I’ll be going back to my tales of the past soon enough but today we’re going right to the present, right to my life in isolation. There’s stuff going on around here, stuff I don’t want to talk about on the blog, but around the stuff, I’m not actually minding isolation too much. I’m working from home at one job and furloughed (on full pay!) from the other. I’ve got scrapbooks to finish and recorders to play – and a violin I can’t play because I can’t tune it – and vegetables to grow. A book to write and a blog to write. I’ve done some painting, I’ve walked 40+km so far – that’s three walks to the shop at the top of the road and nearly 40 circuits around the local rec.
But the most exciting thing I’ve done – and I use the word exciting in terms of These Weird Unprecedented Times – is camp out in the garden.
I’ve never camped in the garden. I’ve dried wet and muddy tents in the garden. I’ve put up new shiny tents in the garden. I’ve sat out in the garden in my tent, reading, enjoying the sun and using it as a shelter. But I’ve never slept in it.
So on Good Friday I pitched the tent. It’s a two-man tunnel tent, by far the biggest tent I’ve ever owned. It’s pretty cosy for two people but it’s very spacious for one. It has a porch! It also has two broken poles. I probably discovered that last time I used it but I’d totally forgotten and no doubt I will again until the next time I use it. I’m not very good at pitching tents – that is, I’m excellent at pitching tents but I can never pull it tight and the roof always sags. It probably didn’t help that I decided to be lazy and not peg out the guys. It was an absolutely calm weekend, otherwise I wouldn’t have bothered with the tent at all.
I spent most of the day lying in the porch, where my face was protected from the sun. It’s more shady than lying in the grass and more comfortable than sitting on the bench under the umbrella. I’d brought in my camp blanket to lie on and my tiny folding table… well, because I like it, although it was also useful for keeping my phone and camera and drink safe.
Around lunchtime, I emerged from the tent to do some gardening. I’d grown two tiny pots of lettuces on the windowsill and it was time to transplant them into a trough in the garden. I’m not an experienced gardener but the way it works is that you put the compost in the troughs, tear the baby pots apart very carefully and then pick out each individual baby lettuce seedling, which then gets popped in a little hole in the waiting trough. A few weeks on, they’re thriving.
I went inside for lunch but in the evening, after my government-mandated walk around the rec, I got out my cooking stuff. I have a little gas stove and a set of stacking copper-bottomed pots and I sat in the garden and cooked some pasta.
It feels like I have a lot of stuff for eating. There’s my plate bag, my washing-up bag, my dry-stuff tub, my cookset, my collapsible colander and my stove – and that’s before we get to the food. And I didn’t bring out my camping knives and I still haven’t got a grater to live in my camping kitchen box. I’m not wild camping with that lot.
I didn’t wash up that night. I brought most of it into the porch and put it on the little table and then I crawled into the main compartment with a headtorch and a book… and my phone and charger block. The house wifi doesn’t really reach the garden, which was frustrating and also makes it sound like my garden is big enough to open to the general public. I had my self-inflating mat, the pillows from my bed, both my camp blankets and both my sleeping bags. I hoped the two-season sleeping pod would be enough for that weather but in the end, I opened the four-season bag and used it over the top as a blanket and it did get pretty chilly overnight.
Not that I slept for quite a while. That’s partly because I never sleep well in a tent but it’s partly because of the hedgehogs. We have hedgehogs in the garden. Dad’s been putting plates of hedgehog biscuits out for them since at least October but the most we’ve ever got is glimpses – sometimes he goes outside at 10pm to put out the food and finds one waiting by the door wondering why its dinner is so late.
What I learnt from camping is that the hedgehogs emerge about 8.30 and stay active all night. Hedgehog biscuits are really loud and hedgehogs squeak and squffle while they’re eating. They run around the garden making squeaky snuffly noises. They rattle the plates and they switch on the motion-activated lights on the front of the garage. And as soon as I hear them, I lean out of my bed and open a corner of the outer door and lie back in a very awkward position to watch. As long as I opened it slowly, they weren’t bothered by the zip and once I wasn’t making zip noises, they didn’t even know I was there, watching them eat. I sent my mum hedgehog emojis every time I heard them and she kept asking things like “Is it the same hedgehog?” I don’t know! I find one hedgehog looks much like the other and they’ve all turned up in the same brown spiky outfit.
In the morning, it was hot in the tent. It always is. I tend to wake up with the sun but it had been a late night of hedgehog-watching and it was gone 8am before I decided I had to go and visit the house. Normally I’d take a groundsheet outside and sit on it to eat my breakfast but toast works better in a toaster in a kitchen. I took a drink in an enamel mug outside afterwards and sat in a garden chair to enjoy the earlyish morning sunshine, much to the disgust of next door’s cat, who believes our garden is her kingdom until at least lunchtime.
That morning’s holiday-at-home activity consisted of walking up the road to the shop to get some bread. On holiday, we always used to get up at dawn and pop to the campsite shop for fresh bread for breakfast. A loaf of bread in a bag in late morning isn’t quite the same but for my purposes it would do. And taking the long way back via the dogwalking field down the side of the road instead of shortcutting across the rec led me to a hazel grove. I’m not into cutting bits of wood for myself so I picked some bits that had either fallen or been cut by someone else and brought them back for my next camping at home activity.
Whittling. I was taught the basics of whittling at Try Inspire Qualify eighteen months ago. I own a good whittling knife and a pair of kevlar gloves. It was bad quality hazel, rotten in the middle. I had a go at making a troll, which means a pointed hat, a knob on the end and a little D-shaped peeling where the face goes. They’re very simple, but while I could carve the hat no problem, every time I tried to make the knob on the end, the wood split and I had to give up and leave it with a pointy hat.
That’s about the limit of my whittling ability. I know how to use the knife safely (I know about UK knife laws too) but the only thing I know how to carve is a troll or a marshmallow stick, which is a troll with a really pointy hat, no face and which is cut off much further up. I made a few trolls – how they turned out depended on whether I had a rotten piece of wood or a very rotten piece of wood. I want to write an entire post on whittling but given that I’m struggling to write two paragraphs and I’m not an authority on the subject, maybe it can wait.
I kind of left camp around early afternoon. The tent was too hot to lie in and it needed to come down and be properly dried before I could put it away. It wasn’t really wet but it had got well-condensated overnight and the groundsheet was damp. In the hot sun, it all dried in five minutes flat and then a lockdown Easter miracle occurred. I folded up the tent and it went in the bag on the first attempt. Actually, it hasn’t been back in its bag since last June, when I failed to get it in on my way back from Devon.
So it wasn’t particularly exciting but I slept outside, I planted some lettuces, I did some whittling and I watched a lot of hedgehogs. It wasn’t quite the trip to Iceland I missed in March but any adventure is an adventure in lockdown and if this carries on much longer, I might have to do it again.