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.”

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.

Absolutely pissing down, say the BBC

I am sure the fault lies in my perception of the situation. I am sure the BBC is blameless and perfect, and not the meteorological Daily Mail they appear to be.

Weather should be clear-headed, but news is clouding weather’s judgement

Residents of the Highland community of Carrbridge say that they live in one of the driest areas of Scotland. The residents claim that the BBC weather website forecasts a wet day and then it turns out that there are only a small number of isolated showers – and sometimes no rain at all. This tallies with my own experience – an hour of rain in an otherwise fine day billed in advance by the BBC as a weeping black cloud.

News and weather are always bundled together, like husband and wife. News accentuates the negative to create drama. Weather should be clear-headed, but news is clouding weather’s judgement. Perhaps it is time they ended their co-dependent relationship and then weather might be able to think more clearly about what is really happening outside its window.

Friday afternoon. Invariably the BBC five-day weather forecast has been chipping away at morale all week, only to change its tune just as Saturday is upon us, innocently maintaining that it had predicted bright with sunny spells all along. But it is too late to pack and so we must spend the weekend in the house, staring at the sunshine through hot windows and dreaming of green fields.

Barbecuing with your shirt off: Dadness 1970s-style

Combine the prospect of good weather with a weak pound and a recession, and you have the prospect of a mammoth camping season.