WET WIPES, LOO ROLL AND CONDOMS! SURELY NOT?

UNTIL I was in my mid 50s I hadn’t even made it through the night camping in the back yard, but the brave new world of divorce introduced me to tent life at the same time as the joy of festivals.

Yeah man, I was suddenly waaay cool. ‘What do I need?’ I asked Wee Fran, veteran of Glastonbury at the ripe old age of 24. ‘Wet wipes, loo roll and condoms,’ she said. I choked on my Ovaltine. Surely not, I gasped. You might pull, she insisted. The only thing I intended to pull was my Cath Kidston festival socks.

On arrival at my pre-pitched orange tent in what looked like a refugee camp, where I found a deflating air mattress, the last thing on my mind was sex.

Fun? They call this fun? This was a humanitarian disaster. I needed an airdrop of blankets — and food that wasn’t vegan and overpriced.

I returned home less than converted to the idea of love in a tent. Or even just tents.

However, a year later, it was a different story. After meeting my partner we braved camping again with proper, borrowed kit. Us, a rural field, a duvet and our own pillows. It was so cold we slept fully dressed and we fought over the duvet. It was cosy. At night we huddled by the camp fire under the stars and an umbrella, and sucked on a bottle of vodka, before stumbling in the dark into the bushes for a pee because the shower block wouldn’t have been out of place in a PoW camp, and cleanliness suddenly seemed an unnecessary bourgeois concept. As did sex. Too many layers to remove. However the days were long. We had no television. I draw a veil . . . My partner was so cheered by events that we recently invested in our own gear and might have been applauding the opening of campsites had it not been stolen from my car. Turns out there is a god after all.