Climate camp: next year we’ll go for longer

It is 11 p.m. on Saturday night and I am way out of my comfort zone. With my husband, two young children and dog, I have spent the day with 1,300 climate campaigners, none of whom I knew before, in a sodden field near Heathrow’s second runway. Now the five of us are squeezed into a three-man tent, rain seeping through the sides, listening to the roar of planes taking off and landing. It’s not exactly summer camp. And yet I feel strangely elated.

The irony is that we nearly didn’t come to climate camp — because of the weather. At home in Wiltshire on Saturday morning, with a nice dry house full of chores and entertainments, the idea of camping in the rain seemed particularly unappealing. Like eating cold baked beans, or stepping barefoot on worms.

But we couldn’t pull out completely. We’ve spent the last 13 months feeling quietly proud of our decision to stop flying. We’ve enjoyed holidays by train, and gritted our teeth as friends gaily said they were taking up our carbon slack. But what had seemed like a radical decision at the time was beginning to feel inadequate. Climate Camp offered the possibility of taking our private protest a step further, and joining a mass campaign against airport expansion.

In the end we opted for a halfway house: we packed the car full of camping gear with the idea that we didn’t have to use it. We could spend the day at the camp, and then retreat to my parents-in-law in nearby Maidenhead if the going got too muddy.