Tent camping - as written and defined by Art, the editor

When I was young in the 1950's (When??) yes, the 1950's, our parents used to take us tent camping in the south of France. Apart from the travelling, which took forever because neither motorways nor autoroutes had been invented, then it was an absolute hoot, but as you may imagine, everything in those days was totally different to things today.

I mean, the tent for a start was something our father had brought back from WW2, and his idea of a camp fire was to splash half a gallon of petrol onto some sand and throw a match at it. Apparently that was how it was done in the desert, but it worked.

I don't recall there being any camping sites per se in those days, and certainly we never went on one so soon after the last war, so showers were things we (our parents) rigged between them, and as we normally motored down through France in a virtual motorcade of the same families every year those said parents rather got into the hang of things like that.

The tent though was something out of the Ark, huge and so very heavy that it took all of our family to lift and erect the thing! Not only that but it took so much room in the back of the car - the car in this case being a "Shooting Brake", A shooting brake to you younger readers was the forerunner of the estate car and got its name from being used as transport for pheasant/grouse shoots on large estates.

Tents had to be waterproofed and we were told in no uncertain terms that if it rained when we were inside we were forbidden to touch the canvas. Of course I did just the opposite and had to sleep under a constant drip for several nights.

Was it good fun? Absolutely! And we learned so much about camping the hard way, though it only seems that it was the hard way when I look back 50 years because all the modern camping equipment on the market now makes tent camping so easy - in fact, there is a company called Selectcamp which offers camping holidays throughout Europe and they provide bathrooms in their tents!!