The Idler’s camping expert Matthew De Abaitua was invited by a PR company to camp on the roof of a shopping centre to raise awareness for something or other. What a stupid idea that was

WE step into the glass elevator with our camping gear. Cath pushes the button for the roof. The paved forecourt of the shopping centre silently falls away. I avert my eyes from the vertiginous drop and look across at St Paul’s cathedral. It is late afternoon and the golden cross atop the dome blazes in the sinking London sun.

We step onto the terrace. Thirty or so identical blue pop-up tents are pitched on patches of astroturf, their corners weighed down against the wind with stones. Each tent contains a fat inflatable mattress, a pair of pillows, two sleeping bags, and a goody bag gathering together various donations from the stores in the shopping centre below. For one evening, this roof terrace in central London will be our campsite.

Our compère for the evening is Melissa, immaculate in her little black dress, haircut and tan. This urban camp is raising money for charity, and the other guests have paid hundreds of pounds for the privilege, mostly inexperienced campers attracted by the novelty of camping but unready to risk the English countryside. I haven’t paid – I will be giving a talk. As Melissa explains the running order, PR people congratulate one another on the evening’s organisation: the tents are amazing (“They just pop-up!” “Really? Amazing.”), the food is going to be fantastic, and it’s such a thrill to gaze over the city from this vantage point, south over the Thames and the Tate Modern to the distant hills. What an exciting novelty it will be to sleep here!

As they are talking around me, I remember three things:

1) The first time I met someone who described themselves as working in PR, they were crying.

2) People rarely feel in themselves as posh as they appear to others.

3) Quests for novelty mainly discover new forms of stupidity.

Camping on a roof is a stupid idea. It is very windy on a roof. Tying my tent to weights leaves various sections of it unsecured to flap against my face all night. The other tents are single skins, without an insulating layer of air between inner and outer tent, so they will be cold at night and hot in the morning. The organisers are naive concerning the reality of sleeping outdoors: a watch manufacturer offers campers a wake-up call as if the dawn won’t be up to the job; a telescope is arranged even though London is so drenched with light that stargazing is limited to a misty half moon and the pole star. At this camp, nature is some uninvited, barely-tolerated provincial oaf excluded from the metropolitan fabulousness.

Speaking of provincial oafs, Melissa catches me gazing at the many little tents and the polished stone floor, and the handrail and sloping mirrored sections of roof beyond.

“Amazing view, isn’t it?” she says.

“Yes,” I reply, trying to figure out where—at four in the morning—I will have a sneaky piss. Behind the dermatology stall? In the bonsai plant pot? The digging of a latrine should be the first act of establishing a new camp. It’s crucial to establish the lats before you set a fire or even pitch a tent.

“There are toilets,” explains Melissa, “but you will have to be buzzed in and out of them by security.”

“What about in the middle of the night?”

“Oh don’t worry. Somebody will stand there all night.”

(And they did.)

“Which one is your tent?” I ask. The blue pop-up tents rock and shiver in the wind.

“Oh, I’m not camping.” She makes a face.

I look at the PR people. They make the same face.

This is a blow. I wanted to discover if an urban camp generated the same camaraderie as a countryside camp. One of the pleasures of camping is that it is inherently egalitarian – the status symbols and hierarchies of city life are suspended for the commonality of the campfire. If the organisers and compere would not participate, then how would I be able to observe the effect of the camp on the social hierarchy? Their absence was itself an answer: Melissa would never camp. Her face registered disgust at the suggestion.
Why do some people find camping so disgusting? Perhaps it is the proximity to strangers that makes us cringe. On the roof, the tents are pitched far nearer to one another than they would have been in a field. Only in the lowlands of Glastonbury festival have I seen campers so cheek-by-jowl. In a debate about the merits of camping, the presenter of Woman’s Hour cited the “nocturnal noises” of strangers as one of her sources of revulsion, not just the noise of sex but the whole range of sounds produced by one type of stranger in particular: another woman’s husband. A husband is a barely tolerable collection of private shames that one does not care to be aired in public.

Camping rubs up against taboos around privacy. Some of these taboos are minor (how do you feel about other people seeing you brush your teeth?). Some of the taboos are so potent that I have known entire families leave a festival because not one of them could use the toilet. (My mother would have taken a bucket. The communal nighttime pissoir of the bucket has vanished from modern camping gear: in the 1970s it was considered preferable for small children and adults to urinate in a plastic bucket in the middle of the tent than to go outside against a bush or tree. I am still haunted by the sound of my brother’s urine ranging over the groundsheet, then rattling the hard plastic base of the bucket, then off again.)

Festival toilets do take some getting used to. It is not only a question of hygiene. The toilet in a caravan, for example, is about a yard away from the kitchen. In a caravan, you are shitting where you eat. Or, more accurately, in a wardrobe next to where you eat. The camper does not mistake privacy for hygiene.

At festivals, the boundaries of privacy are steadily eroded. I often find myself at open urinals alongside the queue for the women’s toilets. A blithe spirit prevails. Exuberant or inadvertent public nudity is always on the cards at festivals, from mixed showers to communal skinny-dipping in the river (although ‘skinny-dipping’ is an inaccurate phrase for my nude swimming: ‘chunky-dunking’ would be more appropriate). But the erosion of propriety does not make the festival a more sexual place; if it were possible to measure the precise amount of sexual activity undertaken by a nation, then I wager this index would see a drop during the big festivals such as Glastonbury. Most of the men are so heady with booze, drugs and body odour that their festival is a three-day impotence binge. I once gave a talk about camping etiquette to a tiny audience at a small festival called Playgroup. During the Q&A I realised that my meagre audience were all on ketamine, the horse tranquiliser; they were the only people who had been unable to get up and leave when I took the stage. What psychological agonies they must have suffered, their sense of time distorted, every elongated moment made torturous by the drone of my voice! If only they could muster control of their limbs! From their glazed drooling and involuntary moans, I gathered that they found the very idea of camping etiquette—of behaving in a way at a festival that was considerate to other people—completely alien. Gazing into their drugged watery eyes, I was reminded of the latrines at Glastonbury, each of which empty directly into a common cesspit that roils and seethes below.

And so Melissa’s flickering look of disgust at the thought of camping is understandable. Camping has many unsavoury associations and, on the roof terrace, the proximity to other people’s husbands is close. Camping in the city renders the taboos concerning privacy stronger and so the suggestion of breaking those taboos is all the less palatable. It is only much later that I realise that the source of her revulsion was not physical but social: you camp in places you do not belong, and for Melissa and her friends, a great deal rests on their ability to convince this city that they belong.

PITCHING my tent on top of a building makes me realise that it is the countryside which makes camping bearable. The roof terrace is unyielding and unwelcoming and it abrades the knees. The act of hammering a peg into the earth creates a bond between the soil and the camp; up here we are balanced precariously on polished stone and on strict orders not to mark the terrace in any way. The tent is so vulnerable and slight compared to the building. Take a tent out of the countryside and place it in the city and its meaning changes – it loses its heroism and becomes a symbol of the dispossessed: the hobo jungle, the tent city of Nickelsville that moved around Seattle, Brian Haw’s peace camp on the lawn of Parliament Square evicted onto the pavement by order of the mayor, the Occupy Camps that will be pitched below this shopping centre within the month, and of which our privileged little camp anticipates in form, albeit representing its antithesis in spirit and intent.

After he left university, William Wordsworth moved to a house in this area, in the lee of St Paul’s cathedral, where he was to “pitch a vagrant tent among the unfenced regions of society”. From the roof, I try to catch a glimpse of the tree on the corner of Cheapside and Wood Street that inspired his poem ‘The Reverie of Poor Susan’. In the poem, the song of a thrush reminds poor Susan of the countryside, and pastoral images intrude upon urban reality: she imagines “A Mountain ascending, a vision of trees; / Bright volumes of vapor through Lothbury glide / And a river flows through the vale of Cheapside.”

Wordsworth’s poetry about London—his vision of Westminster Bridge at dawn, his walk through its teeming crowds as recorded in the Prelude—drape pastoral metaphors over the city, memories of the Lakes and Dales used in the same way that contemporary citizens use their headphones – as a way of removing oneself from the London present. The metaphors of the London crowd recur throughout the centuries: the ceaseless procession of faces, with their marks of weakness and marks of woe (or rather, around the London Stock Exchange, marks of wealth and the exhaustion required to earn it), the unstaunchable wound of people gushing onto the tube platform, legions of the undead on London Bridge. To be part of the crowd and alienated from the crowd at the same time: the hemmed-in claustrophobic freedom of anonymity.

In our terrace camp, far above the emptying streets, the campers watch the slow approach of rain clouds from the north. After the rain a double rainbow wavers over the city. In the setting sun, the Shard skyscraper is an unsheathed blade. The skyline is an uninhabited landscape, and on the roof we feel these sights belong entirely to us.

Night falls. A single gull, underlit by city lights, shines against indigo clouds. The city is never truly dark. It merely changes from one state of mind to another. Melissa takes the stage and the evening’s entertainment—of which I play a small part—unfolds. A female jazz saxophonist is up after me and she performs in a short, tight leather jacket. She looks very cold. In between songs, her smile turns into a shiver. I want somebody to give her a blanket. When a vicious gust whips around the dome of St Paul’s and lashes against our camp, she arches her back, gasps and bites down on the mouthpiece of her instrument.

Melissa applauds the saxophonist off stage, and then it is time for the charity auction. The lot is a box for an evening at the O2 Arena watching Batman: The Musical. The bidding starts at five hundred pounds. And it stops there too. An uneasiness falls over the small audience. Who can afford five hundred pounds to buy something they don’t want? Who is willing to break the awkward silence?
As a social phenomenon, silence as is not as awkward as it once was. With such a glut of communication from work colleagues and friends, it has become acceptable to curtail all unsolicited communication with silence; the rejection letter and the polite refusal are almost extinct. The audience fiddle with their smartphones, absenting themselves from the obligation of the auction by briefly touching their digital acquaintanceship.

“Come on!” says Melissa. But our faces are set. We will not bid for this item. Not even for charity.

“Do I hear five hundred and five pounds?”

Silence.

“Five hundred and five pounds for this amazing opportunity.”

Five minutes ago she said the burgers were amazing. And they weren’t. That’s the problem with hyperbole: it leaves you nowhere to go.

Silence.

We leave her hanging there, hair tousled by the cold city wind, one arm crooked protectively over her midriff.

“It’s only five hundred and five pounds, and for a good cause.”

And this is why Melissa is worth the big bucks. Because I would have given up at this point, this unbearable juncture. She doesn’t.

She will face us down to the very quick of our shame.

“Do I hear any bids?”

No, you don’t. We clutch our wine glasses tighter. Leave us alone, woman.

“The money will really help young people. Disadvantaged young people.”

Haven’t we done enough for disadvantaged young people by paying four hundred pounds per tent to sip wine atop a shopping centre next to the London Stock Exchange?

“Please, someone.”

Don’t appeal to our pity. We have no pity.

Oh, wait.

And there, sat in a deckchair at the front, a man richer than the rest of us wearily caves in. I am guessing it is not the first time he has had to pick up the cheque to save a crowd from embarrassing itself. He offers six hundred pounds just to be decent. Is this rich man camping with us? No, he has bought a ticket but he will not camp. That would be absurd when his apartment is only across the road.

Next up, a team of jugglers perform in a crosswind in the dark. Against the racket of dropped clubs, a juggler shouts, “This is really difficult to do with no visual information!”

Then at midnight, a sensitive singer songwriter—a floppy-haired, middle-distance-gazing, cardigan-wearing manboy—appears to usher us into the arms of Morpheus.

The wind scatters his laminated lyric sheets across the terrace. The jugglers join him on stage to lead a singalong instead. They look up the lyrics of American Pie on a smartphone. He demures. They ignore him. The wine runs out. The PR team go home. American Pie enters its thirteenth verse.

“Look at his face,” I say to Cath, pointing at the singer-songwriter manboy wedged in between a line of sweating drunk jugglers. “He’s not happy.”

Cath starts laughing at the manboy. The wine goes to her head. She can’t stop laughing. The more demonstrative and bellicose the jugglers become, the deeper the manboy sinks into despond, and the louder Cath howls. During the nineteenth verse of American Pie, a camp spirit flickers among the remaining urban campers.

The camper is a stranger to the land in which he or she is pitched, and so readily forms bonds with the other strangers around them. Because she is not camping and therefore not one of us, Melissa has retired to the smoking area of the Moet Chandon terrace bar. I go over to congratulate her upon her persistence during the auction and she introduces me to her boyfriend, a good-looking twentysomething who, it transpires, has had relations with contestants from two reality television programmes, one set in Chelsea and the other in Essex.

I shake his hand.

“My word,” he exclaims, “you’ve got big hands.”

I look at my hands.

“You want to be careful,” he says, “I might sneak into your tent when you are asleep and chop off your hands and keep them for myself.”

I put my hands behind my back: the image of this well-to-do young man hacking at my wrists and stealing the one thing I have going for me—large hands—just so he can prance around wearing them strikes me as strangely symbolic. I want to say to him: “Don’t you have enough? Aren’t you content with all the money and the power and the good looks? Do you really need my hands too?” Perhaps I am being unfair. I wonder if he went to boarding school. A dorm adolescence can give the schoolboy a different sense of physical boundaries: when I was an undergraduate, the boys from the rugby team or the rowing team would often grip my shoulders, measure me up and ask me if I played their particular game. I didn’t even know the rules.

The conversation moves on to places where I do not belong and so I make my excuses and slip away with my hands in my pockets. Returning to the singalong, I find the entertainment dispersed, the campers off performing their final ablutions before bed.

“Have you seen what’s in the goody bag?” asks Cath. In our tent, she removes one item after another from the bag: some crisps, a dermatological product, a pair of red fluffy slippers, a chocolate bar, a bottle of mineral water and a small box containing His and Her thongs.

“The perfect Saturday night,” she says.

I hold up the thong and slippers.

“It would have served them right if I had performed in these.”

The goody bag is a travesty of the camper’s gear. I take it personally. I start to tell Cath about the young man who wanted to cut off my hands. She interrupts me.

“Anyway, have you heard the news? There are riots in Tottenham. The streets are ablaze.”

I unzip the tent and run to the balcony, expecting to see a distant glow to the North. But Tottenham is six miles away and the guarded silence of Cheapside abides. Standing at the railing, a journalist from the BBC is on her mobile. She screens her face from the party with a raised hand. The fleeting shame of it: to be sleeping on the roof when history is kicking off on the streets.

In the morning, after a restless night, Cath and I strike camp: we pack up our tent and our sleeping gear, and take the glass elevator down to the street. It is Sunday, and the tall buildings are quiet and assured. It is in the nature of camps that they are temporary. To pitch a tent in the heart of the city is to say, look, London, we are strangers in our own home. It is a rich man’s jape, a prank of unbelonging,

ENDS

Matthew De Abaitua is a writer, journalist and consultant, who was for many years deputy editor of the Idler. He is the author of the novel The Red Men and the non-fiction work The Art of Camping (Hamish Hamilton).