Camping in Dorset

The summer holidays are over and I'm about to wake the girls up to send them back to nursery after a looong break (six weeks? eight? thirty two? I lost count a while back). It's been a really good summer holiday actually and the return to nursery sort of sneaked up on me. I have really enjoyed spending time with the girls who are not nearly as trying as they were during the easter holiday, which nearly killed me. It helps that they've stopped trying to kill each other. For a while (about six months) we were woken every day by their fighting before they had even got out of bed and it just continued all damn day, descending every five minutes into screaming, sobbing, hitting and gouging. Thankfully they are going through a truce period and life has become a lot nicer around here. (Notice how I didn't say 'thankfully that has passed'? Mama ain't no fool.)

At the beginning of the summer we took the girls camping in Dorset. Some of you might remember our last attempt to go camping with them; 'a fiasco' would be an apt way to sum it up. This time was better. For a start we let a good two years and two months pass (HAHAHA to our plans to introduce W&P to camping young, for it to be a regular and cheap family holiday, to buying a new tent when they were a year old under the justification that 'it will get so much use'.) For another, this time we were visiting a friend who has land and on that land she has a large, semi-permanent tent with two sleeping compartments - one for each kid. Meanwhile we slept outside it in our three man tent; absolutely no trying to sleep all four of us in one space. It did feel like cheating, I'll admit it. Our friend's tent had sleeping platforms, mattresses and curtains around each bed and a kitchen area... it was far removed from our wild camping of yore. My guilt that we were 'doing it wrong' was short lived though, it dissipated the first night that we put the girls to bed at bed time and they stayed put, and slept! To our credit we didn't use the kitchen area once, we cooked all of our meals outdoors on either a camping stove or a barbecue. 'All our meals' translates to '174 burgers and 68 sausages'. It was a good week. 

The little corner of Dorset that we were staying in was pure heaven, it was England in perfection - fields, forests, rivers, farms, cliffs, beaches, tiny stone houses, villages with twisty streets, fruit farms... there were definite murmurings about leaving London and starting an orchard or a flower farm or a camp site, or pretty much anything that would let us live like this all year long and let our children grow up tanned and wild and free, like my friend Flora's beautiful, funny, wild and free kids, who live a mere handful of miles from where we stayed. A life of beaches and barbecues and axe skills and eating peas, raspberries and (in W&P's case) courgettes straight from the plant.

Here are some pictures. Sorry they're a bit shit, they're all from my phone. I took a film camera with me but the film has been added to the 10 year old pile of unprocessed rolls and goodness knows if it will ever make it to the lab. I suck at photography.