Perfect pitch
Michael McMahon
Take half a pound of flour, a pinch of salt, some water and a large bar of chocolate. Mix the salt into the flour, and add enough water to make a stiff dough. Peel a green stick and dry it over the campfire. Wind the dough around the stick in a spiral. Suspend it over the fire, turning once. It is cooked when it sounds hollow when tapped. Allow it to cool. Break a piece off, taste it, spit it out, and throw the rest on to the fire. Unwrap the chocolate and eat it.
‘Twist’ wasn’t a recipe, it was a ritual, and it used to be observed by every boy who was ever in the Scouts. Campfire cooking was part of camping, and camping was fun. The liberating thrill of living under canvas made all sorts of hardships tolerable. Campfires fried eggs until they took on the texture of melted plastic bags; blackened sausages and bacon were distinguish able only by shape. We ate them without complaint, and drank tea made sickly sweet by tinned milk. When we kipped we persuaded ourselves that we must be comfortable, because we had scooped a dent in the soil under our sleeping bags to accommodate the outline of our hips. Our tents weighed tons but always let the water in. We washed in cold streams (or pretended to); we pissed en plein air, and we buried our turds in the earth.
Few such in(or non-) conveniences trouble today’s campers, and today there are many more campers than there are Scouts. Camping holidays have suddenly become fashionable. Market research published last spring shows a surge in the number of them taken by ‘ABs’ — which is marketspeak for ‘the moneyed’ — and campsites have been quick to cater for their cash-cultivated tastes. I have camped in France at least once a year since 1988, and the change I have seen has been recent and dramatic. Yes, there are still old-fashioned municipal sites that are little more than a field and a shed housing a bog, sink and shower, but in the sort of places that foreigners flock to campsites now boast luxuries that would have had Lord Baden-Powell of Gilwell clutching at his woggle in disbelief.
Last month my wife and I spent a night at the ‘Camping Pyrénées Natura’, in the Parc National des Pyrénées, where there are eagles and marmots and bears (oh my!) and all sorts of other things wild. Nature at our tastefully appointed campsite, though, was hardly red in tooth and claw. There was a solarium with infrared and ultra-violet sunbeds, a ‘music room’ furnished with an adjustable leather armchair and a CD-player with speakers the size of sideboards, and a sauna advertised as capable of accommodating an entire family. We weren’t tempted to use any of these facilities, even after we found that they were ‘free’, and that we had therefore already paid for them. But after a day spent hiking through penetrating mountain mist, we did enjoy a hot shower in one of the spickest and spannest loo-blocks I have ever encountered. Had we brought our chocolate labrador, Cookie, she could have been offered a shower, too, for there is a separate cubicle set aside for dogs. I suspect she would have been more puzzled than impressed.
We didn’t have showers at all in the camps I ran as a patrol leader in the late 1960s, when we drove out the damp by sitting round a campfire, and made our own music by singing ‘Ging Gang Goolie’ and ‘The Quartermaster’s Stores’. The nearest most contemporary campers get to such pleasures is watching Ray Mears on the telly — and many of them go equipped to do just that. In Continental campsites, fancy tents and caravans nestle among forests of poles that support satellite dishes. Come twilight, the shifting glow over a terrain de camping in the Pyrenees, Provence or the Ardèche is not the flicker of wood fires but of TV screens, and the smell on the air is not of birch logs lit by rubbing sticks together, but of burgers cooking on gas-fired barbecues ignited by turning a switch.
And why shouldn’t it be? Most people get only one stab at a holiday each year, and if that’s how they want to spend it, good luck to them. ‘Luxury camping’ would have been dismissed as decadent nonsense by the man who wrote Scouting for Boys, but times have changed. Mention that book title in conversation, and people think you are talking about an imprisonable offence committed on the internet. Search the net for ‘luxury camping’ using Google, and you’ll get close to three million hits. Top of my list was a site describing four permanently pitched tents on a beach in Goa: ‘Each tent sleeps two in a double fourposter bed and has a private en suite bathroom with running water and a hot shower. Each tent also has its own sit-out and a bamboo jetty over the river.’ They are bookable through responsibletravel.com, available from January to the end of April, and cost as little as £165 per week. Mind you, you’ve got to get there. Google also turned up some rather nice-looking ‘permanent bungalow tents’ nearer to home, in a walled garden on the Northumberland coast (annstead.co.uk), as well as any number of luxury safaris in Tanzania and Botswana, and a site called the Chattooga River Resort in north Georgia, USA, where ‘your camp is lit by soft Christmas lights, and you can call ahead to ensure there’s steak and bacon-wrapped potatoes, and a fine bottle of wine waiting in your cooler when you get here’. That’s got to beat a charred chipolata wrapped in ‘twist’.
Even so, this isn’t my kind of camping, but then I wouldn’t want to relive my scout-camp days, either. When I take off the woodsmoke-tinted spectacles, I remember sleepless nights, aching limbs and a pretty constant sense of grimy clamminess. There is something to be said for the comforts of a well-appointed campsite. One of the finest I know is near the foot of the plateau of the Vercors, and if I had the time to spare and the weather forecast looked favourable (as it might do September can be warm and settled in those parts), I’d be back there like a shot for an autumn break. The GalloRomain (www.legalloromain.net) shuts at the end of the month, so there is just time to squeeze in a week. The setting is stunning, the facilities glisteningly modern, and the owners-in-residence are two delightful Dutch couples who speak perfect English. I’d ask for emplacement number 50, a terraced pitch in a quiet corner overlooking the valley. The chances are I’d get it. At this time of year, I would have the whole site pretty much to myself — which is perhaps the greatest camping luxury of all.
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