Monday, September 21, 2009
Friday, September 18, 2009
Things That Make You Go Agh!



What makes you go aaaaghhh?
Sunday, September 13, 2009
Grin Dangerous Gin

Saturday, September 05, 2009
Hi De Hi, Hi De No!

Awfully sorry for yet another gap but I have a genuine reason other than sheer laziness, twittering and bloggers blogfright this time. I have been camping in Cornwall. I can hear a chorus of 'oh how lovely'. Well quite, in theory but in practice not quite exactly what I had in mind per se. I went with the 8 year old - voici le Garcon de Ginge:

These were our pristine and weird and INCREDIBLY BORING campsite neighbours:
Fast forward to same night 03:30 battling with boggy ground and pegs that won't stay in as the wind has pulled them out so many times there is now no longer any purchase.
Fast forward same night 04:30 both of us soaked through staring at each other saying: I hate this. Well actually I think we said: this is SHIT!
Fast forward to same night/morning 06:00 - I wake up to panicked shouts of 'Rockmother! Get up now - the tent is on my face!' I leapt up and then immediately lost balance on deflating airbed then headbutted the flysheet. Oh comedy camping capers. We finally both staggered outside to see the tent sagging badly on her side which again had lost purchase in the ground that had had a years worth of rain in 2 hours.
Next door had the same problem - we saw a lot of pyjama welly and wet hair action going on throughout the night. Basically no one slept a wink - one family abandoned their tent completely - just took the contents and left. Good move. Later that morning a few obviously seasoned campers came over to say hello and have an irritatingly jolly chat. What the bloody hell did they have to be so jolly about? They all seemed to think it was hilarious and fun that we had all camped out in the eye of a terrible storm.
This lasted for two more days at which point we:
(a) became very miserable and ratty
(b) had to gather around a coolbox with junior monopoly balanced precariously on top lit only by a tiny torch to have mammoth raucous games which garcon de ginge loved as we..
(c) drank copious amounts of wine to obliterate the ability of getting up any more at night to rectify the tent
(d) decided that people who like camping in extremis are mad and obviously like being inconvenienced and cooped up in flappy nylon for fun
(e) thought about torching the tent but himwhosnoreslikeabison would probably not be that happy so we didn't.
But really, camping is no fun if all you can do is stagger around with hot weatherbeaten faces in damp clothes smelling of dog and have to run the risk of permanent tinnitus due to incredibly loud nylon flapping noise from wind and rain beating down like a ton of marbles onto the roof for 48hrs solid. So we moved. Sheer luck and god knows how we found a 2 bedroom pre-fab holiday home type thing in beautiful grounds including a heated swimming pool half a mile down the road. It had a hand-painted kaola bear plate on the wall in the kitchen.
It was bliss. So it was quite an adventure and despite the harrowing start we still had a great time which involved laughing quite a lot because if we hadn't we may have cried. Check out the unconscious 'art therapy' we did on the beach as part of our recovery....
All photos © Rockmother except top photo © alanandtricia.com (yes - they are for real!!)
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Labels: camp campus campmat camp not