Economy Drives

The following article by Carol Midgley was spotted in this week's Times Magazine on Saturday and offers an alternative view to the earlier blog article "Camping Boon as Credit Crunch Bites":

"There's one credit crunch story that is patently kosher. Sales of tents have rocketed, and bookings at caravan and camp sites have been the highest for years as people eschew expensive foreign holidays. I know this to be true because the entire caravan population of Britain was in front of me doing 25mph tops on single-lane A roads as I was driving home from Devon recently, mainly in second gear. In seven days I saw more clapped-out caravans and crammed-to-the-toilet-block camp sites than in my whole life. And yet these holidays - in ceaseless rain, obviously - looked about as appealing as a John McCririck bottom boil.

A good friend of mine swears by camping and yes, I see the attraction of not worrying about whether a hotel mattress will smell of wee. But on closer observation, it seems that British caravan and camping holidays consist mainly of putting out bins and attending the camp-site launderette.

Caravan dwellers appear to spend their entire time inside boiling kettles and, on the rare occasions when the sun does come out, promptly erect two deckchairs outside their own door to enjoy a bracing view of someone else's four-berth. Why not just set up camp on the grass at a motorway service station? Oh, actually, I did see one family doing exactly that.

And yet there have been waiting lists for some sites. Mystifying. I'm afraid I'm with George Carlin, who famously said that when you wait a year to sleep next to a tree, something is very wrong indeed".

Image above courtesy of photolibrary.com