Last week I went off for my first holiday since the pandemic! I went glamping – glamping with a hot tub!
It was third time lucky – I was supposed to have gone at the beginning of November but there was a mess-up with the dates. Then I was supposed to go right at the beginning of December but our beloved PM put us into lockdown and it overlapped and so I arranged it for last week and spent the entire lockdown declaring that if Boris extended the lockdown, I’d be striding up to the door of Number 10 myself and demanding special permission to go. And so at last, on Sunday afternoon, I arrived.
I had a shepherd’s hut in a particularly green and rolling part of Dorset, somewhere across the fields from Beaminster. For the avoidance of doubt, I wasn’t leaving my tier. I wasn’t even leaving my county. I live in Dorset. A year ago, I would never have even considered going on holiday to the county I live in – I can visit anywhere I like and be home by bedtime – but here we are in 2020 so here I am in a shepherd’s hut less than an hour from home.
The main appeal of this particular shepherd’s hut was that it came with its own private hot tub. This is a small eco site, with three huts and a yurt and each of those four has a hut tub of its own. I love hot water. Ever since I realised you can have hot tubs in your own garden in the UK as well as in the US, I’ve wanted one and now I had one. Iceland has a hot pot beside every public pool and those are great, I’d had a big corner bubble bath thing in my apartment in Ekaterinburg but a hot tub of my very own is something of a dream. I planned to be in from dawn until midnight at the very least.
When I arrived on Sunday, the thing was lit but had only been going for half an hour or so. It’s heated by a wood burner and it takes three hours to get up to temperature. Well, that solved my “do I eat lunch or do I jump straight in the hot tub?” dilemma on arrival. I fed the burner for the three hours and when I eventually put my hand in the water, it was lukewarm and that would do.
It turned out it wouldn’t do. By now it was gone six in the evening, a dark winter evening and not warm. It turned out sitting in a tub of water that also wasn’t warm wasn’t quite the delightful evening in paradise I’d been imagining for the last two months. I clung to the heat output and stargazed determinedly but it was just too cold. Scrambling out and running back into an unheated shepherd’s hut was an extremely unpleasant experience and I had to have a hot shower and put on several layers of clothes before I could go back outside and put the lid back on the hot tub.
On Monday, I got to work properly. I lit the fire at quarter to ten and went outside at five or ten past to put more wood on, to discover it had gone out and I had to start again. Linger to make sure it catches. Fill it up with logs. And then I went inside and read for twenty or thirty minutes at a time before the alarm on my phone sent me outside to pack more wood into the burner. At 11.56, I shoved in three large logs and lifted the side of the cover to see how it was getting on. I didn’t expect it to be ready to jump into for at least another hour, more likely an hour and a half and yet when I put my hand in, it was hot. Not lukewarm, not even warm – this was toasty, and within a few minutes of getting in, those fresh logs made it hot. I’d been told three hours to get it to temperature. I’d got it hot in less than two.
So in I went. In fact, it was so hot that I had to spend a ludicrous amount of time perched on the edge despite the December day, scalded a light piggy pink and far too overheated to properly enjoy it. After an hour or two, I decided I’d get out and have lunch, go for my daily walk and then get back in later.
I returned to the water about two hours later to find it pleasantly warm. It would have been nice to have had a view but December had decided to have some fun by dropping a heavy mist over the rolling fields. Still, I was on holiday, I had a private hot tub of my very own and a book – well, a Kindle in a waterproof case. This was what I’d been looking forward to for so long and it was nearly perfect.
About 4pm, I relit it and stuck on some more logs. The water was getting a bit cool and needed a bit more heating, not least so that it would be hot enough for stargazing in a couple of hours’ time. I didn’t for one moment imagine the mist lifting for me to actually be able to spot any stars but the glampsite recommended stargazing from the hot tub and I’d gone to some effort to heat it, so I was going outside in the dark if it killed me.
On Sunday night, despite the cool water, it had been fun. On Monday it was nice and hot but somehow I was jumpy and the helicopters overhead eventually unnerved me enough that I retreated to the hut. But this time I was warm – warm enough to put the lid on the hot tub before going inside and getting dried and dressed.
On Tuesday morning, it was still lukewarm. I went out for my walk and had lunch before lighting it up again, because if I heated it first thing, there would never be a good time for a walk, and the water was hot again in well under an hour. By now it was beginning to show signs of use – it didn’t have scum on the top exactly but there was definitely a bit of thin something on top and the seats had a kind of dusty feeling even under the water. Still, the view was back and looking amazing – so green, so rolling, miles of hill and valley as far as I could see – and I spent the entire afternoon in my wonderful hot water with my book. Nelly, the glampsite’s dopey but gorgeous poodle, came by and posed nicely with the view before poodling off towards the greenhouses. I’d had the view and I’d had the heat and now I had both.
I had some aerial entertainment too. Military helicopter after military helicopter buzzed low overhead, a few small planes, a few more military helicopters. I appeared to be due south of RNAS Yeovilton, one of two Fleet Air Arm bases, home to a lot of helicopters. I pointed my phone’s map app in the direction the helicopters were coming from – yep, that was exactly the direction of the air base. They came overhead, circled round to the left and headed due south before disappearing somewhere over Bridport. Then three small planes came along in formation and I sat back in my hot tub and watched them apparently practising aerobatics above my head. I’d concluded they were the Black Cats, the Navy’s display team, right up until I discovered that the Black Cats are a helicopter display team. I have no idea who was performing above my head.
I added some last logs for the last night dip. It took a while to get going, so I set my timer again to check on it and re-feed it. But when I went out to see if I could fit another log in, I was startled by actual flames leaping out of the burner door. I said a word I vowed not to use on this blog, closed the door and stepped back. Ok, my clothes and hair weren’t on fire, the tub’s cover wasn’t on fire, the pergola wasn’t on fire. I went back into the hut to wait for the fire in there to burn down but that flash of flame had left a lingering smell somewhere. I’m borderline pyrophobic – I like it well enough in its right time and place but I’m very prone to lying awake at night worrying that I can smell smoke or hear crackling and now everything smelled of fire. The hut’s wood burner died down and I closed the vents. I blew out the candles that were my main source of illumination, checked again that my clothes weren’t on fire and went outside to the hut tub.
I knew by now that I didn’t want one of my own. It had taken one person 48 hours to make the water grubby enough that I wouldn’t want to get back in by daylight and it takes two to four hours of continual attention to get it hot enough to sit in. I’m also not a talented firelighter. I’m better since my bushcraft course but the fact is that occasionally my inability to light a fire gets brought up at district meetings. I’d been given some firelighters – I don’t know what they are but they seem to be tightly woven bundles of grated wood. They’re really effective but given that there isn’t any smallish wood and that I’m not great at firelighting, every fire takes two or three attempts before it gets going and that really burns through firelighters, so after the initial attempt inevitably failed, I resorted to relighting it with strips of birch bark from the woodstore. It’s such a hassle. I was already 99% sure I never wanted a wood burner and now I knew for certain and I also knew that if I did ever have a hot tub of my own, I didn’t want a wood powered one.
It was a beautiful clear night. I had hot water and stars and now I had a better idea what the helicopters were, they didn’t bother me any more, although they did disrupt the peace and quiet of the starry night. I’ve seen the stars before, of course. I particularly remember emerging from a cave after dark on a Welsh moor when I was a student, lying back in the heather and seeing more stars than I can even imagine but somehow the sky seemed more full on Tuesday night, as long as I didn’t short out my eyes by looking at either the solar-powered fairy lights strung over my tub or in the direction of the owners’ house. Layers and layers of stars – near stars, far stars, bright stars, dimmer stars, constellations I knew, constellations I recognised and maybe it’s because I’ve spent 2020 watching more scifi than usual, but I could picture so many planets around so many stars. How could anyone not look up at the night sky and that many stars without feeling dizzy from the size of the universe?
I stayed in the water that last night until the water cooled. If you’re going to have a hot tub and make the effort to heat it, you might as well enjoy it for as long as possible and anyway, if I got out of the warm water, I’d only have to go into the hut. I’d lit a fire before I’d gone in the water but it would have cooled down by now. I could either continue enjoying the warmth of the hot tub or I could light another fire and burn another couple of logs. It seemed more economical to keep enjoying the warmth, both in effort and in logs.
On my way out of the hut on Wednesday morning, my last day, I pulled back the cover and dipped my hand in the hot tub one last time. It was still lukewarm, probably warm enough to get in if I was determined enough, but it was definitely too dirty now. It had been a wonderful two days glamping with a hot tub but it would be good to get back to a bath, where I could re-heat it by just turning on the hot tap.