Camp Bastion

Mrs O and I went camping at the weekend, as is our wont at the end of August.  Sadly, the summer ended a little prematurely this year in England, so the weather alternated between air frost and torrential rain the entire time.

The final day of the trip, Bank Holiday Monday, was worthy of especial note.  It started raining at about 10am and gently ramped the action up until lunchtime, by which time it would have brought down an albatross.  We had intended to have a mooch to the coast after breakfast, but you couldn't really get out of the car without a full-face crash helmet, so decided against it.  Instead we thundered back to London to do some utility shopping.

There are fewer more spirit-sapping experiences than being in the B&Q in Leyton on a Bank Holiday Monday in the p1ssing rain.  People were slumped in corners writing war poetry.  It was that bleak.  The dead-eyed staff didn't help much either, shuffling about trying not to catch anyone's attention.  The whole thing was miserable on an industrial scale.

Next year we're taking the tent to Doha.

Aide de camp

The camping season is looming, and it's time for young men the nation over to nail their courage to the sticking place and get the Trangia and the tent out of mothballs.  Each year camping looks less and less appealing - the cold, the hassle, the inability to bring all your adult toys with you etc.  And yet to decline to go would be an admission of defeat, a kowtowing to the advancing years.  And we can't have that.  Rage rage against the dying of the light.

Unfortunately it's murder trying to book campsites these days as holidaying under canvas has become dead fashionable.  Years ago one could turn up without a reservation and still bag nine pitches and a kennel for the dog.  But now it's like trying to get into Studio 54.  This is only one area of many in which the zeitgeist has chased me down and helped itself to my hobbies.

Over the last five years or so most if not all of my interests or peccadilloes has become the thing for the fashionable young graduate about town.  All men under 40 who aspire to a certain intelligent otherness now wear tweed jackets, ride fixed wheel bikes, drink real ale, go camping of a bank holiday weekend and live in Walthamstow Village.  Yes - I invented that.

Whilst one doesn't wish to appear churlish, where were you lot in 2010?  I don't do these things to make a statement; I do them because I believe them to be pleasurable and/or worthy of my time in some other regard.  I happened across them not because the colour supps suggested I should, but because they appealed to me on a fundamental level.  That's the problem with fashion movements: they broker no dissent.  They don't allow for individual likes and desires.  You throw your lot in with currently fashionable pasttimes etc. whether you like them or not

When I was a boy, I was starstruck by the mod movement.  As soon as I saw a scooter, a sharp suit and a pair of desert boots, I was lost to it.  My little mates and I immediately became mods, and I can honestly say that this period was the most improbably exciting time of my entire life.  I lived being a mod, absolutely lived it.

Sadly for me, during the long summer holidays in 1981, all the former friends decided en bloc to become casuals.  Just like that.  I could not believe it.  I felt betrayed, but they couldn't see the problem.  "Everyone was a mod then, and everyone is a casual now."   The scales fell from mine eyes.  The aesthetics of modism meant no more to them than did the price of sherbet.  It just is what it is now.  We move on.

I resisted the move, and I still affect a certain mod look to this day.  I don't do this to make a statement or stand out.  You cannot choose with whom or with what you fall in love.  It chooses you.

I'll Be Back

I've been away for a long weekend. It was the August bank holiday here in the UK yesterday - the traditional end of the Summer. We spent the weekend under canvas as is our wont at this time of year. The weather, for once, was tremendous.

We spent the weekend pursuing very low-impact pastimes: croquet, crabbing, eating and drinking, and a bit of camp football. I don't mean we were mincing up the wing à la Quentin Crisp. I mean we were playing on the campsite, which necessitates careful reining in of the male instinct to twat the leather off the ball irrespective of the tactical advantage to be gained. We did quite well in this regard.

I May Be Some Time

Well, we've returned intact from our weekend's camping. It was a fairly uneventful trip. There was a real ale festival at the pub on the site. (For non-British readers, real ale is traditional form of British beer. It's delicious, but it does tend to attract joyless, bearded obsessive types. They're usually harmless unless you get talking to one about hop varieties, in which case you're likely to experience a virtual stroke due to boredom.)

However, I'd forgotten how cold it gets in England at night. The days were nice enough, but as soon as the sun went down, it got seriously chilly. I went to bed each night wearing all my belongings, and I was still frozen solid. And it was a real battle of wills to overcome the urge to urinate in the small hours. I had to lay it on the line to my bladder and central nervous system: we're going nowhere until daylight, so roll over and get some sleep. Also, some of our neighbours thought it might aid the sleeping process if they sat up all night inexpertly playing a shrill banjo. It's a testament to how much beer I'd stuck away that I was able to zone out the extraneous noise and get ten hours solid dreamless a night. I'm not by nature a deep sleeper. At home, the sound of dust settling is usually enough to disturb me.

In the news today I see serial offender Joey Barton has got it all over his shoes again. He was sent-off yesterday for confusing football with greco-roman wrestling. When his manager, Alan Shearer, questioned the wisdom of his commitment to the game, he got the right royal hump. Anyways, the upshot is he's been suspended by the club (again).
Now I don't believe I'm betraying any great confidence when I say that Barton's got history in this department. Everyone outside the game appears to realise that he has (ahem) issues with authority, and that he'll fly off the handle as inevitably as night follows day, and yet clubs are queueing up to buy him. They always argue that he's turned over a new leaf or at least deserves another second chance. Someone will give him a job if Newcastle sack him, and he'll be okay for about ten minutes before getting the red mists again. What does he have to do to get sacked? Take hostages or organise a drive-by? Even if he did either of these, he'd be employed again because between assaults, he's a decent footballer. This dubious logic doesn't extend to other professionals thank God or Fred West would still be in work. Yes, he murdered a few, but look at the quality of that grouting.

Camp as Christmas

There's a bank holiday weekend looming here in merry England, and that means we're off camping. Camping's got a lot more popular now due to people having no disposable income and an exchange rate that makes Europe as expensive to get to as geo-stationary orbit. Despite the fact that it's all over the weekend lifestyle supplements, a lot of people still have misguided notions of what camping involves. They baulk when you tell them you're proposing to spend a couple of nights under the stars. They clearly picture you marooned on a shear cliff face, drinking boiled urine and eating lichen. I suppose there are some hardcore Northerners who spend their downtime like this, but they're definitely in the minority. Yes, there are many shades of camper in New Labour's Britain, and I'm firmly in the airbed, disposable barbecue and plenty of stiff drink category.

We went to see "Oliver" last week. It's effortlessly brilliant. When the opening number of a musical is as good as "Food Glorious Food", you know you're in for a rare treat.

I read somewhere that one of Lionel Bart's teachers recognised his talent and wrote to the boy's parents suggesting that they might have sired a genius. I was initially mightily impressed by this. Then I thought again. How insightful does one need to be to recognise genius, particularly musical genius? Not very is the conclusion I came to.

"Sir, Sir, I've written a song."

(wearily) "Very well, Bart, let's hear it."

Two bars in and the bottom lip would have been trembling and the foot tapping like a good un. You don't need five years at the Royal Academy to recognise genius like that. You just need two good ears with a brain slung between them.

Swine flu update: it's spreading like wild garlic. Between this and the economy imploding, it's not been a vintage year, has it? I'm going to build an ark.