We are away in the van again. We are in France this time but van-life (on campsites) works pretty much the same – certainly in both France and the UK. There’s a communality, a shared appreciation of what makes living together in a relatively confined space work for everyone’s benefit. The are rules in place and, again, they are very similar across the board. Some sites enforce them harder than others (Camping and Caravan Club seem especially zealous at some of their sites) but there is generally no need for a heavy handed approach as, like I said earlier, campers understand one another. One of the ways in which sites do differ is in the allocation of pitches. For those unacquainted with campsites, a pitch is basically your designated area of the site for the duration of your stay. They can be clearly marked out by, for instance, border hedges, or they might be, in the UK especially, more a notional area of grass that permits you space to create your very own temporary autonomous zone (TAZ). I have referred elsewhere to TAZ space on a number of occasions. Essentially they are shared spaces of communal living where the ‘normal’ rules of societal engagement don’t apply in the way we generally understand and accept them. They exist, as the name implies, for the duration of your participation in them, your stay at the campsite or festival etc. TAZ space generally implies a freedom of spirit and mind. Campsites can generally be split between those that allocate your pitch before you arrive and those that allow you to choose where you pitch up when you get there. This week we are at a site where we have been allocated a pitch number (7) but, as they are quiet, we could choose one of a number of other, vacant, pitches.
Last night a couple arrived in their motorhome and whilst the male of the party parked and levelled up his female companion went looking for a better spot. So they moved to another pitch. And then they moved to another and then finally decided on their final resting place. They only stayed for one night. Anne and I on the other hand, are on pitch 7 which, as you will recall, is our originally allocated pitch.
There are a number of reasons why we stuck with what we were given and I am going to highlight some of them now.
- The campsite owner recommended it to us. There is no room for cynicism in the world of Van. If the man says this is a good pitch he isn’t saying it because it suits his mowing cycle – he is genuinely telling you which pitch he thinks is a good one.
- If it turns out that the campsite owner has radically different needs to us and that pitch 7, in this instance, is a bit of a bum steer then well we can blame him for our less than satisfactory stay on the sub-optimal pitch at his campsite.
- You generally arrive at a campsite in the late afternoon or early evening so you can see what the weather is doing at that specific time. If the sun is shining then you can swiftly ascertain how your evenings are going to go vis-a-vis exposure to sunlight or warmth. What is harder to determine and, in my experience, has a far greater impact on your stay, is how much sunlight you might be exposed to first thing in the morning. Bear in mind that first thing in the morning in summer time is pretty bloody early and the pop top of our vehicle, where we sleep, is canvas walled and gets hotter than a sauna after about 10 mins of direct sunlight. As a consequence, because neither of us is terribly competent at working this shit out, we don’t push for a scenario that will ultimately back fire on one or the other by either roasting one or, more hazardous still for a harmonious stay, sweltering the other because you were the one that decided we should move to a ‘better’ pitch.
- You just have to take what life throws at you and deal with it.
I am going to now focus in on 4 as I think that is the more important reason for our currently living life on pitch 7.
We all have to be somewhere. Being is essentially occupying a space at a particular time. You are there. I am here (in pitch 7). I might want to be in pitch 8 (currently occupied by a lovely, elderly, French couple) as they get better sun in the morning than we do. I might enjoy pitch 22 for the same reason but it is much further from the toilets. Given my present condition (see I Have Cancer. for further details), the closer I am to a urinal the better. Don’t even mention pitch 6, too great a slope and the grass is practically non-existent. The thing is that all the pitches have something to recommend them and all, by the same token, have their drawbacks.
Once you are on your pitch though then you have to work out how you are going to live there, essentially how you make the best of what it has to offer. Can you sit out in the morning/afternoon/evening? Where can you hang things to dry? Where can you put your mat down to do your morning yoga? (I appreciate this is a little niche but very important for me and Anne). You will make some minor mistakes in the first few days, you will feel self conscious putting your seat in the sun if it exposes you ‘too much’ and you will especially feel vulnerable the first morning you roll out your mat and do your yoga practice. After a day or so though this will feel more and more like ‘normal’. You will become acclimatised and start to feel a little bit like this is ‘home’ for the next few days at least. You get to know the place and you begin to understand where you fit in.
I have something of a personal philosophy that can be summed up by the (perhaps not so) simple phrase – know your place. Those three words have been much abused. Historically, the idea that one might be getting ideas above one’s station (god how antiquated does that sound?) and you should stick to what and who you know were a means by which some people were suppressed and thereby prevented from achieving their full potential. This was clearly true but can it really be so now? It was also a slight at people that tended to spend their whole lives close to where they were born and brought up. I am a case in point for both these views, I never went to university, like so many of my peers, and I have lived my whole life without moving 3 miles from where I was born and brought up. The thing is though, as with the pitch you are allocated on a campsite, you have to be somewhere. You have to occupy a space in time so why not be somewhere you know? The converse is, of course, that if you are somewhere you are unfamiliar with then it is in your interests to get to know that place as much as you can so that both you and the place get the best out of each other. Know your place. Is that belonging?
I find the concept of belonging fascinating. I have, as I stated earlier, lived no further than 3 miles from where I was brought up yet do I feel that I belonged there in all that time? No, is the short answer. So what is belonging and how do we get to feel it? The derivation is from a ‘longing’ – a strong desire for something, in this case a place and, usually, the place of your kith and kin. We long to be with our own kind in our own place is how it is depicted and, in fairness, how it has played out largely in history. I think there is a subtler interpretation to it. We long for many things, we have what can be described as a fantasy of how our lives play out. This could easily be restated as a longing – isn’t that what fantasy is? So we long, dream, fantasise about a state or place in which we will be contented. The other half of the word belonging is ‘be’. To be or not to be, etc. the ‘be’ is short for being, that occupying a space in time thing. Perhaps then, we could describe belonging as being where we are longing to be. Where the space in time we occupy is, or roughly equates to, that for which we long for or dream of. We belong because it is the best space/time situation we could be in. That combination of factors might well have come about because of chance – we happen upon the perfect set of circumstances, perhaps because the chances of doing so are great (we have a broad definition of our ideal situation) or we are easily pleased – or, more likely in my opinion, we adapt both our ideals and our way of living in order that they more closely align. We take what pitch 7 offers and we meet it head on and make it work. The alternative is to go to pitch 8, decide its not for us and try pitch 9, 10, 22, 57, 95, 42 until we ‘feel’ it is the right pitch for us, the one in which we can belong (or, maybe, never find the right one but stay because it is deemed suitable by others). Belonging requires us to do the work of being, we cannot pursue belonging. In the same way as the pursuit of happiness, for instance, our struggle will always leave us dissatisfied. There are aspects of life, these include both happiness and belonging, that arise because of other factors in the way we live. They are by-products. We are happy because we are out with friends and enjoying their company. We belong because we work to make the place in which we reside meet with our expectations of how communities function.
(I will coda this section by seemingly refuting an awful lot of what I have just written. The essential aspect of any TAZ space is that no one belongs. This is a neutral space owned by no one and defined by all. You can feel a sense of belonging after some time at a festival or a campsite but you have to arrive feeling that you will be in a space and time you haven’t been before. That is where the magic happens. That is when it works. On pitch 7.)
There is, in the way I describe this process, a sense that we have a choice in how it comes about. When we arrive at the campsite, we could have (our allocated and rightful) pitch 7 or we could choose pitch 9 or 42 or 17. Whilst we effectively do make the decision to stay in pitch 7 or move on, the question of whether we are consciously making that choice is somewhat vexed and certainly not something I am going to explore in any great depth here. I will nail my colours to the mast of determinism though and state that whilst it does feel like we are choosing we are, in fact, merely responding to the prior events and occurrences in our lives, coupled with our basic genetic coding, that delivered us to that place at that time. We were thrown there, by fate or whatever force we choose to believe drives us through life. What is certain, to me, is that this is in no way down to me being me at some essential level – it is, somewhat paradoxically, both very much because I am this Steve Priest and, equally, not because I am this Steve Priest.
To sum up then, I had no say in my being allocated pitch 7. I was thrown into it. I chose not to explore other options and I made of it what I did. I played the hand I was dealt. We had a really great stay on pitch 7. There were frustrations and annoyances during our stay but we coped well with them. The day before we left it rained and the temperature dropped significantly. This meant that we had to be patient on moving day whilst there sun came round the trees and, eventually dried everything before we packed up. The point is that by then we had the lay of the land and we were confident that the sun would come round and dry things in time for us to leave. We knew our place.
We are now on a different site, on pitch 134, the sum of which is 7. And they say there is no god, the fools.