I Am A Polar Bear

I like to go camping. That is, I think I like to go camping. The reality is that for one reason or another – or several reasons – I never really actually sleep in a tent. But I like to get away from my life for the weekend without feeling like I need to explore, to see things, to make the most of my time. I sit out in the fresh air with a book and a box of snacks nearby, I go to bed early because no matter how hot the weather, it always gets freezing cold by about 8pm and although I tend to wake up (from a non-existent sleep) by about dawn, I don’t have to get up, go anywhere or do anything.

Last weekend I camped on a fruit farm in West Dorset, a 15-minute drive north of Bridport. Reviews sounded good – there are a limited number of pitches and other campers reported “not even realising there were other people on site” until a day or two in. It’s early enough in the season that no one’s coming for the week just yet so when I arrived on Friday around lunchtime, I was the first camper to arrive, which meant I had the pick of the pitches. I asked owner Frida which one she recommended for someone who liked to be unsociable and quiet and peaceful and she recommended pitch 9. Or, if I wanted to be really isolated, pitch 10, but you can’t drive to that one and have to carry your stuff up and down the hill.

Pitches 1 and 2 are in a small field in the farmyard, right opposite the nice little toilet block. I later discovered that the campsite’s water supply sloshes right next to pitch 1, which would probably get annoying overnight, so I’m not sorry I didn’t pick it. But I should have picked pitch 3, which is on the other side of this small field, at the nearest end of the large camping field, in a little dip under the trees, the only pitch with shade. 4 to 9 are on top of the ridge that rises up from 3, each a mowed circle with a mowed “drive” leading up to it marked with a number, although 8 is actually a much shorter drive positioned between 7 and 9, which is where you’d expect 8 to be, but 7 and 9 are spaced out the same as the spaces between 4, 5, 6 and 7 and 8 is on the flatter bit between them.

The point of this story is that 9 is fairly exposed at the end of the ridge and it’s a 0.54km round trip to the toilets. It’s got a nice view, though – the ridge is a mini hill with a kind of natural moat between it and the higher hill behind it. Pitch 10 is down in that moat, so an even longer walk to the toilets plus a pretty big hill just to get onto the track. There were 6 groups due on Friday night and I calculated – pitches 1-3 would fill up first and then the others would pick probably 4 and 6, leaving me nice and peaceful up on 9. Nope! They went for 3, sure enough, but the others picked 6, 7, 4 and 10. And some of them brought children! Fortunately, none of them felt the need to bring a loud speaker to play tinny music across the swishing of leaves and calling of pheasants and buzzards and by about 9pm, I realised the campsite was in absolute silence. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

I drove up to pitch 9 to unload and put the tent up. I’d brought my big 4-man tent and had had the sense to check I had everything, since it spent some time being waterproofed and then rained on for several days last autumn. I had it piled up in the kitchen, hoping it would dry, and every time I moved it to bring a damp patch out to dry, I found another puddle of four or five litres of rainwater trapped inside. Utter disaster. Anyway, it was in a big Ikea bag and I dragged it outside to discover it contained the outer, the tent bag and the mallet. The inner, pole bag and peg bag turned up in the actual tent bag – this one will not fit into its original bag so I have a quick-wrap bag for the whole thing, which is what was with the outer.

What I hadn’t checked was the contents of the pole bag, despite having seem a broken pole abandoned in a box in the garage. You already know where this is going but I assumed it belonged to my little blue tent, which has a habit of breaking poles, rather than my big green one which doesn’t. Of course it belonged to the green tent, as I discovered when I emptied out the pole bag and began to put them together! Missing pole!

It could have been worse. It was the rear pole which props up the back end of the sleeping compartment. I had the front pole and the pole that forms the arch between porch and bedroom and with some ropes and the tent went up ok-ish, other than being droopy in the bedroom. I intended to make a video about the weekend, which I ended up not doing (didn’t do a lot worth filming, to be honest), so at least have the timelapse of putting the tent up.

It wasn’t as stable as I would have liked but it could have been a lot worse. Not that it was ideal, but I’d only taken my little yellow one-man tent out of the car, and I would later have such cause to wish I hadn’t! The first time I used it was a windy day on Dartmoor and I rushed down to the nearest agricultural supply store and bought 20m of blue baler twine, so this tent has had extra improvised guylines since day one, so I had enough ropes to make it a tolerable sort of cave for 36 hours.

Disaster number two: I’d forgotten to bring my water carrier. I got on for many years before acquiring one but in this case, it was getting on for a half-mile round trip to the nearest tap and taking my little enamel camping mug on that kind of walk every time I finished it just wasn’t an option. So I had to tear myself away from my droopy little palace on the hill and go to Lidl in Bridport for a big bottle of water. This was a tip given to me when I tried to do my Going Away With licence. Rather than worry about sterilising water carriers that lie in storage for years on end, buy a big bottle of supermarket water and when you’ve finished drinking it, use it as your water carrier for the weekend. I personally do prefer to use my carrier but under the circumstances, it was a good idea that I’m glad I’d been given.

Friday was nice. Once I had my water, I lay in the porch or out the front, I read an entire book, I ate far more than was good for me. I have a set of rechargeable camping lights, which is a really long string of fairy lights that wind up into a flat disc that also lights up. I can have just the lights or just the disc or both, I can have the lights in white or either flashing or gently pulsing in colour. I strung them up around my hot tub when I went glamping last November but this is my first opportunity to try them out in a tent and they’re really good! My previous fairy lights are powered by 3 AA batteries and they always go flat between trips. This is USB, so I just have to recharge them before I go.

Friday night was terrible. It had been a really hot day – in fact, a really hot month but in that tent, I was freezing. I’d dithered over taking my fluffy pyjamas and was very glad I’d decided to take them after all, but I’d only brought my two-season sleeping bag and even with a blanket, even with my down jacket first dragged inside and then put on, I was so cold I was awake pretty much all night. At seven o’clock in the morning, almost on the dot, the sun rose over the trees on the hillside behind the tent and it was like someone switched the heating on. Tents are a suntrap, a greenhouse, and once the sun is shining on them in the morning, it’s going to get real hot real soon. I managed to doze until a little after 8 and then it was time to get up.

Does it count as a disaster that I’d brought a book for the weekend and finished it by bedtime on Friday? That prompted another trip to Bridport on Saturday morning, this time to Morrisons, which I assumed would have a small book section. It did. Very small. Not a lot of choice and none of it to my taste. I eventually went for a crime book, which turned out to be about 22nd in a series, about someone killing influencers on livestreams and it turned out I enjoyed that enough to finish it on Saturday.

But the big disaster came up next. The wind picked up and there’s no shelter on that ridge. I alternated between lying outside on the groundsheet I’d pegged out the front and sitting in my chair in the porch, depending on how fierce the sun was and how chilly the wind was and by about lunchtime, I realised that my tent was suffering in the wind. Now, off the ridge, it was the faintest spring breeze if there was any wind at all but up on the ridge, my tent was getting torn apart. It leaned so far over against the wind that when I was inside, the tent which is high enough for me to comfortably stand up in got pressed down on top of my head. I spent at least 20 minutes in a panic, putting in more ropes, tightening and adjusting ropes, trying to fight the wind, putting my weight against the bowing poles and then there was a horrible crack. That’s a tent pole snapped clear through. And if the poles are snapped, they might start tearing at the fabric. I yelled at the wind, I yelled at the tent, I ran from rope to pole, I tried to hold the tent up myself and all the time, the scene from the end of Noel Streatfeild’s Circus Shoes was playing in my head, where the Big Top gets torn apart into tiny scraps on a wet windy night at the end of the season. I did not want that to happen to my poor tent and at last, I realised what I had to do.

I was not having fun. I was stressed, my tent was being torn to pieces – why was I staying? Why was I not just getting the tent down and going home? So that’s what I did. I brought the car up, had a discussion with the owners, who were desperate for me to stay (“we can help you move to a more sheltered pitch, we’ve got a spare tent you can borrow, is there anything we can do?” I left them a lovely review but I couldn’t stay) and then I hauled all my stuff out. Once I’d popped my two poles out and had the tent sprawled flat on the grass, I found I could breathe easily again. Well, not easily. Between the stress and the fact that I was doing a lot of bending over, I was getting my oesophagus burnt out and several times I had to stop, straighten up and try to breathe it back down but at least I was no longer stressing and panicking.

I packed up the car but rather than leave, I sat in the front seat to finish my book. Despite the breeze, it was a nice campsite, a nice bit of countryside and a nice break from real life. No reason to flee now the tent was safe.

But the last disaster was coming. I’d dropped a very sticky gummy sweet outside my tent, which had got stuck to the bottom of my coolbox when I put it out there – cooler in the breeze and the shade than inside the tent. Then I put the coolbox on the front seat of the car before I decided to sit there myself. I got to the point where the villain had been revealed, although the plot not yet foiled, when I discovered I’d been sitting on that gooey sweet, which had detached itself from the box and stuck to the seat. So a half-kilometre round trip to the toilets to try to wash that off my trousers, without having the sense to take anything clean or dry with me. Well, I got the trousers adequately clean but I got them a lot wetter than I intended. So up to the car hoping no one had noticed, and hide round the back of it while I change into the shorts that I’d pulled out from the depths of my car, underneath a huge tent just stuffed in hastily.

Didn’t leave, though. I moved into the non-sticky driving seat and finished the book (got my right arm a bit sunburned). Then I drove back down to the car park and decided to go for the little stroll down in the woods that Frida had recommended. The reason for the weird topography around the campsite is that there’s fairly narrow band of sand forming this region between Bridport and Beaminster. The farm is fed by springs that pop up all across their land and down in the woods below the camping fields are two spring-fed ponds leading to a walk that runs through the “moat” up to pitch 10. I didn’t bother with that but I did want to go and have a look at the ponds. Just being out in the fresh air for the weekend was my aim but when the campsite has got something scenic that they specifically recommend you visit, you feel like you should go and visit. So I did.

By now it was probably getting on for 4pm. Lunch had been whatever snacks I could extract from under the tent while in the car, breakfast had been far too long ago, I was tired, I was sticky, I had indigestion, I’d read two books in 24 hours, I had no shelter and it was time to go.

So, one disaster after another. It’s not the campsite’s fault, other than that the ridge is a bit exposed. I should have gone for pitch 3, I should have checked on that pole (and brought it with me to repair, even if it belonged to a different tent), I should have faced the tent into the wind and not side-on to it, I should have brought the water and so on and so on. Hot water bottle, 4-season tent, extra blankets and/or liners – no, it was time to call it a day. I’d had 24 hours outside but one thing after another had gone wrong and it was just time to go home, back to a real bed where I wasn’t going to get too cold, wash the sweat and general filth off in a proper bath and then spend Sunday doing nothing in particular at home instead of in a field.

Great campsite, though – can’t fault the site or the owners, I really can’t.