Protest camping...Pramping?

Camping. It’s very popular, apparently. Of course, it’s always been popular with outdoorsy types, and poor people. But as the recession has bitten deeper, it’s also become popular with families who have worked out that the airport tax that it costs to get their three kids onto a flight to somewhere sunny will keep the parents in enough decent chardonnay to numb the pain of having to spend two weeks in a field with a dozen other families all coming to terms with the fact that in order to be able to help their kids with university fees, they are going to be spending less time sunning themselves and more time wondering why the shower block doesn’t have complimentary Molton Brown toiletries, and trying to out-do one another with barbeque marinades (my tip…lard, simple, elegant, and nothing says ‘campsite feast’ quite like the smell of frying lard).

By 2010, a holiday under canvas could be categorized thus:

Camping. Heavy canvas tents, featured in ‘Carry On’ movies, tents with a sense of history, the sorts of tents that the Empire pitched in jungles and artic wastes, the sort of tents a scout master was disgraced in, with guy ropes that are set like booby traps to trip the unwary. In recent years, advances in camping technology mean that entire tents are now made out of the same material that cagools used to be made out of, making them light, waterproof and ensuring that the inside of the tent usually has the same smell that the inside of a cagool.

Wild camping, used to be called trespassing, different to camping because while it still takes place in a farmer’s field, there's no stand pipe in the corner, just a cattle trough. (Nearby salt lick likely to deter middle class families on low sodium diets).

Glamping, a recreation favoured by middle class parents who can no longer afford to take their children abroad or the even more expensive alternative: centre parcs. Glamping offers the promise of a stay in a decent B&B or a boutique hotel. This is, of course, complete bollocks as, even if you stay at a Travelodge, your stay is unlikely to feature you treading in cow-shit as you make your way to a stinking toilet block in the dead of night. A tent is a tent, deal with it, be honest with yourself and embrace camping – it’s easy, just strike up a conversation with your camp-site neighbour about your journey to the site, sustaining a conversation about the perils of this countrys’ A roads for three hours before drinking enough wine to allow you to sleep despite your wife’s muffled sobbing and your eldest child’s stubborn refusal to exit the car. At all.

Festival camping - does not really count. Camping is all about pitching your tent, fetching your water, cooking your dinner and brushing your teeth in a communal toilet block next to a bloke who you are pretty sure sneaks looks at your wife’s breasts when he thinks nobody’s looking. It’s also about waking at dawn in the countryside far from the cares and distractions of the pantomime that passes for real life and having a cup of tea in complete silence before the business of the day – a punch up with your lusting neighbour and trying to tempt your kid out of the car – begins. It is not spending ten seconds sproinging your pop-up tent into existence, hoisting one of those fluttery pennants above it so that you can find your way back, realizing that every other bugger has a pennant just like yours and so fixing your position using GPS on your smart phone, then going and getting wasted for three days, doing all your sleeping in hedges or the St John’s Ambulance recovery tent/chill out lounge.

Previously, those were your choices. Let me add another:

Pramping - protest camping.

The tented village on Parliament Square has been forced from the grass on to the pavement. This, I suppose, tests the convictions of the protesters as it's one thing to camp on grass, but a different proposition entirely to pitch your tent on paving slabs six inches away from a bloody big bus belching diesel fumes. Also, it's harder to dig a latrine pit through concrete. I have always been perversely proud of the peace camp outside parliament, when it was a single bloke but bloody hell, a whole village?

One can’t help but have the sneaking suspicion that while Brian Haw was a committed protestor who embodied much that was great about England – taking a stand, commitment to a cause he considered just, defiance of authority – and while his presence there was a living embodiment of the other great English values – tolerance and fair play (can you imagine a protestor trying that in North Korea, or Italy? At least when they turned the water cannon on it would put out the flames from the burning encampment), I can’t help but wonder if any of the other campers are not so much there to protest but rather saving on a hotel room and spending their money on tickets for Madam Tussauds and the Phantom of the Opera.

I walked past the other day and there were so many tents I was wondering if there was some sort of festival on.

Pramping is, I think, here to stay. And I’d like to see more of it. We have many gorgeous civic buildings in this country, seats of power crafted by Victorian architects. But what those tall towers, high windows and splendid cornices need to set them off is a little village of tents in primary colours outside each one. Pissed off with your council cutting libraries? Pramp! Annoyed that your parish council have chosen to ignore your plea for a bus shelter with a roof for the third year running? Pramp! And why draw the line at democratic institutions? Who the fuck organises ‘Britain in bloom’ and why has your village never won? Pramp! Camelot…every week you buy a ticket but have you ever won? Ever had a sniff? No? Pramp!

And as for the ticket prices at Glastonbury…actually, no, your protest would, I’m pretty sure, go unnoticed.