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.
In the end I looked up pictures of flysheets on Google. Having figured it out, I zipped all the doors shut and consulted the manual again: ‘Feed the colour coded poles carefully through the colour coded pole sleeves.’ I examined the poles but as far as I could tell they were all completely colourless. Same was true of the sleeves. Had I been sent the wrong set of instructions?
By now, 3 p.m. had come and gone and I resigned myself to only watching the second half. I puzzled away at the poles for another ten minutes and eventually discovered the plastic bits on the end were slightly different shades of grey. Apparently, that is what Halfords means by ‘colour coded’.
After threading the poles through the sleeves I returned to the manual: ‘With one person at each side, attach the pins into the ends of the poles.’ Oh Christ. The last thing I wanted to do was ask Caroline for help. She would immediately take over and start barking instructions at me. Worse, she would prove far more competent than me at deciphering the instructions. My inability to carry out this simple task would become a family anecdote to be wheeled out at Christmas time with the in-laws. There was only one thing for it. I’d have to enlist the help of Freddie, my three-year-old.
Freddie proved quite dependable until the time came to start banging the tent pegs in with a hammer. He insisted on delivering the first blow and managed to hit my fingers roughly 50 per cent of the time. Once the flysheet was secured we then had to put up the two ‘bedrooms’ inside. No easy task, particularly as Freddie’s idea of helping was to clamber into them midway through, but we managed it in the end. Once they were in place it was time to unroll the groundsheet and inflate the two blow-up beds.
I glanced at my watch: 4 p.m. OK, I’d missed the first 15 minutes of the second half, but still. Not a bad afternoon’s work. I decided to take a photograph of the tent with my iPhone and post it on Twitter just to prove I wasn’t a total idiot.
‘Hurray,’ someone tweeted back. ‘Mind you, it looks inside out.’
This was soon followed by a cascade of tweets, all pointing out the same mistake. (‘Which is more of a lightweight, Toby?’ asked Jasper Rees. ‘You or the tent?’) Once again, the prospect of Caroline regaling her parents and siblings with the Tale of the Tent loomed in front of me. Reluctantly, I decided to take it down and start afresh.
By the time I got it up again it was 6.05 p.m. It had taken me over four hours. Something tells me I’m not going to enjoy living in Budget Britain.
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