Its a bank holiday weekend and here in Leeds we have the Carling Music Festival, a huge gathering of unwashed youth and the not-so-youthfull gathering at a country estate just outside of Leeds for four days of camping and listening to some of the countrys top rock, pop, and indie music - and if I knew what all of that meant I'd put a fuller description, as it is you'll have to follow the link. Its sold out by the way.
Travelling through Leeds past the railway station for the last two days I've seen them arriving from all over the country, hordes of kids, some of them no more than kids really, all humping huge backpacks with four days worth of pot noodles, cheap canned lager, a sleeping bag and a tent whilst at the same time wearing all of the waterproof clothes they can find in their parents home as everyone knows it always rains at music festivals.
Last night on the local TV News programme the scene was there for all to see, acres and acres of tents and thousands of young people getting to know their new neighbours and cracking open the beer whilst waiting for the first of the ear-splitting bands to appear this afternoon.
It sounds like my idea of hell on a bank holiday weekend, absolute hell.
But it wasn't always that way.
Oh no.
I've done my fill of camping.
Many, many years ago when the world was a younger place, just shortly after Noah had broken up his ark when the rain stopped actually , I, and dozens of my friends would head off to the Lake District of a bank holiday weekend for three days of beer, beer, a tent, and then some beer.
To be honest I don't really know why we bothered driving all the way up to the Lake District - for those not in the know it the nearest thing that we Brits get to mountains and wilderness although in reality you are never more than 500 yards away from a pub in the Lake District, its like a brewery theme park with what we jokingly call mountains - I don't know why we bothered with the travelling because we only ever sat in a pub drinking beer for three days, we could have been in any pub anywhere for all the attention that we gave to the outside world.
And it always rained, always.
Which should come as no suprise as the Lake District is reknowned for rain, lots of it, storm clouds that have made there way across the Atlantic for four days, gleefully dump their precipitation on the first bit of high ground that they come across, you don't need to be a meteorologist to understand that suprising fact, and the first bit of high ground they hit is the Lake District.
So we would lie on the wet ground in our wet sleeping bags in our wet tents at night, wide awake and in a drunken haze, listening not the drip-drop of a gentle bank holiday shower, but the thunder of gallons upon gallons of water hitting our feeble nylon flysheet every second whilst a howling, whining banshee of a wind would arrive all the way from Newfoundland just to torment us and threaten to whip our tent out of the ground and carry it away up onto the top of Helvelyn every night, just for fun.
I still remember the very night when I decided that camping was just pathetic and a complete waste of my life energy - it was the Queens Silver Jubilee bank holiday weekend in 1977.
It had been such a promising start, I'd borrowed the company van for the trip and had picked up John the electrician who claimed to have in his possesion a tent, well he called it a tent anyway, I'll call it a tent for the purpose of this story, but in fact, and despite looking like a tent, it was as useful as a sponge would have been for sheltering under.
It was a glorious Friday evening as we travelled up to the camping location of our choice, a lovely summers evening with the promise of a three day weekend in store, in all the villages that we passed through people were hanging out bunting and flags in celebration of our Majesty's 25 years on the throne, including a man up a ladder who had a suprise waiting for him when he came back down it as John the electrician leaned out of the van window and threw up all over his ladder and house wall - he'd already been drinking for most of the afternoon and was feeling a little worse for it.
It all changed when we arrived in the Lakes - it started to rain.
We put up the tent in the rain and then walked to the pub in the rain, and then later we walked home from the pub in the rain and slithered into the tiny two man tent in the rain to find that it was raining inside the tent too and had been busy raining all over our sleeping bags while we'd been in the pub.
For the first night I lay on my back inside my wet sleeping bag, looking up at the wet nylon roof of the tent from which water poured down on me without let or hinderance from the nylon and I lay there and thought how stupid this all seemed and how much dryer I'd be if I actually just went and lay outside and didn't bother with the tent.
And then it rained all through the saturday and we spent all day saturday in the pub and then walked home again through the rain and crawled into the useless tent and into our sodden sleeping bags and I lay there again for another night of staring at the water pouring in through the not-so-waterproof nylon and the next morning in our wet clothes we went to the pub in the rain and spent all day and all night in the pub and then we walked back to the tent in the rain and I looked inside the fekkin useless contraption and decided there and then that camping was not my cup of tea at all.
And at that point I had a brainwave - why not sleep in the van ?
Parked right next to the tent that doubled as a shower enclosure had been, for the last three days, a nice, waterproof, sometimes warm metal box who's principal use was for transporting electrical goods around but with a little imagination could easily double up as a bedroom.
I used it.
It was freezing cold in there, my sleeping bag was still wet, the steel floor was ribbed and hurt you whichever way you lay and the relentless rain just sounded a hundred times louder on the steel roof than it did on the nylon joke-of-a-tent.
At 4am I'd had enough and went to the tent to awaken John the electrician and tell him I wa sgoing home and that if he wanted a lift he'd better be in the van in three minutes, its a good job I did awaken him at that point as the water level inside the tent had almost reached his open and snoring mouth, another half hour or so and he would have been submerged and likely drowned.
I've never been camping since.
And if it rains this weekend for those kids at The Carling Music festival,
Then I will laugh my dry socks off.
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