Budget Britain, and the Tale of the Tent

26 June 2010

Toby Young suffers from Status Anxiety

I haven’t yet calculated how much worse off I’ll be as a result of the budget but it’s time to start belt-tightening. My first austerity measure has been to buy a tent. I’ve been invited to speak at a literary festival in Cornwall but the organiser doesn’t consider me important enough to offer me a room in his house. One of his retainers suggested I hire a yurt, apparently unaware that the cost of doing so is over £800. In the end I decided to buy a family tent from Halfords for £89.99. Pretty reasonable, particularly as the price included two air beds, four sleeping bags and a couple of torches.

Caroline thought it would be sensible to practise putting it up beforehand so I dragged it out into my back garden last Saturday for a dummy run. I was planning to watch Ghana v. Australia at 3 p.m. so gave myself plenty of time. The instruction manual said it would only take 25 minutes.

The first step was to remove the flysheet from the carry bag and lay it out on the ground. Sounds simple enough, except I didn’t know what a ‘flysheet\’ was. Was it the big black sheet? I carefully stretched it out but was then stumped by the next instruction: ‘Ensure all doors are zipped closed.’ The black sheet didn’t have any zips.

I decided to seek help from my 12,500 Twitter followers. ‘Anyone know what a “flysheet” looks like?’ I asked. Quick as a flash, someone called Simon Mason tweeted back: ‘If you can’t even put up a bloody tent, how can you be expected to run a school?’ Perhaps broadcasting my ineptitude on Twitter wasn’t such a good idea.

1 | 2 | 3 Next page