I'm back from a camping sojourn in the sodden British countryside and I have to reveal a shocking truth; everything in nature is about sex.
Stuck in my urban flat, I don't notice these things; my 'outside' world mainly concerns fighting or buying stuff. In the countryside, it's all different.
I am almost embarrassed to witness greedy stamens of Queens Anne's Lace forcing themselves upwards to the bees. The frisky sheep, the bucking horses, the pelvis-shaped sycamore wings fainting to the floor like damsels in a 'take-me-now' twizzle toward the fertile earth. Stags, deer, cadavers on the road, the fenced-in versus the wild. Flowers open shamelessly towards the sun and coyly close in the night air. Our campfire greedily sucks up the air and all of our wood. The earth, voluptuous in her mounds and curves, defies the copsing and mowers that try to tame her. She just keeps on saying it; "Love me, love me just the way I am. You cannot contain me!"
Everything in the countryside wants to shag or be shagged!
And the kids, my God the kids are free, combusting and instantly feral! No need for chastening sex education videos or tightlipped lessons about 'nocturnal emissions' and 'The Curse' here. No, my six-year-old girl, just get a load of those rampant poppies in the upper field!
Camping in the dank grey, our tent is a seed pod of dreams. Our sleep is odd, incorporating the raw sounds from outside, a canvas sheet between us and the pelting rain which batters us out of our slumber saying, "Submit! You are so much less than all of this."
Elemental, feet blackened with dirt and damp in our bones, we head home to the Big Smoke where I run a bath so hot I burn. I wonder if camping is not so much about being at one with nature, but about proving we can still build a home that keeps her out. We try to humanize the wild with our Bell tents and trangias, but looking out from the comfort of our canvas porches, we are just voyeurs at a demented peep show, catching a glimpse of who we really are.