Camping in the rain

It was pretty well non-stop deluge here yesterday, pure raining stair-rod country. I was restless for lack of exercise so I went for a short walk as the gloom descended around four, well wrapped up in my waterproofs and with a big umbrella for company. I headed south along the river for a mile or so to inspect the civil engineering crews working on the new river retaining wall. Up to their knees in mud, soaking wet, cold muddy overalls. There is always someone worse off than you eh? I can see what fun it might have been to be a plutocrat back in the last century, riding around in a big warm chauffeur-driven car feasting on caviar and champagne and shouting at hungry downtrodden labourers to work harder or else ... As Confucius once said - "Better to be rich and healthy than poor and sick."

Now when the weather is this lousy I always think what it would be like to be camping on a day like this, wondering how you were going to heat up your sausages and beans as the rain started to leak in through the canvas and then the groundsheet got wetter and wetter. And then I remember an interview I saw once on TV with someone who was going for the 'Guinness Book of Records' world title for having lived longest in a tent. This guy had been living in a tent on the lawn of his garden in suburban London for about twenty years already and in fact as long as he kept on doing it he was going to hold the 'World Title' because obviously nobody could 'catch him up' until he was dead. The glaring ethnocentricity of this claim - there must be a heck of a lot of aged Desert Arabs and Mongols around who have lived their entire lives in tents - did not strike either him or the BBC interviewer.

On seriously rainy days I wonder how I would feel about committing my whole life to the apparently meaningless choice of living in a small tent on my lawn just to get my name in a two line entry in a book. When you were sitting in there on the cold ground with the rain drumming down is it possible that you might, in the watery darkness of long solitary nights, query the wisdom of your life choices? I mean, you aren't going to have the chance to go back and do it all again, no replay where you can go to the opera, sleep with beautiful women in four poster feather beds and take advantage of central heating, piped water and electricity. To do this you would have to REALLY love camping.

Makes me a bit philosophical through. All our volitional life choices must seem weird to most of humanity. When I stick out my chest and preen my feathers and say "Aren't I a clever boy then!" about three billion others say "Good grief! Look what that clown is doing now!"