Camping is challenging but worth it – any other trip will feel like the lap of luxury
Even if you’re sureyou’d hate camping, I recommend you try it at least once. Because after camping you’ll notice aspects of every other holiday will have elements of luxury, from packing and unpacking to showering and sleeping.
I can’t remember my first camping trip. I grew up with a mother committed to ensuring her children saw as much of their home state as possible, even if this involved excessively long drives to the middle of nowhere. I was also a Brownie then a girl guide. I liked camping, I had friends who liked it, later I married a guy who liked it, and we had kids who did too.
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On one hand, who wouldn’t? Stunning views in the day, starry skies at night; beautiful beaches and bush; time to read, to wander, to swim, to think, to talk.
Then there are the double-edged swords. No reception feels freeing, unless someone gets hurt or the car breaks down; food somehow tastes better but, unless there’s a shop within cheating distance, you have to BYO everything. If there are toilets you have to contend with the smell, and if there aren’t you have to find a spot secluded enough to avoid getting seen but not so secluded you end up lost.
There are aspects of camping I don’t like at all. Packing is a pain. It doesn’t just involve clothes, bedding and food. You need tents, tarps, a stove, fuel, lighter, an Esky, pots, pans, bowls, knives, spoons, washing-up liquid, towels, tea towels, chairs, chopping boards, mozzie repellant, hats, coats, jackets, beanies, scarves, swimmers, boots, torches, batteries for the torches, first aid supplies …
Sometimes there are predatory insects: mosquitoes, flies, leeches, jellyfish. Possums are endearing, until they spend the night unzipping bags, stealing food and fighting more viciously than cats. Native mice are cute, until they’re scuttling in the night and your sleep is interrupted by the fear they will crawl over your face. And snakes, spiders and ants, well, sometimes they bite.
There are moments of exciting exploration and blissful relaxation. But boy do you have to earn them. You have to pitch a tent before you can sleep, set up a makeshift kitchen before you can cook, pack supplies – even a map – before you can hike. You’d think that by the time you roll into bed you’d sleep well, but even if the wildlife behaves, lying in a bag of synthetic fabric that makes a noise every time you move, on an air mattress that feels less like the air than like the ground, in very close proximity to other family members, isn’t necessarily restorative.
There is also the work of leaving: trying to stuff sleeping bags into sacks that seem half the appropriate size, cleaning the tent, drying the tent, packing up the tent. And then, when you get home, another round of unpacking and cleaning and putting away.
By the time you’ve let the (brown) bathwater out of the tub and scrubbed the filthy rim it left behind, you might vow never to camp again. But the experience might yet pay off. Next time you go away somewhere with walls, beds, electricity and shops, you won’t believe how easy it is.
I was struck by this the last time my family had a weekend away – at a house. Rather than make an extensive list of necessities in advance and check off items as we packed ahead of time, we just chucked some stuff into bags on the day. Rather than pack for the kids – or at least supervise their packing – I just told them how many nights we were going and left them to sort themselves out. Rather than plan our meals and shop in preparation, I grabbed some food from the cupboard and fridge – supplies could be replenished easily.
On the way I said I knew this haphazard approach would mean we’d forgotten stuff but reasoned it wouldn’t matter. So long as we all had undies. At that point I realised I had not in fact packed undies and added a slight detour to our route. A subsequent discovery was that our six-year-old had packed three pairs of PJs – one for every night – but no clothes. Another child remembered thongs but forgot shoes. If we’d been staying in the wilderness this would have been an issue, but we were staying in a HOUSE!
If you pack the wrong clothes for camping and get snowed in, you might risk hypothermia; if you haven’t packed enough food, you might starve; if you run out of fuel, you can’t cook; if all your torch batteries die, you can’t light up the night. But if the nearest shops are a 20-minute drive away, the stakes are gloriously low. And don’t get me started on the luxuries: soft beds, electric lights, flushing loos, privacy, a fridge.
Even if you expect to hate camping and regret choosing to go while you’re there, it will pay off afterwards; when being in a normal house – even a rundown shack – feels like the lap of luxury.
Emma Wilkins is a Tasmanian journalist whose freelance work has appeared in newspapers, magazines and literary journals in Australia and beyond
post can be a considered and meticulously composed 3,000-word essay, or a spurted splat of speculation or whimsy. No rules about structure or consistency of tone. A blogpost can be half-baked and barely proved: I feel zeroresponsibility to “do my research” before pontificating. Purely for my own pleasure, I do often go deep. But it’s nearer the truth to say that some posts are outcomes of rambles across the archives of the internet, byproducts of the odd information trawled up and the lateral connections created.
“Ramble” is the right word. When blogging, I can meander, take short cuts and trespass in fields where I don’t belong. Because I’m not pitching an idea to a publication or presenting my credentials as an authority, I am able to tackle subjects outside my expertise. It’s highly unlikely I could persuade a magazine to let me write an essay comparing Bob Fosse and Lenny Bruce, or find a thread connecting Fellini’s Amarcord, Wes Anderson’s The French Dispatch and Jacques Tati’s Playtime.
In recent months, I’ve ruminated about Wiki-Fear and the sticky way that upsetting information attaches itself to favourite artists and their music; looked at fame-as-royalty and royalty-as-celebrity via Dame Edna Everage and Clive James; and remembered the suggestive Flake commercials of my youth.
As those examples show, one of the great things about blogging, for a professional journalist, is that you can write about topics that aren’t topical. You are unshackled from schedules. An old record or TV programme you’ve stumbled on, or simply remembered, is fair game. YouTube’s arrival in 2005 brought a new dimension to blogging. The two go together so well because they are both servants of 21st-century archive fever, instruments of the atemporal culture brought about by the internet, social media and streaming.
The motto at the top of my primary outlet, Blissblog, twists Tricky’s lyric, “my brain thinks bomb-like”. My brain thinks blog-like: the digressive rhythms, the lurching between tones, it’s how my mind moves when it’s not behaving itself in print. I realised that I had, if not a problem, then perhaps some kind of disorder, when I started to spin off satellite blogs initially dedicated to the books Energy Flash, Retromania, Shock and Awe, but soon splintering to encompass particular obsessions and modes.
Freedom and doing it for free go together. I’ve resisted the idea of going the Substack or newsletter route. If I were to become conscious of having a subscriber base, I’d start trying to please them. And blogging should be the opposite of work. But if it’s not compelled, blogging is compulsive: an itch I have to scratch. And for every post published, there are five that never get beyond notepad scrawls or fumes in the back of my mind.
I’m heartened that some of the younger generation have caught the bug – including my own son Kieran Press-Reynolds, who operates his own outlet and contributes to the collective music blog No Bells. I can’t imagine stopping blogging – even once there are just a few of us still standing.
Simon Reynolds is a music journalist and author
with eating roast penguin).
It did the best for my four-yearold, introducing that bulletproof comic preschool element, a fart, but making it “frosty”. Even so, it was moralistic (“sometimes the silliest moments create the most magical memories of friendship”), formulaic and relied heavily on that cardinal sin of writing, telling and not showing. You can deploy mischievous eye twinkles only so many times before the frosty-farting little snowman starts to appear as deranged as Jack Nicholson in The Shining.
The algorithm is honest – in its robotic way – about its shortcomings as a bedtime storyteller. It offered that, if used appropriately, it could provide a “time-saving” tool (again with the optimization!) to “co-create” with your child while “teaching morals and values” (Lou never once taught me morals, except that jaywalking is acceptable), and “fostering of love of imagination” (though I’ve yet to come across a child so pragmatic that they need help with that).
But it cautioned that “it’s essential to use ChatGPT as a supplement to, rather than a replacement for, your own storytelling”, and pointed out that overreliance on AI at bedtime might “encourage passivity”, both in the tellers and the listeners. Well, duh. Bedtime is arguably my most defenseless parenting moment of the day. The idea that I’d be able to use the text as a jumping-off point for my own creativity and not simply read it word for word is as realistic as serving my kids pâté en croute for dinner.
The real issue, I concluded as I mulled it over more, has less to do with the skill of the AI model, which will no doubt improve, and even less to do with the issue of feeding into the demands of our children. It’s a fundamental misunderstanding of how much joy a kid is taking from a story, tailored so specifically to him, and how much he’s taking from the hearing of that story, any story, filtered through the medium of a beloved parent who’s looking him in the eye, or stroking his head, and not craning towards the blue light of a phone like a dystopian sunflower.
Until we merge more fully with the machine, until AI can mimic my voice, my history, my personal creative instincts, the entire act remains a simulation, from the way the words are put together to the feelings they are supposed to evoke. Which is likely why my second-grader stopped asking my husband for AI stories a couple weeks in, pronouncing them “repetitive”.
So, as we wrap up this AI-fueled year, I plead with fellow parents to resist the pull of AI’s tentacles at bedtime. Everything in moderation, sure – there are a lot of bedtimes. But the idea that my child will grow up with a profound lack of the kind of whimsical bedtime joy that can only come from co-creating morals-driven, hyper-specific stories with me is ludicrous. She’s evolutionarily programmed to find that joy and whimsy, even if it takes us grownups a moment to catch up.
On the way to school the other day, we spied a group of pigeons congregating on a street lamp.
“What are they doing there?” she asked. After a beat, she answered her own question: “Going to school, right?”
In the remaining blocks, the two of us created a parallel world, one in which squirrels and pigeons and sparrows were off to schooldays of learning how to hide acorns, and fly, and eat worm snacks. We’ve kept it going every morning since. As I dragged her scooter hurriedly behind me one morning, she forced me to slow down, pointing to a squirrel scurrying over the stone wall separating the street from the park.
“He was late to school, just like us,” she said. “Too bad he forgot his scooter at home.” I could swear I saw her eyes actually twinkle.
Sophie Brickman is a contributor to the New Yorker, the New York Times and other publications, and the author of Baby, Unplugged: One Mother’s Search for Balance, Reason, and Sanity in the Digital Age
Until we merge more fully with the machine, until AI can mimic my voice, my history, my personal creative instincts, the entire act remains a simulation