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I think I told you about buying the tent. I got it from a film director in the next village. He’s moved back to Hollywood to make multimillion dollar blockbusters. He accepted his calling not with any great whoopee, more resigned dignity, really. ‘I suppose if you’re in oil,’ he said, ‘you have to live somewhere in the North Sea. I make movies and that means we’re going to have to live in Hollywood.’ Then he told me choosing between Beverly Hills and staying here in the tent was about the hardest call he’d ever had to make. Off he went with his family. They tried to hang on to the thing, but they had nowhere to store it properly.
We had quite a panicky phone call from his wife in the middle of the night. ‘Look, we’re really worried about the tent. We think it might be going mouldy. That shed is just too damp. I’m worried it’ll never survive. Have you got anywhere you can keep it over the winter? Do you want to buy it?’ It was almost as if they’d left a dog behind by accident, or maybe a cherished tortoise. They loved that tent.
It’s a pretty big tent, and on the face of it, a fairly ridiculous thing to have. But it always pays to spend time in the company of the fantastically, stupidly, sickeningly rich, to step into their lives for a moment, the way you might step off terra firma to board a yacht, and get the feel of another world. They have some very good ideas, the stupidly rich. The Crown Prince of Dubai had a kebab machine in his garden. I found I wanted one of those more than the royal yacht, the grand prix circuit or any of his other toys. But I’d take the tent over any of them. A whacking great marquee is actually the most practical, cost-effective slice of heaven going. That was why our friends were so worried about it going mouldy, I think. It wasn’t the value of the thing, more that it was something that needed to live on and be enjoyed. There aren’t that many big tents around. Most big old tents get snapped up by hire companies and let out for weddings and whatnot. But if you’re hiring one, you might as well buy one. Probably cheaper, and the cost of putting it up on 1 May and taking it down when the apples are ripe are the only overheads. Like Russian microphones made before 1970, old globetrotter suitcases and gulls eggs, you never know when you’re going to see a big old tent, and whenever you do you just have to grab it before someone else does.
The main reason that the tent is so fantastic is because for something so utterly spectacular it’s all so simple. Normally when you want to build something you have to start filling in planning forms. You have to call somebody to find out which forms to fill in. Then there are building regulations, contractors, accounts, snags and VAT. Before you know it, the dream invariably becomes a nightmare. Not with tents. Call any marquee-hire company and tell them you’ve got a huge tent and they’ll come and put the thing up on their day off. It’s what they like doing. It’s so idiot-proof it can all happen while you’re on holiday. Try building a swimming pool while you’re on holiday and see what happens.
When we got home, the sun was shining. The kids saw the tent and went absolutely bananas. They forgot their holiday as soon as they went inside. All their news pictures from school the following day had a tent in the garden, not a five-star hotel in paradise. It’s full of a bouncy castle and teddy bears at the moment, but I’ve slung an extension cable in there and I’m pretty sure I can hook it up to a kebab machine.
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