Why do we do it?

Let's face it, there's nothing about caravanning that's easy.

Towing is a breeze when the caravan isn't attached to the back of the car.

You can see stuff in the mirrors, you don't need to worry about the builder's van in your blind spot with its nose between your arse cheeks waiting to jump out and overtake precisely when you need to pass a truck thundering along the inside lane at 60.9 mph, and reversing is a piece of cake.

Not to mention your fuel consumption tanking to half of what it usually is.

When you get where you're going - at least an hour and a half later than you intended - you have to remember how to assemble a complicated flapping monstrosity that doesn't fit properly, collects vast quantities of rainwater in its roof and threatens to end up in the next field if the wind rises above dead calm even if you've nailed it to the grass with big nails and silly rubber mallet.

You have to fill a big plastic barrel with water from a muddy tap which is at least four hundred yards away from where you are before you can wash anything or have a wee in a toilet so small you can't help thinking that Ernest Thetford was a midget as well as a comedian.

If you're foolish enough to take a little telly with you, you spend ages fiddling with an aerial - which is outside - while you're inside trying to find a channel which isn't showing a blizzard.

You have to unfold your uncomfortable outside furniture and find somewhere to put it where it isn't listing heavily to port or where one of your chair legs goes down a hole just as you sit on it.

You can't cook proper meals because the proper stuff for cooking proper meals is in your kitchen at home; you have to share most of what you eat or drink with a selection of insect life which enjoyed an hors d'oevre of your blood beforehand and when you've finished what hasn't slid off your lap into the grass, you have to wash up in a silly little sink the size of a pudding basin.

If you have a toilet inside, you have to empty it yourself. You have to tug a little plastic suitcase on wheels across a bumpy field like an ill-prepared tourist disembarking from a tiny plane at a remote airstrip somewhere in darkest Africa, the only difference being that if you are an ill-prepared tourist disembarking from a tiny plane at a remote airstrip somewhere in darkest Africa, your suitcase isn't full of soggy toilet paper and blue turds.

The likelihood is that unless you've had a skinfull you won't sleep well - at least for the first couple of nights - because you're either too hot or too cold, because you're tangled up in your expensive Duvalay like a half-unwrapped toffee or because you didn't get it all level before spending hours attaching the awning and unpacking everything you brought with you.

Because nothing has a proper place inside your little tin snail, stuff is strewn all over everywhere, and it takes five times as long as it would if you were at home to organise anything and everything. We can count on spending the first half of any day out sightseeing trying to get ready to go, and you can guarantee that someone will say 'Bloody hell. Hang on a minute...' just as you turn out of the campsite onto the main road.

And if it rains you get wet. Now I realise that there's no such thing as bad weather, merely the wrong choice of clothing, but when the right choice of clothing is all damp, such pearls of wisdom seem ill-placed.

How much easier would it be to stay at home where everything is exactly were its supposed be, the toilet empties itself, comfy chairs are in exactly the right place for watching television, water comes out of the tap without having to put it in first and there's no need for half a tent hung on the side of your house.

Other than that, it's just grand.

.

Another pearl of wisdom from Monsieur Le Pew Thanks Pete for cheering me up

Does your van have "a little plastic suitcase ON WHEELS?" Now that is posh. I have to carry ours by a flimsy handle located at each end. To look "hard" and not look as though I'm cradling a plastic baby I have to carry it by one handle only and pray all the way to the disposal point that the trap door doesn't fall off and spread the last 3 days collection of used wine all over the campsite.

Randa