Camping it up?

As a Cub Scout I used to love spending a night under canvas, but now I can't think of anything worse. Well actually I can, like surgery, watching Big Brother, snogging Ann Widdecombe or listening to Scooch. Camping has got to be somewhere near the top of my "not to do" list.

For starters you have to sleep on the ground, zipped up in a small sack. For the true camper, this is supposed to be fun, supposed to be one of the real treats of the camping experience. Sleeping on hard uneven ground and waking up bent over like a human prawn. That is fun?

Tents are designed to prevent a good night's sleep. They keep you freezing at night and roasting in the day and provide a guesthouse for visiting creepy crawlies and woodland animals.

But these are only a few of the reasons I don't like camping. Combine it with a rock festival and you may as well dig a hole in the ground and bed down for the night.

The first challenge is locating your tent after a hard night of revelry and music.

As I discovered last weekend, tents have an uncanny knack of all looking very similar. Trying to spot a flying flag above a tent suddenly becomes lot more difficult on a windless pitch-black night.

Then you have the hazard of guy ropes to trip up and decapitate you.

Safely back at the tent I recommend hanging luminous glowsticks on it to locate it again if you need to pop to the toilet.

Unfortunately a glowing tent normally attracts groaning drug casualties resembling a scene from Night of the Living Dead.

Once asleep you can then lie back and await to be woken minutes later by the piercing daylight of a 5am sunrise and the dawn chorus of the bongo playing students next-door.

If you're lucky you might even get a badly played guitar serenade of Oasis's Wonderwall.

Who says camping can't be fun? Me - and I didn't even mention the overflowing Portaloo situation.

Here's to forgetting the horrors and hardships till next year then.