By popular request (although the friends due to come camping with us later in the year may regret it), there follows a report of this year’s Family Summer Holiday: A Wet Weekend in Wooler. Not that I’ve got anything against Wooler. Well not much. Read on.
They say rain sounds much heavier from inside a tent than it actually is outside. I don’t know about that, but I do know that if you pitch your tent next to a river, it sounds like it’s raining all the time. Which it was. They also say* a bog feels much squelchier through a groundsheet than it actually is underneath. This is probably true. It is also certainly true that everything seems harder when you have had less than two hours’ sleep per night for the last week due to a poorly eighteen-month old who just wants to be held and fed all the time. And that everything is more worrying when you take a medically-fragile child away from the comfort-zone of home and hospital. So, from a balanced viewpoint, we probably had a great holiday.
The campsite owner thought he was doing us a favour by offering us a choice of sites. Of course, he doesn’t know that we are the most indecisive people on the planet and that, whichever site we chose would inevitably result in one of us feeling that it was the wrong choice, one of us feeling guilty for making such a bad choice, and both of us blaming the other one for those feelings, for the rest of the holiday.
Anyway, we eventually selected the ‘secluded, sheltered, quieter’ pitch on the basis that on the day we arrived the campsite was rather windy and overrun by Duke of Edinburgh Award students on their expedition. As the days passed this turned out to be the ‘just next to the road, just above the river, surrounded by poisonous plants with yummy-looking pink flowers, exceedingly muddy and rather midgy’ pitch. On the plus side, it did have a play park right opposite and was well frequented by cute fluffy rabbits and cute fluffy ducklings (and their rather aggressive parents. And all their shit). At least Caitlin got a lot of practise at ‘What does the duck say?’ ‘Quack.’ Without us even having to say ‘What does the duck say?’
‘Quack’
So, we arrived at the campsite on a Wednesday evening with our car (leased on the Motability scheme solely on the criterion of having the biggest boot of all cars) packed from floor to ceiling – determined this time to be prepared for every eventuality. Of course this meant that the first eventuality was having to unpack the entire boot to get the tent out, leaving all our medical gear, sleeping bags, blankets, pillows, hot water bottles, emergency cake, cuddly toys, etc., out in the drizzle-that-became-persistent-rain while we spent the usual two hours putting the tent up, pegging out all the guys, attempting to tighten all the guys, realising that all the guys were threaded in such a way that they couldn’t be tightened, arguing, re-threading all the guys, swearing, arguing, and re-pegging and tightening all the guys.
This years’ spectacle was enlivened by the fact that Caitlin is now mobile and exceedingly speedy. We put Jackie on red alert, chasing Caitlin around the campsite and shouting a warning if she got to close to any road, river, poisonous plant or live animal, on hearing of which one of us would let go our portion of the tent and leg it at full pelt to intercept her, while the tent crashed to the ground behind us.
As we were slowly heating up our spaghetti bolognaise over a nearly empty gas canister on the first evening I remarked that it was getting a bit midgy. ‘Don’t be silly,’ said Ric, as my skin started to come up in large red weals, ‘You don’t get midges in England. Keep the tent flaps open, it’s a lovely evening.’ The next day, after I dosed Jackie up with Piriton to counteract the itching, we mentioned to a lady in a shop that we were camping. ‘Ooh, really?’ she said, ‘That’s brave. How are you coping with the midges?’ Turns out midges are less respectful of national borders than one (husband) might think… The next evening, we kept the tent flaps shut.
I don’t care about midges – I’ve got cake
After tea we gave Benjy and Caitlin a quick wipe with a wetwipe (Jackie was deemed old enough to cope with the excitement of the campsite shower, and returned more covered with grass than she started) and had just about got everyone settled in their sleeping bags, if not terribly sleepy given that it was still completely light outside, when the unmistakeable tinkle of an ice cream van was heard. So while I commenced Benjy’s night-time routine of feed and medications, Ric and Jackie set off up the hill and returned with three enormous 99’s plus a complimentary, slightly smaller one for Caitlin. By the time everyone had eaten/spilled their ice creams and brushed their teeth again – and it was still completely light outside (and inside) – there was no chance of anyone going to sleep any time soon. So we all lay down in the bedroom together for stories and milk and an ongoing game of musical roll-mats until it finally got dark and we crashed out, one by one.
Night night everyone!
Are you sure about this mum?
At last…
Wooler is a delightful little town on the edge of the Cheviots with a remarkably good Italian restaurant hidden behind an abandoned gym hidden behind a pub, an old fire station converted into a depot for fish-and-chip vans, and an amazing number of butchers. Even more delightfully, we were unaware until we arrived that we were there for the weekend of the Glendale Festival: a showcase of marching bands, fancy-dressed children, a lady on a pennyfarthing, and some plastic duck races on the river (sadly, Postman Pat failed to turn up). We were also unaware, but reliably – and entirely correctly – informed by the lady at the fish-and-chip van hub, that ‘T’always rains on festival weekend.’ In fact, even the pictures in the festival brochure showed a distinct predominance of umbrellas…
Entirely appropriate camping attire (attitude optional)
On Thursday we decided to explore our surroundings, so we wandered up, then down, then up again into Wooler (which, unsurprisingly given its beautiful location on the edge of the Cheviots, turns out to be surprisingly hilly). I say wandered; between Ric and myself we took it in turns to carry Caitlin, push Benjy in his chair and push Jackie on her bike, except on the downhill bits where it was more of a case of chasing Jackie on her bike shouting ‘stop when you get to a ROAD!’
By the time we got into town it was lunchtime so we walked up and down the high street a couple of times, deliberating, before returning to the first café we came across, which was spacious and friendly and had a spaghetti bolognaise special on the board. So Jackie had her third helping of spaghetti bolognaise in two days and Caitlin threw jacket potato around the room. After this brief interlude of peace Benjamin started vomiting copious amounts of bile out of his nostrils, so I leapt up and suctioned him with our very noisy portable hoover while Ric attempted to contain the girls and we both ignored the questions from the children at the table next to us. Eventually the café-owner came up to me. Here we go, I thought, she’s going to ask us to take our caravan of children and medical emergencies elsewhere. ‘Is there anything I can get you?’ She asked. ‘Do you need any water? I know what it’s like, I had a little boy like yours.’ I could have hugged her.
After lunch we managed a bit of shopping: a waterproof jacket and large amounts of wine, chocolate, wetwipes and Calpol. We only had to make one phone call to the hospital (to check if a small amount of overgranulation around Benjamin’s new feeding tube required us to do anything – it didn’t) and only had to discard one outfit in a bin due to a nappy explosion and the fact that I couldn’t face storing that amount of poo for the next three days before we could get home and wash it… so I count the day as a success.
Friday was also a relative triumph, spent as it was on the Heatherslaw Light Railway, ‘England’s most northerly narrow gauge railway.’ Once we had got over the usual confusion and convinced the driver that Benjamin was a wheelchair-user and not just a child in a pushchair, we were allowed to use one of the very accessible wheelchair carriages for the twenty-minute trundle to the village of Etal. There we had lunch in a nice tearoom which had the foresight to provide ride-on toys in the garden so that Jackie and Caitlin could terrorise the other guests. Benjamin and I gate-crashed an AA meeting in the village hall in order to manage another nappy explosion on the floor of the disabled toilet, and then there was time for a quick climb on a cannon before the train back.
‘It’s okay,’ said Ric cheerfully later that evening, ‘The forecast has improved: there’s a whole hour tomorrow when it’s not going to rain.’
‘Really?’ I said, ‘That sounds promising.’
‘Yes,’ he replied, ‘It’s going to hail.’
So on Saturday – along with the rest of the population enjoying the first day of the English school holidays – we cut our losses and drove to Alnick, had lunch in Sainsbury’s and tired the girls out in the swimming pool. Returning to the tent, we spent a happy evening trying to avoid walking on the squelchiest bits of the floor, and watching the drips gather on the inside of the flysheet (I really do think they were just condensation resulting from containing five people and a heap of wet swimming towels on a day with 100% humidity. Ric remains less than convinced.).
Drying off in the Italian. It’s even warm enough to remove my jumper, look.
The rain continued throughout the night (Oh, the joys of taking a five-year-old to the loo on a wet night. Oh, the repeated refrain of ‘Don’t touch the walls!’) and throughout the packing up the next morning. We were reduced to strapping the children into the car and putting on Mr Tumble’s ‘Party’ CD (on the plus side, we didn’t have to listen to it ourselves) while we took the tent down and attempted to get it back into the bag it came out of. ‘I remember this: you fold it in thirds, then roll it.’ ‘Maybe it’s quarters?’ ‘Let’s try and shake some more water off it’ (tent still contains more than its weight in water, and now we are both soaked too). ‘It must be folded in half and then thirds.’ ‘Does it matter if we don’t get it in the bag anyway?’
As I emptied and repacked the boot for the final time, to get Benjamin’s buggy in and also to find space for the authentic Spanish bowl we purchased at one of the festival stalls as a souvenir of our time in Wooler, Ric and the girls emerged from a temporary tea room run by the WI, bearing emergency cake supplies for the journey home. ‘I don’t want to go home Mummy,’ said Jackie, stomping her wellies. ‘Quack,’ said Caitlin. So we must have done something right, right?
Overcome with excitement
The way I look at it, things can only get better. I mean, that’s got to be about as bad as camping gets, hasn’t it? Non-stop rain, midges, twenty-hours of daylight making it nigh-on impossible to get the kids to sleep. A toddler just old enough to run into the road, fall into the river and eat the enticing-looking foxgloves but not old enough to understand the word ‘no’. We spent four days packing up, two hours pitching the tent, approximately three and a half days actually being on holiday, two more hours taking down the tent, and another couple of days unpacking and cleaning the mud off everything, not to mention the laundry, and the fact that the tent is, more than a week later, still lying in our garden ‘drying’, with the lawn slowly turning yellow beneath it… Don’t tell Ric I said this, but I think it might feel more worthwhile if we actually went for a fortnight next time… Roll on October (and God help the friends who are coming with us).
*they may not
[To read the previous installment in this series, click here]
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