (check here before heading out), which makes a trip there all the more meaningful; the drive down into the village seems to take much longer than the map indicates, suggesting a topography warped by military intelligence.

Pristeen phone box against the village ruins

“To drive down into the Tyneham valley is to sink into a zone where even the sharpest of actualities seems overtaken by myth,” observes Patrick Wright. The birdsong is rich and multi-layered, as if the birds have expanded and deepened their repertoire free of the distracting presence of mankind. The graveyard and restored schoolyard – both scrupulously maintained by the Army – are poignant reminders of the temporariness of our places. The small Elizabethan mansion, unstable and gutted, speaks of wayward shelling.

Deserted places exert a particular pull. If Nature abhors a vacuum, the imagination adores one, drawn in by the possibility and promise of an empty lost place.

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Dancers entertain a gathering of the Kindred of the Kibbo Kift

A performance of The Great Taboo at the Al-Thing of 1924

From Matthew De Abaitua’s essay on the Kindred of the Kibbo Kift to be published in The Idler in 2010.

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Long Man of Wilmington from the Kinlog of the Kindred of the Kibbo Kift

Carved into the north-facing scarp slope of Windover Hill, the Long Man stands two hundred feet tall. In each hand he clutches what appear to be two staves. The provenance of the Long Man of Wilmington is uncertain: we cannot be sure if it is a sixteenth century tribute or symbol of pagan antiquity. Today, the outline is defined with concrete, and the Long Man is visible to the traffic passing on the A27. But in the year of the hike, August 1929, the figure outlined in the long grass was a mystical watermark on the hillside.

Hawk, gleemaster of the Kindred of the Kibbo Kift

Windover Hill and the surrounding area are rich with remnants from England’s ancient past: Neolithic flint mines, Bronze age burial barrows and a Roman terrace way. The hikers marched up the steep hill in their variant of the classical wedge formation and, at the heart of the Long Man, performed a brief ritual of dedication. Their voices echoed around the distinctive acoustics of the concave slope. Thus they reached back, far, far back into the void-faced hood of prehistory. Mankind’s evolution has been a progressive degeneration, with alienation at every stage. First Man was alienated from oneness with his god, then cast out from the harmony of Nature. The process of separation is remorseless, each severance placing another partition between Man and the Golden Age. He lost his link to his ancestors. He grew apart from others, from his community and fellow man, until even his wife and his own children were alien to him. Each cut was made by the instruments of knowledge and industry, two scissor blades cutting in unison. The final divorce, the ultimate decree nisi, was issued by Freud: man was alienated from his own self. The hikers reached through the void and into the hood searching for the rough hand of Neolithic man, their ancient guide to living in harmony with the subtle, undulating forms of the Downs.

Ritual completed, the hikers continued up over the featureless head of the Long Man to the brow of the hill. There, they looked down over the South Downs, a cumuliform landscape of “whale-backed” hills and verdant valleys founded on a bank of chalk. Cloud shadows passed over ploughed wheatfields. In the distance, coastal bays and the glittering English Channel. On the coast the seven peaks of the chalk cliffs rise and fall. Known as the Seven Sisters, each Sister is the measure of a terrifying eternity: trillions of coccolithophores – nanoplankton – lived and died here in a deep warm sea, leaving behind their scales of calcium carbonate to build up over time into the gleaming white cliffs. On the beach, a stunning everywhere of light as the high sun was reflected by these geological mausoleums.

From a leaflet distributed by the Kindred of the Kibbo Kift

The Sussex downs, their name derived from the Saxon word ‘dun’, meaning hill, were one of many sites in the English landscape stalked by these strange hikers. Their rituals summoned the ancient British pagan tradition, from back before the Romans, back to a Neolithic Albion of menhir, tor and cromlech, Silbury Hill and the White Horse of Ulmington. The ancient sites throbbed with dormant meaning. For a joke – in the Freudian sense that there is no such thing as a joke – one of their men stripped naked and squatted at the root of the enormous phallus of the Cerne Giant, as if drawing the sexual potency into himself. Such ancestor worship sounds preposterous now: in the twenty-first century, Stonehenge is a tourist attraction at which the passing traffic on the A303 slows to gawp, before speeding on to holidays in Dorset. But in 1929, the remains of English prehistory retained sufficient mystical charge to inspire this select group of hikers and campers as they sought to change the direction of Western civilisation. They were the most intriguing and inspiring of English reform movements, an elite cell a few hundred strong, already nine years into their existence come the occasion of the dedication to the Long Man of Wilmington: they were the Kindred of the Kibbo Kift.

This is the opening of a long essay on the Kindred of the Kibbo Kift to be published by The Idler in 2010.

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