Tentage ventage

When I was a child, we did not go to museums or art galleries, or listen to classical music, or discuss politics and philosophy at the dinner table. I had to work out how (and whether) to do these things for myself, once I'd realised they were options. I spent a while feeling slightly disadvantaged in certain types of company, but then I got over myself. I still can't reliably tell a Monet from a Manet, and anything featuring a harpsichord is just plinky plonky noise in my head, but so what. There are swings and there are roundabouts, and one of the greatest of the roundabouts is that while we did sometimes go on holiday, with very mixed outcomes, we never went camping. I may have lost my technical virginity to a grass seed on a Majorcan beach in 1975, I may still have sunburn scars from a trip to Israel in the years when sunscreen factors only went up to 5, and I may remember the pain of both those events vividly. But my parents never made me sleep in a tent. And for this I will be forever grateful.

I have of course slept in a tent since. The first time was at school, where for nearly three years we had compulsory CCF. I was not as good at getting out of CCF as I was at getting out of netball, though I never did more than the absolute bare minimum. But that was still quite a lot, and one Friday we had to go on an overnight camp. It was in the summer term and we left after an afternoon of athletics, during which ex-housemate-then-schoolmate-S managed to break her own nose doing a Fosbury Flop. So she didn't have to go, and I was deeply envious, but too shit at the high jump to manage such a stylish self-inflicted injury. I can't remember where they drove us on the bus, but I do remember that the tent was triangular, canvas, and primitive - complicated ropes and poles, and a fly sheet that would basically pour water in if it touched the inner tent at any point ever. We cooked sausages in lard on tiny solid fuel stoves. I had recently become a vegetarian and pleaded for a Pot Noodle but instead I had to eat half-burnt, half-raw chipolatas which did their bit to keep me a vegetarian for the next 30 years. We tried to go to sleep but they woke us up for some kind of character building exercise where were in teams and trying to find each other in the dark. My night vision is spectacularly poor and I fell into a ditch. I cried with relief when we got back on the bus the next morning, only silently, so no one would hear. Formative.

The next time was after my A-levels, when a group of us went to the Lake District and camped in a field next to a pub for two or three nights. There are blurry photos of us trying to dry our socks on sticks held over a fire. The rain was torrential, but we did have Pot Noodles. And we were old enough to drink in the pub (actually, I wasn't, but most people were and no one was that bothered in them days). I think my main feeling was happiness that my A-levels were over, and more happiness that I'd been invited on the trip (the cool kids were The Crowd. Ex-housemate-then-schoolmate S and I were Pseudo Crowdists. Our currency varied). And then cider. I don't really remember much else, except that we christened Fairy Liquid Hairy Diquid, and I call it that to this day.

And then there were the festival years. You have to camp at festivals, at least, you used to have to. And I went to quite a lot of them: one Reading, four Glastonburys, six or seven Womads. I wanted to be at the festivals, so I worked on the camping side of things: we got a better tent, discovered Thermarests (a genuine leap forward), ear plugs and head torches, located the showers and the best time to go to them (4 am)… and there is decent food and booze at festivals, even before the music and the other happenings. If you have a bit of cash, you can cope. Or I could till the last Womad I went to, the first on its new site: we drove there through sideways rain, and the sign at the gate said 'welcome to Womud'. The first night I planted my camping chair in the mud and made the best of it sinking six inches and nearly taking my wellies with it. The second night I was pissing in a pint glass in the tent (and bladders hold more than a pint, so this is quite a strain on the pelvic floor) because I couldn't face the journey to the toilets. There was no third night. We aquaplaned out of the car park and counted ourselves lucky. I have not braved a festival since. Though of course we don't have a car anymore (of which more later).

But in all these years there was only one actual camping "holiday". It was towards the end of my relationship with my Significant Ex*, and the time of my life when my behaviour was the most normative. We hung out with other couples around the same age. We went to barbecues. We drank lager in pub gardens and watched football on big screens. It was the fading years of the Major government, all ladettes and Ellesse trainers and Britpop, and frankly I was a bit lost. I can't really see any other reason I'd have agreed to a week's camping in north Wales. I think I must have felt that this was the kind of thing people like me did now.

We went with one of those other couples, who picked up a caravan from a parental home on the way. I can see even less point in caravans than in tents, because you have to drag the fucking things behind you down the motorway and then drag them all the way home, but I've never had caravanning inflicted on me so I won't dwell. We drove to a field pretty close to the middle of nowhere, they unhooked the caravan and we pitched our tent next to it.

And then… I don't know. It basically rained most of the time. The facilities were of the kind where you have to put money in to get a hot shower and it doesn't last very long. Only the female wash block had a washing up sink in it. This made me SO ANGRY. The boys did their share of the washing up in a bucket, and thought it was funny. I didn't think it was funny. There was a lot of smoking dope, playing cards and eating cake around the caravan table, and we ventured the occasional damp day trip. I got to see Portmeirion in the rain, which was interesting I guess, especially as I was feeling pretty trapped myself. I also came to understand that I didn't like playing cards or eating cake, or, really, smoking dope. It occurred to me that I seemed to be spending a lot of time doing things I didn't really like doing (this felt like a big realisation, but then I was pretty stoned). So I took to the tent and read a novel, which came across as antisocial, I knew, but sometimes needs must.

The tin hat on that holiday was the night I needed to wee in the middle of the night, and it was raining. The wash block was a longish walk across a dark field, and we were the only people in our corner, so I decided to venture out in my pants and just wee behind the tent. I unzipped the inner tent and crawled out through the porch, which was held up by two poles. Unfortunately I stood up too early, and flipped the pool of cold rainwater that had been collecting between the poles up in the air and then down onto my naked back. I looked up at the sky as I did my wee, and I swore I would never do this to myself again. 

All these delightful experiences have only served to cement my view that camping is for refugees, masochists, or people who are too off their heads to care where, or even if, they sleep. Why would anyone *choose* to dispense with almost every benefit civilisation has given us - rooms you can stand up in, privacy, mattresses, electricity, kitchens, bathrooms, windows, a degree of climate control, cupboards - for a shit version of the same, which you have to a) buy in the first place despite having the real thing, b) keep somewhere in your house with all the other stuff that you only use once a year, and c) transport to where you will be having your authentic nature experience, assemble, then disassemble a few days later so you can do the whole thing in reverse, quite possibly involving another assembly so it can all dry out. Seriously, you can keep your cool boxes and your gazebos and your sporks and your wet wipes. I do not need them. The world does not need them.

And yet.

I really miss ex-housemate S. I always thought she would move back north too one day, but for various perfectly understandable reasons it hasn't happened. We do still see each other, but not like we used to, not in that easy, mooching around town kind of way that we started in Blackpool in the 80s and refined over several towns and several decades. So a couple of years ago I suggested that we might all go on holiday together one half term (has to be school holidays, annoyingly but also understandably, on account of her a) having had some children and b) working in a primary school).

I did some research, looked at some family-friendly resorts in Spain, Greece and Turkey, made some suggestions. I wouldn't remotely choose a family-friendly resort in Spain, Greece or Turkey myself, you understand, but I was thinking about the collective. Sunshine, swimming pool, beach, mini-marts, cheap beer / tapas / meze / pizza, hanging around in various permutations and combinations doing nothing very much. You get the picture.

This idea didn't fly. I'm still not sure why. I'm inclined to blame the patriarchy, but then I'm inclined to blame the patriarchy for most things. But for whatever reason, chilled out beach holiday went into the washing machine, and by the time the spin cycle had finished we were going camping in the Lake District.

I should have protested harder. I suspected that ex-housemate S actually knew fuck all about camping, and what she did know, she'd forgotten. "It'll be fun!" she said. The last time she told me something would be fun, she was talking about the 72 hour Magic Bus journey from Athens to London she persuaded me to take in 1991. [It was not fun. Nothing about it was fun. It was wildly uncomfortable, sexist, racist, in parts actively terrifying, we drove through an actual war zone, we arrived at Victoria Coach Station with a police escort, and my ankles did not return to their normal size for a week].

But I am not bringing up children, and I have learnt that - generally - if you are making plans that involve them you should defer to their parents, because for some reason children don't want to hang out in interesting little backstreet bars reading Joan Didion novellas, drinking ouzo, and playing backgammon. So eventually (via a plea for Center Parcs - at least they have a spa!) I was ok, fine, camping, whatever, and I found a little campsite that was next to a community swimming pool, near a train station, and had a Co-op and two pubs within walking distance.

No. They wanted to go to the National Trust campsite on the empty side of Windermere... I think again partly because they just didn't think through how fucking far from anywhere that is, and also because they didn't actually own a tent, and they wanted one of those ones that is already there and has beds and furniture in it.

Now they might not have had a tent, but we don't have a car, so then we were getting into serious logistics. We booked a camping spot on the edge of the lake, just down the hill from their megatent, made arrangements for them to pick up the stuff we couldn't carry on their way past, and headed for the 555. I kept saying things to myself like "well, it will be a beautiful wilderness experience".

We got there first, sans tent, and we dumped our rucksacks on the goose-shit covered spur of land we were directed to, sat on them, and wondered if it was too early to start drinking (it clearly wasn't, but then we remembered that we'd left the box of wine with the tent and had already established that National Trust campsite shops do not sell beer).

Our buddies turned up a bit later, cabin-feverish from many hours on the M6 and wearing their winter coats (it was not a warm May) but bearing our stuff, including the organic hot dogs I'd bought thinking they would be easy to cook on an open fire and eat with, I don't know, some nice salads and wraps and things.

Dinner that night was organic hot dogs rolled up in white sliced bread with tomato ketchup. The kids went to bed in the megatent around 8.30, and the adults sat outside drinking wine and shivering gently (despite the fire, it really was not a warm May) for about another hour, then called it a night. We descended to our normal tent and got into our sleeping bags for the warmth.

Being kept awake by goose-honking is a kind of torture, it turns out. Please! you cry, after some hours. Just PLEASE SHUT UP for FIVE MINUTES, I am SO TIRED that if I GO TO SLEEP you will not WAKE ME UP. *honk* they reply. *honk honk* - pause for 180 seconds - *honk*. Around three in the morning I decided a shower was the thing, beat the queue and all that. Three till five I lay awake with a cold damp towel round my head, wondering if it was too early to start drinking. When it got light, the bastard geese went to sleep (I genuinely did not know nocturnal geese were a thing) and so, for a bit, did I.

So Day 1 of the Beautiful Wilderness Experience started with tent hair and sleep deprivation, but nothing too serious. Our pals had some kind of family Lake District experience pre-booked (I'll be honest, this was a slight point of annoyance, but all the earlier points about family dynamics apply, and god knows I would not want to try and entertain kids all day in the Beautiful Wilderness) and M asked me what I wanted to do. The absolute non-negotiable #1 thing was 'buy earplugs', so we walked into Ambleside (four miles? five?), did that, had a nice lunch, bought some nice salads and wraps and things for the next day, got the ferry back, and settled in our sleeping bags (for the warmth) with our books till they returned.

That evening was one of the two nights a week the National Trust will make you pizzas, if you are organised enough to book in advance (we were). They were not cheap, but they were pretty good, if not the hottest by the time we'd carried them across the campsite, and I was working on my optimism. Hey, we have pizza, salad and wine. We also have to go to bed at 9.30 again because it's cold and the kids are asleep in the megatent, but you know what, we're tired, that's fine. And we have earplugs!

The next morning, we awoke to the steady thrum of rain on flysheet. Ah, the joy of the combination of chilly and humid (my towel never did get dry. It retains camping residue to this day). Our co-campers had another day of organised family fun to attend to, so we bid them farewell and basically stayed in our tent till hunger drove us from it. For reasons which I'm sure represent our respective subconsciouses at work, I was reading Toni Morrison's Beloved, and M was reading The Narrow Road To The Deep North. At some point during that relentlessly wet morning, trapped in a confined space with no way of escape that wasn't going to involve getting at best much wetter, we realised we were both reading books about slavery.

Eventually we had to eat, and we made our way up to the empty (and surprisingly dark) megatent, where M fashioned a lunch of nice salads and wraps, including lighting the fire to heat some things up. In the rain. We ate inside, and I had a little cry at the misery of it all, then we returned to our sleeping bags (for the warmth) and wondered if it was too early to start drinking. It clearly wasn't, but we'd finished the wine. Never mind, I thought, our guys will be back soon and we'd agreed that tonight, we would trek to the nearest pub (approx 2 miles) for dinner.

Around 4.30 they returned, and ex-housemate S came down the hill in her cagoule. She brought more wine (yes!) but also bad news - they were cold and tired, and they weren't up to walking to the pub, so were staying put.

Well we had been hanging out for the exotic allure of a pub (Chairs! Ceilings!) All. Fucking. Day. by this point, so we decided that we *were* up to it. And so we got our full waterproofs on, and assembled our walking poles, and set off across the fields in search of the Outgate Inn. It appeared as a beacon through the murk (I may be exaggerating here, it was only about 6.30 when we got there, but that's absolutely how it felt) and as we staggered in through the door my glasses steamed up and I thought, oh, we will be ok here for a while.

We peeled off our waterproofs, and M went to the bar for beer and the menu. He returned bearing two pints, with a glassy look in his eye. Jo, he said, they Have Rooms. I thought he meant in the conceptual sense: imagine if it wasn't half term and/or we'd booked well in advance. We could have stayed here, in the comfort and the dryness, for money! But what he meant was: the Outgate Inn was under new management, and they had not quite finished refurbishing the rooms, so they weren't taking bookings, but if you happened to walk in off the fields and look desperate enough, they could provide you with a bed with a mattress and pillows and sheets and a duvet, and a bathroom with a hot shower and dry towels, and electric lighting and carpets and a *full English breakfast sitting at a table inside*. For money. 

Oh my god, I said, book it before anyone else does.

They laughed very hard at us when they realised we had no luggage (not even toothbrushes) because we were actually supposed to be sleeping in a tent a couple of miles away, but they were lovely - the landlady lent us shampoo and shower gel, and even the house phone so I could let ex-housemate S know we would not be back till morning, as our mobiles were dead. I don't think she took it that well but I also think that was mainly because she'd have loved to have been having a pint and a burger and then getting into a real bed like a normal person.

And honestly, that bed. We stretched out in it like starfish till our limbs unknotted, and then we slept like logs, showered like heroes and breakfasted like kings. We bid our hosts and their kids goodbye (we were the only guests, so it was basically like hanging out in their family room) and marched back across the damp fields fortified by creature comforts and pork products. Only one more day to go! We can do this! We might even get those books about slavery finished!

We burst into the megatent brimming with good cheer, to find ex-housemate S packing things up. I can't do this anymore, she said, we're going home. I didn't have to ask her if she was sure, and I couldn't even pretend to be sorry. She did rather marvellously organise a lift home for us, via her niece R, who was coming out to see us all anyway, and we did all manage a very nice lunch in Ambleside on the way back.

We have never spoken of it since, and (as is often the way with long and successful friendships, and certainly with this one) I suspect it will be at least a decade before we do.

For reasons I do not fully understand, we still have our tent.

joella

* After we split up, people would sometimes ask me how things had worked out (there was an obvious wealth disparity between us). I used to reply 'let's just say that he got the flat and I got the tent'. This was unfair on several levels but funny enough to be worth it at the time.

Lights are changing

I don't work on Fridays, as a rule. I generally use them to get things done (admin, digging, shopping) but I spent a good few hours of this one lying in bed, interspersing staring at the ceiling with staring at the wall. I associate this kind of lying around with grief, I did a fair amount of it after my mum died. And if I try to untangle the thoughts in my head, I think I am grieving. Not for anyone in particular, though I have read and heard stories over the last few weeks that have had tears rolling down my cheeks, and I have a few (#metoo) of my own. But for all of us who will never express our fullest humanity, never do our best work, because we are too scared. I'm going to be generous and include the men, even the ones who are very much not woke, because we are taught to be endlessly generous to the men, and I haven't run out of that yet. It's like Catholicism, never quite leaves you.

This stuff has been building for a year at least, since the US managed to elect a full strength no filter misogynist to the most powerful office in the world. History will damn them for that, if there are any of us left around to write it, but in the meantime we have to live with it, and the pressure is starting to build. The pussy grabber in chief seems fairly inviolable himself (he is the President, ergo his conduct is presidential, right?), but elsewhere, cracks are appearing in conspiracies of silence that have lasted near-lifetimes. And it's waking up all kinds of sleeping feelings.

(No content warning here apart from general fucking patriarchy, but I know it's been a hard month)

I think what set me off was the Hallowe'en episode of the new season of Stranger Things. It ended with the Ghostbusters song and suddenly (and unexpectedly) I wanted to cry. I was back on an overnight ferry to Rotterdam, in the autumn of 1985. I had just started my A-level Geography course and we were going on a field trip. There was a bar, and a dance floor, and I was a couple of Southern Comforts in (nobody bothered too much about underage drinking in those days) and Ghostbusters came on. And I *knew the moves*. So I was up and out there and giving it my all. Very enthusiastically, as I recall. At some point during the song, one of my schoolmates came and shouted in my ear. She said 'Joella*, stop it, you look like you're for sale'.

Seems weird that I remember this so clearly, but it was a proper Moment in my young life, and I do. I remember stopping my dancing, a little out of breath and a little sweaty, and wondering what on earth she meant. I remember looking down at myself, and I was wearing a white T-shirt tucked into a pair of (I now realise) terrible 80s jumbo cords, and bare feet - I still prefer to dance in bare feet. I probably didn't have a bra on, but I was a late developer and didn't have much to put into one at the time, and I could never really be arsed with them till I did. Then I looked around me, and I realised that everyone else who was dancing was a boy. I think that was her issue. That, and my inelegance maybe. I've never been a smooth mover.

But seriously, I was DOING THE GHOSTBUSTERS DANCE. I was FIFTEEN YEARS OLD. I was dancing with boys my own age, who were doing the SAME DANCE. It was FINE. None of them fancied me anyway, because I was stroppy and had no tits. We were CHILDREN.

I mean, I say that, but I had a Saturday job in a bread shop by then, and I'd already experienced (among other delights) its owner coming over while I was setting out the barmcakes, sticking his erection into my thigh and muttering 'if you were sixteen, I'd rape you'. I knew about the evil that men did, all fifteen year old girls do. I wasn't an idiot. But I was at a fucking disco on a fucking ferry getting a bit pissed and having a laugh, and I got policed by one of my own. That's what stayed with me. They make us police ourselves. Then it's even more our fault if something bad happens.**

I could tell you more about my schooldays but life's too short. I genuinely worry for people who see them as the best days of their life, and suspect most of them weren't girls. But whatevs. We grew on up and we grew on out. And we ended up in a world where versions of this self-policing are entirely normal: don't do this, don't wear that, don't go there.

For example. Some twenty years later, I was completing my plumbing NVQ, and installing a pretend bathroom in a workshop to get the requisite number of points. This required being in college in the daytime, with the apprentices doing their day release. It was educational, though none of them took the slightest notice of me. Apart from the only girl among them, who came to talk to me. How do I get them to leave me alone, she said. They never leave me alone.

Well, I said. I can tell you it gets better eventually, but in the meantime, the only thing I can say is, tie your hair back. Don't wear any make up to college or on site. Wear a crew neck top so they can't look down it when you're bending over, and find workwear trousers that fit you round the waist, so they can't look down those when you're installing your pretend bathroom. Don't flirt, don't giggle, and get the best marks. Basically, don't give them anything to work with.

What I *didn't* say was 'talk to the tutors and let them know you're uncomfortable', because they were my tutors too, and I knew it wouldn't have made any difference. It's on you to manage this, is basically what I said, and you will have to learn how to do it.

I might as well have said, don't look like you're for sale. Don't have any fun, don't play around and explore the power that you *do* have, don't mess with the programme. I thought I was giving sensible advice, and - given that not long before that I'd been squatting on top of an industrial fridge in a pub kitchen drilling holes in the wall for pipe clips and one of the chefs reached up in passing to squeeze the only part of me he could reach - arguably I was. He got my knee, which was his bad luck, as my trousers had kneepads, but seriously, you're out there, you're fair game, even when you're nearly 40, even in a fleece hoodie and steel toecaps and armed with a drill, even when your boss is two metres away.

But it's not the answer, is it. It just makes us all responsible for our own vulnerability, and that fucking stinks. These stories that are tumbling out now, piling up like snowdrifts, are the consequence of that. It's not like we haven't had feminism for decades, it just hasn't been enough. It still isn't. I feel a strange sense of shame that I've internalised all of this, developed my strategies, been grateful to get older and have to deal with it less, while more generations of girls grow up and go out into the world and find themselves needing to work out how to deal with something they should never have to experience, at best, and survive something much, much worse at worst. The stories from women in their 20s and 30s have made me rage. We should have sorted this shit out by now.

But this might be a moment that there's no going back from. We might get to smash a little bit of the patriarchy, finally. I hope I'm not too old to play my part in that. I'm certainly angry enough.

joella

tl;dr: (and related to the title of this post) oh my heart is sore at the moment. If yours is too, listen to this and it might help a little.

* Not actually Joella, but I don't go by the name they called me at school no more. 
** She went on to become Head Girl, and I, despite my "Oxbridge potential", subsequently realised, did not even get to be a prefect. I don't really know why (and at this point I really, really don't care) but I expect it was because of this kind of behaviour. They knocked my school down the other week, and I can't say I was sad. I always had the impression they never really wanted to let girls in in the first place, and they certainly didn't want ones who made any noise. 

Just when I thought I could not be stopped

All hail YouTube and last.fm for bringing the early 80s back to life. I am currently convinced that Ghosts is The Best Song Ever By Anyone, just as I was 25? 26? years ago when it first riveted me to my seat in front of Top of the Pops.

Ah. What the 80s did for us.

joella

Cherry Lips

I got a little bag of goodies from my sister for Christmas. It was mostly Fairtrade stuff for the kitchen, and very nice too, but the real gem was glowing red at the bottom of the bag. It was a packet of Cherry Lips.

I've never been a sweet lover, but I adore Cherry Lips. I haven't seen them for years, since the Chocolate House in Lytham, where I used to buy them, turned into a discount perfumery or something equally pointless. They are part of my adolescence, hard and red and perfumed and impractical. They jam your jaws together, get stuck in your teeth and taste like soap. A bag of them lasts for months, as evidenced by the fact that I'm only about halfway through this lot and we're nearly out of winter.

It's like chewing on a little bit of the 1980s. It's the Ashes to Ashes soundtrack in my mouth. Weird.

joella

I never took the advice in that book

A couple of weeks ago, and apropos of nothing as far as I know, M asked me about the T-shirt that's been hanging on the wall since we moved into this house together in 2001. It's a badly-made, once-white garment bearing the following message (hand-painted, in block capitals):

"Don't saddle me with your ideals
And spare me all your guilt"

What *is* that quote, he said, and what did you mean by it? And why is it hanging on the wall?

I was hungover and sitting on the loo at the time, so it took me a while to explain. But the basics are as follows: it's a line from Billy Bragg's I Don't Need This Pressure, Ron -- one of the B-side tracks on 1985's Days Like These 12". I can (and did) quote the entire song by way of big-picture context, but that line was the one that I cared about most. 'Don't saddle me with your ideals' is a fairly obvious teenage feminist statement: I don't want to be part of your world, and watch me not be. 'And spare me all your guilt' is a bit harder to articulate. I'm still not sure what BB meant by it, but I'm not sure that matters. What *I* meant by it is perhaps best expressed by something Yoko Ono said on this week's Desert Island Discs: "My life is not about appeasing other people. My life is about being myself."

I painted it onto a T-shirt when I was about 17 because I wanted the world to know that this was how I felt. But it never really worked: every time I wore it out men would read it and say something along the lines of 'I wouldn't mind straddling you'. No, I would say, you haven't read it properly. So then they would stare at my breasts a bit harder. V quickly I realised that this T-shirt would only bring me grief, and I stopped wearing it. But I could never bear to part with it. I created it with the best of intentions. And it's hanging on the wall 20 years later because it's still true.

Fair enough, said M. I thought there must be a story behind it. I felt warm inside.

A few days later, I was sorting through photos upstairs when I heard Scholarship Is the Enemy of Romance playing loud downstairs. This could only be C, our new housemate, who has a sticker on her bike which says 'I'd rather be listening to Billy Bragg'. I've never lived with a Billy Bragg fan before. I grinned like a lunatic, knowing which track was coming up next, and ran downstairs to catch it -- I have it, obviously, but I don't think I've played it for about five years. 'So don't saddle me with your ideals, and spare me all your guilt', I sang from the middle room. 'For a poet with all the answers has never yet been built', she sang back from the kitchen.

Truth is stranger than fiction.

joella