A tent is a tent, right?

Husband, having been a boy, loves camping. When we were students, our first holidays together were camping trips. For the first one, based in Hull, we borrowed a tiny tent and drove off to the Lake District in search of Roman artefacts. (I will never forget trying to find Hadrian’s Wall in the north of England. We stopped Marigold, my bright orange car, by a dry stone wall: ‘Do you think this is it?’)

Husband - or Boyfriend as he was at the time – wanted to ‘rough it.’ He longed to camp in the mountains, hunting and foraging for food to provide for me. There must be something deep in his psyche as this wasn’t particularly a feature of our relationship. Luckily I camped as a child and I’ve always despised campsites that have lots of facilities: a TV room, swimming pool, showers, a shop and a restaurant. That’s not proper camping! However I wasn’t willing to skin rabbits either.

We usually compromised on a farmer’s field with loo and a spidery shower by way of facilities. One campsite in the Isle of Wight was just a field and we had to walk to a local pub for anything more serious than a pee. This type of site just about fulfilled Husband’s yearning to be caveman. Back in the Lake District, another place was perfect - the farmer appeared early in the morning with fresh eggs. Oh joy. And Husband’s desire to provide meant that he got up to make breakfast (every time). No wonder I married him.

Once, we got complacent about our ability to find suitable sites and left it too late in the day. We couldn’t find a site anywhere so we had to beg a publican to let us camp in their garden. He wasn’t keen but we promised to be up and out early in the morning. Another great place was a cheese farm in Cheddar which we stayed in for several days: years later we took the children back to the same site for their first camping trip. One place, though I can’t remember where it was, one of the other idiots in the field left a gate open and our field filled with sheep during the night. We had our dog Pepper with us on that trip and she woke us by bouncing around inside the walls of the tiny two man tent at the sound of the sheep.

Anyway, memories of my camping holidays weren’t what I was going to tell you about. Ever since we came to Thailand, Husband has been espousing Thai campsites, which, he assured me, were luxurious. I’ve all but lost interest in camping. It’s true, it’s great fun but when you’re young but it’s hard work when you’re older and I need my comforts.

But that was how I found myself this last weekend in a hotel/campsite in Kanchanaburi, Thailand, and now I’ve run out of space. Tomorrow I’ll have to tell you about our tent, the wild elephants, how I won the worst mother of the year award and the trip to casualty for skull and spine x-rays.