OMG! This camping caper is driving me OTT

MOBILISING troop battalions of starships in a co-ordinated operation involving the invasion of a distant planet in the far reaches of another galaxy would be a doddle to anyone who has organised a family camping holiday. Oh. My. God.

You become Napoleonic in your strategising, OCD in your attention to detail, and like a melting rubber band in your flexibility. You lie awake, make lists of your lists, and ignore memories of when going away used to mean turning up at the airport straight from the party the night before, carrying little more than your passport and a lipstick.

Not anymore. Not when camping, families and driving is involved. Especially if your trip is long and your collective wallets shrivelled (the only one with any cash is the 11-year-old: stuffed with tenners from a recent birthday and lording it up like an oligarch).

Before ever leaving, there are those to consider who will not be coming on the trip — the dogs. A deal is struck with a friend — if you look after my charming but slightly unpredictable Rottweiler, you can leave your arthritic elderly deerhound, who is the size of a donkey and on antibiotics for dodgy guts, here when you go on your holiday. The German Shepherd is also suffering from acute digestive anxiety, a Pavlovian response the moment she sees the camping gear being unloaded from shed to car. Like Lassie in need of a Xanax, she circles the car, whining. When another friend comes to take her away for a more local holiday, there is a tearful hug goodbye, as the children roll their eyes. “Get a bloody grip Mum,” they snort.

But that’s the least of your problems. Your bikini wax, undergone amid much eye watering (literal and financial), is growing back. You are going to be hairy on the beach. Should this matter? Does caring about a growing out bikini wax make you a bad feminist? Or worse, bourgeois? Is the very fact you are going to the most bourgeois place on earth — the South of France — mean that you are bourgeois yourself? Fat chance. You have to have a decent car to be bourgeois, for a start, and not something that sounds more arthritic than the deerhound, and in dog years is even more ancient. To be properly bourgeois you need to not have all your camping gear stuffed in random supermarket bags, without a Cath Kidson pattern in sight — instead everything is spattered in festival mud. The roof box is wonky, the tentpoles cracked, the camping table lost in the depths of the spidery shed, and the children are already bickering. Halfway to the ferry, you will remember that essential item – perhaps the camping stove, or the kids’ tents — still sitting on the kitchen table.