When I was sixteen, some friends and I went camping. Between us, we’d all been camping here and there with our parents, and credited ourselves with a little more experience and technical skill than we really had.

There were four of us in a one-man tent.

We couldn’t start a camp-fire even after we burnt all of my cigarettes.

Some of us had smelly feet.

I have always been a bit paranoid and so insisted that we hammer the spare tent peg through the hole of the door zip, to prevent kidnapping.

And when Toots woke up and rolled over, she found the large brown spider she’d crushed in her sleep and started screaming.

It’s fair to say we weren’t really outdoorsy types.

However, given that I’m wired the wrong way round (I sleep in the day and stay up til dawn), a bit of camping is just the thing to reset my internal clock. Not that I’m doing that anytime soon, but when the time comes, I will send myself out to the garden with a tent and a dog. Maybe that’ll be my holiday with Tara…