Finding your happy hiding place has its own pitfalls
IMISS camping. Even though I was always the world’s worst camper. By the time I had unloaded the entire contents of my house into a field and built the ‘camp’ it was time to go home.
So I bought a camper van. I decorated it in Cath Kidston cushions, filled it with books and hung pictures on the wall. I didn’t even need to drive it anywhere to feel I was on holiday.
Problems started when it became such a charming residence that I used it as bolthole. The boys would be looking for me and I’d be just sitting in the van, reading. When random haberdashery started to disappear, my husband got worried. When he found the missing tin opener in the ginghamlined drawer of my ‘den’, he snapped. ‘You are spending too much time in that van! It’s weird.’ ‘Rubbish!’ I shouted, a little too defensively. ‘I was in the house five minutes ago!’ ‘Only to use the toilet,’ he barked. That was true. I think he was genuinely afraid I’d go out one evening and take off in it. So was I – and so we sold it.
At 54, with an ailing body that feels about 100, this summer I got a craving to camp. Not ready for a tent, or a notoilet van, I booked myself and my son, Tom, into the ‘glamping’ pods on Claggan Island, an hour down the road in Belmullet. Some people don’t get glamping but as a person who owned a van with better upholstery than her house, I do. Besides, Tom and I both needed a technology detox.
This part of Northwest Mayo was voted the ‘best place to go wild in Ireland’ last year and the drive across the beach (and I do mean actual beach) to Claggan Island bears this out.
The Howard family have been farming and living in this remote spot since the late 1800s. Laurence Howard and his wife Myra rebuilt the old Coastguard Station and turned it into luxury holiday accommodation. With a couple of camping pods facing onto the sea, they have set TripAdvisor alight with good reviews. They live on site, along with Laurence Sr, provider of fires in the campers’ barn-kitchen, field mushrooms, fresh hens’ eggs and anecdotes – on request.
We were greeted by our mellow hosts and settled into our pod, a roomy, domed hut with spotless bedding, a toilet and electricity. It was lashing rain so we cooked burgers by a roaring stove in the barn-kitchen.
Back in the pod we snuggled into the huge bed and watched my emergency DVDs. It felt like home, and the two of us snuggled and laughed at Monsters Inc and fell asleep with the door open and sound of the rain patter on the porch.
THE following morning, there was sunshine and the glorious mile of white-sand beach at the end of the drive was calling. ‘Come on,’ I said, ‘up and at it Tom.’ He shook his head. ‘I want to stay in our pod.’
There was a determined look in his eye. ‘But what about the beach? Exploring?’ I knew even as I said it, I was wasting my time. He looked at me square in the eye and said: ‘What is the point of coming to a pod and then going out? I want to stay here, in the pod and watch DVDs.’ ‘Well you can’t.’ ‘But I’m on holiday.’
So am I, I thought, and I don’t want to spend it strong arming my son across somebody else’s lawn while he has a meltdown. I also don’t want to spend it watching Monsters Inc over and over until the Skittles run out.
I sat down on the bed. ‘I get it,’ I said. ‘When you find somewhere you love, somewhere that makes you feel cosy and safe, you don’t want to leave…’
‘Stop talking!’ Tom put his hands over his ears. My boys hate when I do emotional talking, but I do it anyway because I know they’re listening, really.
‘Okay. If you want a bacon sandwich you better get dressed and follow me to the kitchen.’
He did. Eventually. We went to the beach. I stood barefoot looking out to sea and cried as gentle waves lapped my ankles. Tom drew vast, strange shapes on the sand behind me. Back at the Coastguard Station he gocarted around the open fields with the Howard’s kids, then toasted marshmallows around our fire pit.
And as we crept into bed that night I wondered, have I found my new van?