From Bath to Bude: another day, another tent

Well, it’s been a couple of weeks since I’ve written anything on here: I’ve been off in Dorset working as part of a festival production team, spent a few days back home in Manchester seeing my family, and now I’m back with Beth, living in Cornwall for the summer.

It was so strange being in the north again – not because of where I was, but more because I was spending the night in a real life house for the first time in what felt like ages. Sure, I was staying on my mum’s sofa, but still being in the confines of four walls felt totally bizarre! Even when I went to work on Larmer Tree festival, I was staying in a tent, so it kind of felt like a home away from home. Still, it was wonderful being home for a short time and seeing everyone again!

Even though it felt like nothing had changed in Manchester, it was weird to go to the same places I’d always gone as a teenager and see nobody at all that I knew. I went back to the town I went to school in, and didn’t see a soul that I recognised. How times have changed! I reckon everyone has moved on by now. Even my Nana had popped off to Skegness when I went back…

I managed to squeeze in some coffee dates with people that were still hanging about – like my best friend Josie who has just come back from backpacking around Indonesia (seriously, I’m so jealous!) and my ex-teacher and wonderful friend Fran, who gave me bags of writing advice and life-coaching, as usual. Recently, I feel as though I’m even more appreciative of the friends I have that I don’t see all of the time: even though our meetings are few and far between, the love is always stronger than ever.

My oldest younger sister, Lauren, and I, spent a lovely evening in a hotel in Manchester (a stay-cation, if you will), where we had dinner with her boyfriend, went out for some drinks, and I got another cheeky tattoo. I had a wonderful time seeing everybody again, and then I hopped on a seven hour train journey to meet Beth in Exeter, where she picked me up and drove me to our new home.

So now we live in Bude – for the time being anyway – which is probably one of the prettiest seaside towns I’ve ever visited. We’ve spent the last few days popping in to see all of Beth’s family (I really do feel like I’ve been meeting the in-laws… When you share the same tent and get invited to family barbeques, it’s no wonder people think you’re together). She’s taken me to some beautiful places (including an old, haunted church…) and every member of her family seems to want to feed us all the time, which is great for the old bank account (and they’re all super lovely!!).

We’ve even managed to swing a great deal at the campsite we’re living on, where we essentially live for free by doing work on the site like cleaning, feeding animals, social media stuff… So, everything is lovely down this way! The weather has been perfect so far, but apparently we’re expecting some thunderstorms over the weekend. I’m so excited – I’ve yet to experience a thunderstorm in the tent and it’s bound to be wild.

Meanwhile, I still have that novel to write, so I’ve been working on my manuscript for a few hours each day, and I’ve also been thinking about more writerly things… I’ve had a lot of time to commit to this over the last week or so, and I’ve launched my plan into action today.

So I’m very pleased to announce that I’ll be running my own writing workshops from September onwards! My very first workshop will being Saturday September the 22nd in Common Ground, Oxford (UK), and will be titled Mindfulness Writing. I’ve never publicly spoken about my experiences with mental illness, and it still doesn’t feel like the right time, but what I will say is that I have absolutely used my writing as a form of therapy these past few years, and I’m ready to pass on what I’ve learnt to others.

If you’re interested in coming to my very first adult workshop (suitable for ages 14+), and you happen to be around Oxford in September – or you know someone that might be interested – you can have a little look on the facebook event group, or keep up to date with this blog for more information.

Anyway, Beth’s lovely mother is cooking us dinner, so I must dash. It’s a beautiful Cornish evening here, and I hope the sky is as blue wherever you are.

2 weeks of tent living: things we’ve learnt so far

No Fixed Abode

Today marks the two week anniversary of our transition from city-living to, uh living-in-a-field living… Here are some things we’ve learnt so far.

Washing clothes is hard

You might think it seems simple. You have a bucket, some water, and some hand-washing detergent from Sainsbury’s. They did this in the olden days, right? Only, it doesn’t seem so simple when you can’t get all the detergent out and your white T-Shirt is tinted blue, or when you’ve scrubbed your clothes but they still smell vaguely of sweat and grass… Drying your clothes is a whole other kettle of fish: I washed a shirt a couple of nights ago that was still soaking the next morning. I ended up holding it out of the car window on our commute to work, praying that mother nature would be my tumble dryer, and it was still kind of damp when I got there…

Finding things is… also hard

How does everything get lost so quickly? It’s just one tent! Yet somehow – even when we’ve tidied – it’s a chaotic pit of shampoo bottles and plastic cutlery. Where is the hairdryer? A pen? Those earplugs you lost last week? We may never know.

Don’t. Leave. Chocolate. In. A. Hot. Tent.

Seems obvious. Let me tell you, it’s easy to forget you’ve left that bar of Lindt under the table. (Though you do then get the absolute joy of watching your friend try and lick it all off the packet).

Always put the bug net up

I can keep telling Beth but she’ll never listen and, at this point, I’m as bad as she is. Remember to put the damn bug net up or you will spend half an hour of your evening trying to chase a cricket out of the tent (it’s hard. They jump a lot).

Learn to shower with spiders

It’s not that bad, really. They just want to hang out. Side note: don’t get attached to the spiders in the bathroom and start giving them names and saying hello to them every time you go in. Some other camper will squish that spider and leave out his body in a grotesque display of power. It will break your heart.

There are many different ways to make salad

For reals. You can put salad with anything, and you’re going to want to make lots of cold evening meals to save you having to struggle with the gas cooker. (Beth chants Quiche! Quiche! Quiche! in the distance).

Ear plugs are your friend

I did not realise this was a thing, but Beth gave me a pair last week and I’m never going back. Don’t get me wrong, the campsite is beautifully peaceful and quiet — but there are noises that seem much louder when you’re trying to sleep. Sheep, for example. Cows. Birds. Nature in general gets pretty indignant when you’re trying to catch some Z’s.

Make friends with other campers: they might have dogs

Campers come and go all the time on our little site, and I would say a solid 90% of them have brought adorable doggos with them. If you want the opportunity to cuddle with someone’s cute dog, you make friends with them. Simple.

Take lots of reading material

I finished my last book (it was so wonderful it barely felt like reading at all) in less than a week, then Beth finished the same one in a few days. So, now we’re out of reading material and have to actually talk to each other in the evenings (ugh, gross). The struggle is finding a book that was just as good as that one… Recommendations welcome.

Do not expect to be satisfied with city living ever again.

We moan a lot, but it’s wild really. I love living in our little tent in our beautiful corner of the Mendips, and I don’t know how I’ll ever go back to living in a house in a bustling city again.

Luckily, we haven’t made plans to do that anytime soon…

Goodbye Civilization

No Fixed Abode

It’s going to be a summer of tents, caravans, sofa surfing and – hey, quite possibly – maybe a couple of nights in a cardboard box. But since we reached the end of the tenancy on our house in Bath and decided to renounce city living altogether, we have truly committed to having no fixed abode. The first leg of our unconventional journey began yesterday, when we packed up a three-story house and moved into a tent instead.

It’s no surprise that we were fully unprepared for the amount of pure crap we had to move out of our home. We happily went swanning off with our friend Olly to go out for dinner, blissfully unaware of just how much needed to be done. I think it’s safe to say, our smiles faded when we arrived home at 9pm to pure mayhem. We spent the next five (six? seven?) hours cleaning, throwing stuff out, finding more stuff to throw out, running out of bin space, seriously considering fly tipping… Random junk from tenants previous suddenly became our responsibility to get rid of and it took us a long time (and a whole lot of recycling) to finally get the house to a good standard.

The next morning, packed and ready, we awaited the arrival of the new tenants for the momentous Key Handover. Despite having lived there for the last three years, I still don’t think it’s really sunk in that we don’t live at number 25 anymore. We loaded half of our stuff into the car (because that’s all we could fit in the car) and left the other half to pick up later in the day. It seemed like a great plan until we got in the car and it felt like the vehicle might just crumble under the weight of our two-tonne tent.

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And so, we said goodbye to number 25, and hello to… well, a field. It’s important to me that everybody knows that on the tent instructions, it said the assembly time was 3hrs 30mins. We put up this bad boy in 50 minutes (coffee & lunch breaks included).

It was a work of art. We were thrilled. Finished assembling the tent by 3pm, we then battled traffic to get back into Bath and pick up the rest of our stuff – stopping off on the way for ‘supplies’, aka lots of bottled water, custard creams and minstrels. It was definitely one of the hottest days we’ve experienced this year, and we were in a field with no shade, so there was definitely a whole lot of sweat and sunburn going on. We organised the inside of our casa – until it looked like the most adorable and civilised living space – and then went to scope out the campsite showers.

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There are only two toilets and two showers on our site, both in little adjacent cubicles, so Beth and I have now taken our friendship to a whole new level by maintaining conversation whilst showering and peeing.

After freshening up, we received truly adorable directions from the campsite owner to the local pub. Those included ‘cross the field, climb the style, and follow the church spire until you see it’. We’re only half an hour down the road, but this feels a long way away from city life in Bath.

The weather is glorious, and even though we had to wake up at 6.30 this morning to get ready for work, our morning commute was really beautiful. Time to get to work now, but I’m sure the day will be easier knowing I get to go back to my little tent at the end of the day. I have never known a place to have so much birdsong and so little light pollution!

Quills and Coffee

camping

From Bath to Bude: another day, another tent

2 weeks of tent living: things we’ve learnt so far

Goodbye Civilization

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