Julie Jay: We survived our first camping trip as a family 

After a weekend of glamping I feel I am now ready to channel my inner Bear Grylls and live off grid completely

a multigenerational family is camping in a park by the river and setting up a tent

Camping is kind of like hen parties: Great in theory, but the practical application will have you seriously questioning your life choices and wondering where it all went wrong.

For the last while, our five year old has been obsessed with getting us out of our house and into a tent. I don’t know where he first discovered the practice of camping, but I am presuming this is just one more reason why American TV programmes need to be limited, that and his terrifying habit of calling sweets candy and insisting that privatised healthcare is actually a good thing.

His dad is also a newfound convert to camping, though had yet to put his money where his tent pole is and venture outside. Still, with the fine weather, there was no better time to try out tent-life and see what North Americans have been obsessing about all these years, especially given the odds of us encountering a bear are slim to none, unless they are of the one-eyed teddy bear variety.

One-eyed teddy bears are famously a common find in Irish forests, though they can usually recover well following a stint in the teddy bear hospital. In America, a similar treatment would cost you thousands — just one more reason to thank the gods we live in a place where teddy bears don’t have to go bankrupt to have their vision restored.

With repeated throwaway comments of ‘we really must go camping’, I decided to give it a whirl, because sleeping indoors is truly for the weak. And so it was that the offer of tickets to a family festival came at the perfect time to experiment with the concept of yurt life and dip our toes into the Portaloo waters.

I can’t say I was sold on the idea, because I like sleeping on this recent invention called a bed. I also have a phobia of Portaloos since I heard of a young man being turned upside down in one by his friends ‘for the craic’. Not only does this story not inspire faith in the security around the Portaloo system, but it is also just one more example of how stag parties have nothing on their much more pleasant female counterpart (women would never).

But still, I bought the camping chair and feigned excitement about a couple of nights in Wicklow, where the uniform was very much red-faced parent pulling a trolley full of broken dreams: that is, crying children and extortionately priced bubble guns.

Overall, we had a great time, but given we were within 5m of a coffee stand where you could get a flat white at all times and the hot shower never ran cold, you could hardly say we were roughing it. The glamping area was like seeing how the other half lived: I spotted one woman carving a watermelon with a knife that I’d swear had a diamanté handle; I saw toddlers eating olives and overheard a child who couldn’t have been more than six ask his mother if she had remembered to pack the Brie. It was truly a surreal but lovely experience, if also another reminder that I need to work harder to ensure I never end up in general camping again.

All my camping bits were utilised — the tiny lanterns, the camping table, even the little battery-operated hob that momentarily went on fire, but other than that minor blip did the job nicely.

We made camp friends and waved to the people in neighbouring yurts, marvelling at how quickly we had formed a communal bond, bar the hairy moments somebody’s phone would be unplugged from the shared charging area for a teenager to straighten her hair.

Still, when it came to leaving the campsite, all this goodwill went out the window, and it was suddenly every yurt family for themselves. As Mundy blared July across the field, I carried one overheated child, and my husband lugged all our camping bits and bobs before eventually acceding to my pleas and dumping the chairs by the side of the Portaloos.

“We can get new chairs, Fred,” I shouted, doing my best impersonation of a woman with enough money to burn that she can spend a weekend glamping and not worry about her card being declined for a flat white.

Eventually, we made it to the car — exhausted, overheated, cranky — the kids were also not in the best form. I was never so happy to see my husband’s car because for 20 terrible minutes we couldn’t find it, and I had just resigned myself to living in this Wicklow field for the rest of my days.

But driving out of the festival, I couldn’t help but feel proud. We had survived our first camping trip as a family and emerged intact, save for the abandoned camping chairs and the discarded, broken bubble guns.

So heartened by our little weekend was I that I have even purchased a tent, which can only mean one thing: the next time my husband suggests watching Formula 1, he’ll be sleeping in it.