Rustic Camping - my favourite hobbie

Everyone seems to want to go Glamping these days. ‘Campers’ taking along their duck-down duvets, feather pillows, fur throws, floor length mirrors etc.

Some of my mates, the ones with a bit of dosh, now camp in posh tipis complete with double bed, fridge and candle chandeliers.

However, I organised a simplistic camping trip.

I was expecting no frills, but I wasn't expecting our campsite to resemble something out of a horror movie. With a shower that makes you feel more dirty once you've used it.

Apparently that’s the price you have to pay if you want a fire next to your tent?




Forget glamourous tipis we're going basic. My friend Craig and his
very excited chidlren Izzy and Henry

 The boys got far too excited at the prospect of being able to throw raw meat on a huge blazing fire which they’d crafted themselves. And we only paid £7 each per night.

Not many camp sites allow roaring log fires, maybe we should have questioned why this one did??

Anyway...we turned up about 30 miles south of Oxfordshire and literally came face-to- face with an empty field, four porta toilets and endless grass surrounded by electric fencing. That was it.

We had a walk around.

Stumbled across a herd of cows and some chickens but nothing else.

We eventually located one solitary shower, surrounded by an army of insects and spiders.

It's good job no one planned to wash their hair all weekend.

My boyfriend Jimmy and me drunk round
the camp fire

The most amazing thing about our rustic, bohemian, no frills campsite was the sea of stars, literally thousands of them, lighting up the sky each night.

Because we were surrounded by nothing but meadows, hills and cattle fields the starlit sky was amazing.

My friend Tammy had a star gazing app on her iPhone called Star Map. It was awesome for us amateur astronomers. The program shows everything in the sky from planets, star charts, galaxies etc. Lets be honest, the only two everyone knows are Orion’s Belt (three stars in a diagonal line) and The Plough (seven stars shaped like a saucepan).

But who needs modern technology when you've red wine to pickle your senses?

One night, mid drunken stupor, I pointed out that the top of a tree, which was glowing in the moonlight, looked like an angry fox. We all started laughing and staring at it. I didn't even know that it was possible to hallucinate of red wine…even two boxes of it. It seems we'd reached a new booze high. Or low depending on how you look at it.

This is what we romanticised about

We'd hoped to let off Chinese lanterns. They're pretty cool and we planned to each write our names on them and release them into the sky. Yep, we envisioned some kind of fairy tale moment. But we had a complete disaster trying to set them off.

We were too drunk, stumbling around like loons, trying to light each side. By the time one side was alight the other had blown out and this continued for about 10 minutes flipping from side to side.

Eventually we sacked it off, panicking that we'd let them off and they’d come crashing down and set one of our tents on fire.

So much for the serene, romantic moment we were all expecting.

Despite the fact it rained for most of the weekend we had a great time. It stopped raining long enough for us to play rounders. The girls beat the boys. Oh yeah!

We even managed to refrain from gorging on sausages and burgers to make a king prawn and white wine risotto on our camping stove.

We baked garlic bread (wrapped in foil) in the fire and made a mozzarella and tomato salad. And a jug of Pimms.

Yeah... I know. We were quite impressed too. Who said this camping lark had to include the bog standard pot noodle?

Despite giggling in a field, drinking cheap red wine out of boxes and toasting marshmallows on an open fire the best bit about camping is going to sleep.

I love that first moment when you zip-up your tent, get in your sleeping bag and suddenly realise you’re sleeping five meters away from a bunch of strangers (other people in the field, not my friends).

You’re all high on life - sleeping on a bed of grass. In a dark field, in the middle of nowhere.

After the chorus of ‘good night John Boy’, ‘good night Jim Bob’, ‘good night Mary Ellen’... you suddenly tune into the random man snoring his face off a few tents away.

Although it's kind of annoying, it suddenly blends into the background of the excitement of sleeping in a tent surrounded by your best friends.

I truly love camping.

It baffles me when people say they hate it.

Give me a group of friends, in a nylon coloured dome over a 5 star spa any day.



Jimmy, Me, Tim, Sam, Tammy and Craig