Escaping the Rain (in Birthday Style)

Picture the scene… it’s been raining for approximately ever (no news there) but you have a family camping trip booked with friends and relatives coming from across the country to share some soil. Do you stay or do you go? Well you go, of course, in the name of adventure and honouring your rain-battered camping culture.

Arriving on a campsite slap bang in the dense centre of Exmoor National Park you notice the gently meandering river that flows through the site and your lack of phone signal. Never mind that, there’s the unpacking to do, food to make and gazebo to assemble (usually such extravagant paraphernalia on camping trips would not be accepted but these are desperately rainy circumstances and without the gazebo, where else shall dinner be created?)

Dusk approaches and gazebo construction is abandoned due to the constant torrential downpour and quickly developing quagmire. A tarpaulin slung over a tree offers the only cover (the tents have been pitched but sitting separately in them whilst at a party would show a shameful lack of grit). To add to the general hullabaloo two friends are in dire straits in an unknown rural location with bicycles as their only form of transport. The lack of phone signal at the campsite makes getting in touch with them rather difficult and the night is spent wondering guiltily about their whereabouts and welfare (it turns out that they spend a luxurious night in a B&B listening to the rain and wondering the same about us!)

Ten hours, four sodden sleeping bags and a doubling in the river’s original size later the rain is still coming down relentlessly. Obviously understanding how near to ruin we really are a tent neighbour takes pity and invites us all round to their nearby house for a breakfast fry up (even, or especially, during severe flood warnings camping compatriots are some of the best folks you’ll ever meet). Having reached civilisation and whilst thawing out over a cup of strong tea whisperings of the Wimbledon final finally meet your ears.

Murray, in the final!? To miss it would be traitorous and, quite frankly in the circumstances, dangerous (or so you tell yourself as you furtively look around the room to gather the general opinion without giving your own wimpy standpoint away). No one, whether tennis fan or not, needs any more convincing. The lure of home with its log fire, ample bed space for all and sundry and undercover cooking facilities is just too strong.



Needless to say the rest of my birthday weekend spent living as if in the hippy commune of my dreams with all of my closest friends was magical. We ate everything we had bought for the camping trip (including one large pot of ten Pasta n’ Sauce sachets!), played made-up parlour games and cheered Andy and the-legend-who-is-Roger-Federer on in the final. In the last remaining light of my twenty third birthday we got lost on a walk and had to scramble under barbed wire and through multiple slushy bogs. Luckily by then it had stopped raining (this fact made my friends no less angry at me for having forced them into a twilight trek!). Giving up, going home and getting one year older was never so much fun.