Confessions of a happy camper

Why should I go camping?

Why go camping? In The Campers’ Handbook published in 1908, Thomas Hiram Holding answers this question by listing its virtues from the perspective of the solitary gentleman:

“It teaches him no small measure of self-reliance.
It gives him a new incentive to independence.
It opens to him the possibility of personal resource.
It teaches him patience when circumstances are adverse.
And so on.

To Thomas Holding’s list of the virtues of camping, I have a few contemporary additions:

Why camp?

It provides relief from the screens that surround you.
Gaze into the fire. It will change you.
It comes with low expectations, and so spares you the rage when your expectations fall short of the reality.
It is a negotiation between yourself and the environment. You can neither perfect nor control it.
It gets your children out of the house and into nature.
Nature is where children learn to take risks and where those risks have consequences, unlike computer games.
It opens you to a life with less stuff.
It puts you in a place where preparation is more important to well-being than money.
You discover the land and its moods.
You learn how to train and use fire, and so control the element required for survival.
You negotiate with your enemies; the rain, the mud, and the cold, cold ground.
You realise you are neither helpless nor in command.
It punishes greed.
It confronts you with waste.
It takes you out of domestic comfort.
It is a break from people trying to sell you stuff.

A list of reasons why not to camp is equally easy to draw up:

Really, why camp?

Waking up in a small tent on a hot day is like waking up in a plastic bag.
Most campsites are like suburbs, with neatly defined pitches, terrible bars, extortionate shops and fellow campers who are over-concerned with the condition of the toilets.
Other people’s faces first thing in the morning. Other people’s feet.
The first time a toddler runs through your tent wearing a pair of muddy wellies.
Fires burn. Trees graze. Insects bite. If man had been made to camp, he would be born with an unfeeling hide.
You need the toilet at three in the morning. It is cold out there. You lie still for an indeterminate time, stubbornly willing yourself back to sleep regardless of the pressure of your bladder. Then you remember that your body expends heat warming all that urine. You must face the night.
The simplest of tasks become painfully complicated and protracted.
Packing and pitching takes up most of a day; striking camp and unpacking takes a day. When does the holiday begin?
It sounds like a lot of hard work.
It is perverse and puritanical to deny yourself the advantages of civilisation, or to pretend you are somehow outside of it.
It is an undignified pursuit for adults.
Campsites have so many rules, there is no freedom.
It is not an escape from your stuff. Merely the migration of your stuff.

I could keep flipping this coin for the rest of my life. It is the coexistence of positive and negative that makes the experience of camping vivid and telling, and more than a confection.

Read more of Matthew’s camping articles, recipes and recommendations for campsites with campfires at www.cathandmathcamping.com

Read about camping at Port Eliot here. If “waking up in a plastic bag” is not for you, then browse our selection of alternative accommodation, from tipis and yurts to airstream and gypsy bowtop caravans.