My hands are the hands of a bookseller. I don’t have big leathery callouses, apart from the one on my typing finger from using the backspace key. I do have a dickey tendon in my wrist, either from reading too much or playing the guitar with too much exuberance.

I just carried a tent for two hours. I borrowed it from a colleague for James’s campout at the school. It was one of those objects that feels light when you pick it up, and even though you have a nagging feeling to the contrary, you think you will easily be able to carry it home. I was doing my best not to look like a hobo as I rode the train and the taxi, and had to resist jiggling my house keys to prove that I do live under a solid roof.

My uncalloused hands are smarting now. When I was younger I camped a fair amount, but in those days tents were tent-shaped. I had to bring this tent home today to practice putting it up, as it is a modern non-prismatic affair. I don’t want to look like a bookseller tomorrow in front of the other dads, I want to throw it together as professionally as an Everest sherpa setting up camp on the South Col. The last thing I need James to see at his new school is his dad being jeered by other fathers sitting outside their Eiger Dome Homes.

The tent is on the floor, and as I am writing, you may have guessed that I am procrastinating about putting it together. It comes in a surprisingly small bag, which hopefully doesn’t mean that some bits didn’t make it here.

James has never been camping, and he has been rambling giddily about it all week. Apparently we are going to ‘explore’, (as we will be camped on a playing field, who knows what uncharted territory we may find) and eat, and use his specially purchased torch. We have both got torches now, but their combined beam is barely enough to get a moth to raise an eyebrow, or compound eyebrow, or whatever lepidopterae have. I don’t want to barbecue in front of other professional super-dads, and was contemplating getting the pizza man to deliver one to the school. Does that make me lose dad points?

Every time I plan to do something outdoors lately it guarantees rain. We can go for weeks with nothing but blazing sun, and the minute I commit to being adventurous and outdoorsy, it pours.

Assembling the tent is intimidating me. I still have flashbacks about that terrible Christmas Eve where I spent hours trying to reassemble a pile if bolts and thingies and snibs, and turn them into a bicycle. The badly translated Chinese directions referred to miniscule diagrams with vague pictures, and said unhelpful things like ‘Place cranking shaft of (A) upon the turner making sure to tight all for entirety. Be not attaching (F.2) for this be great danger to buttock of user.

Fortunately, I was in the cub-scout movement until the age of ten, and should the tent prove too complex, I have earned my ‘Shelter Construction’ badge. I can bind leafy branches together using vines, and James and I will be safe from the elements.

I have a deep suspicion that this experience will provide material for at least one other post, so keep an eye open for part two of “THEY HUNTED WILD PIZZA”

Also: Should I be having this suspicion that Neen will be laughing herself to sleep thinking of the males outside, since she declined, a little too emphatically, to join us?