20 March

What a night. I should have expected it, of course, since my son brought up the subject of camping yesterday evening. A soon as the evenings get lighter, his thoughts stray to sleeping under canvas, and this despite the Arctic conditions we’ve all been plunged into this week. Me and camping just don’t go. I’m happy for him to sleep out every night under the stars in the garden, if he so chooses, and his dad and his sister can go too – ‘wha’ever’ is my inner response. I camped quite a bit as a teenager, inter-railing my way intrepidly around Europe, sleeping on beaches with my boyfriend … but I was 18 then. I was seduced from my sulks last year by R, who persuaded me that camping was the way forward for family holidays. He was helped by the proliferation of articles last year extolling the virtues of Cath Kidston tents, of Mongolian Yurts, of discovering your inner happy camper. So we booked a couple of nights in North Norfolk, during the June half-term. All anybody seems to remember now about last summer was the often intense heat; but let me remind you, readers, that summer came late last year – June was a wash-out, in East Anglia, at least, and night frosts persisted. We duly froze, along with the grass. I’d booked the campsite on the internet, at the last minute and therefore in a panic – and it was terrible. Truly awful, a windswept, flinty field with no view and the most basic facilities. It’s only for two nights, I thought, in a stoic way, I can do it. That was before R got ill. I diagnosed man flu and left him too it, sulky at having to entertain the children while he lay groaning in the tent. Then on the second night I got it. Clearly not man flu, but a life-threatening disease. We decided we could last the night, as we were heading home in the morning anyway. I managed to get to sleep at about one in the morning, a child wedging me in on each side. Just as I was dozing, James sat up, said “Oh dear Mummy” and threw up all over me, and all over the bedding. Freezing, ill, and soaked in vomit, I gamely carried a carrier bag full of sick across the crunchy white grass to find a bin. We packed up, somehow got the tent down without divorcing, and were home by 4.30 am. Lovely. So my heart froze over when my son brought up camping again last night. I should have known it was an omen.

K woke about 3.00, having been sick in her bed. I got her to the bathroom, waited until I thought she’d finished (ha!), bundled the sheets into a pile and put her into our bed. She was sick again. I changed the sheets. R went of to sleep in the spare room, not unreasonably, since he had to drive to the airport early this morning. I suddenly remembered that I hadn’t put clean sheets back on the bed after guests had left the other weekend, so listened for a while, with as much amusement as I could muster at 4.00 am, to my husband making Basil Fawlty noises from next door. Then K was sick again. I had no more clean sheets that would fit our bed, and it was pretty much everywhere. So, just as he had sunk gratefully into a clean bed, R was turfed out by me and K and banished to the sofa. I spent the next couple of hours grimly praying that she wouldn’t do it again, and she didn’t, but her whimpering, boiling hot little body, pressed right up against me, meant that even the most fitful of dozes was an expectation too far.Apologies to Milla, who has already brought up (excuse the pun) the subject of vomiting children, but my brain is so sleep-deprived that I can’t write about anything else. I feel as if I’m moving underwater.