Escape Attempts.

England's campsites emerged from lockdown on July 4th. Two days later we availed ourselves of the latest small freedom and headed off towards the New Forest. The reason for this was more to do with practicality than pleasure. Laura, our youngest, lives in Bournemouth but is still registered with a dentist in Buxton. She has been hankering after some orthodontics for ages, so when Gill asked her what she wanted as a 25th birthday present somewhat unusually she requested a dental appointment! We offered to pick-up her up, combining the trip with a short break - one night in Warwick followed by another in the New Forest.

I know I moan about the Caravan and Camping Club sites, but under the current circumstances the thing that irritates me about them (rule-bound and over-managed) I guess makes them a safer option. The site at Warwick racecourse is well situated, an easy ten minutes stroll into the town centre.

I had forgotten just how handsome Warwick is, we got to know here and its equally handsome sister town of Leamington Spa when Sarah was at University.

It's scarcely believable that it is fourteen years ago this autumn since we deposited a very excited Sarah at Warwick campus's Rootes hall of residence. I remember her sitting at the desk in her room next to the bookshelves she had just decorated with fairy lights. "I am going to be awesome," she announced. And she was, and is. How time flies.

Right now there are very practical reasons why running away from home is a good idea. As week seven of the house rebuild dawned action moved from outside to inside. As we left yesterday the builders were tearing out the old kitchen units and preparing to jack-up the ceiling rafters before demolishing an interior supporting wall. It's best not to be around.

Equally, it's best not to speculate what we will find when we return in two days time as tomorrow the plumber is arriving to swap the central heating boiler for a combi and install new pipework in the extension. The gas will be disconnected and it's questionable if we will have water. Laura and Connor know the situation, they seem relaxed about it in theory, time will tell how well we all cope with the actuality.

Tonight we are staying near Brockenhurst in the New Forest. Anti Covid 19 measures mean the Caravan and Motorhome sites have embraced regulation more fervently than ever - phone reception first on arrival before presenting yourself at the desk (tricky when the site is in a mobile 'cold-spot'), collect numbered toilet queue wristband from uniformed site prefect, later join a disconsolate line standing dutifully on 2m markers outside the washing up place. Even so, the site is full. I have a sneaky suspicion there is a section of the great British public that just love the trials of the new normal, who confuse victimhood with heroism, clap disaster on cue, find Captain Tom inspirational and have a box set of Dad's Army and the inexcrable movie remake gathering dust somewhere on a shelf back home. 

As ever, most people seemed disinterested in exploring further than the immediate surroundings so we had the nearby forest paths more or less to ourselves, apart from happening upon the occasional dog-walker.

The oak woods are magnificent, and who can resist the inevitable pony picture? Whatever the circumstances in the human zoo you would have to be utterly soul-less not to be uplifted to by the prospect of sun dappled ancient woodlands, a languid stream meandering through them, birdsong then silence.

As arranged we picked-up Laura and Connor in an Aldi car park on the outskirts of Bournemouth and sped homewards. It was the day after Laura's 25th. Cake and tuneless singing was in order, though that had to wait a while until we drove 230 miles home. We had left a kitchen and dining room and returned to a demolition site. It looked a total mess, but among the chaos it was possible to see how the end result might look - more spacious and stylish, with a contemporary open plan vibe. There's a lot of work still to be done before it gets to that stage.

While builders are busy indoors we endeavour to get out for at least some of the time. Laura fancied a trip to the Trafford Centre.

 I'm not too keen on shopping, still it was good to be out and about with a more mixed group of people - it is only when you visit an urban area how much the traditional demographic of Buxton strikes you - more old people than young, predominantly white.

The place rarely 'bustles' whereas the Trafford Centre was busy enough to feel vibrant, but not so crowded as to be uncomfortable. We managed our first meal out since February, burritos at a Mexican place. Normality returns, but cautiously.

Two days later we were all back on the road. Laura was only able to book two days off work and was nervous about using the train. Over four days, back and forth, we will clock up a thousand miles. That's as far as Meze, the nearest place to home with a view of the Mediterranean, we observed. It was great to see Laura though, and home is noisy and uncomfortable right now, so no grumbles really.

On the trip back we are using another Caravan and Motorhome Club site in the New Forest. It's huge, with almost 250 pitches. On Saturday night it was full, people are simply pleased to get away, I guess, after months of having their most basic freedoms curtailed.

I do crave somewhere a little more vibrant and diverse. The club sites really are 'Keeping Appearances' on wheels. I just know I am surrounded by Tories, not a dreadlock nor a graffiti daubed surfer's camper van in sight, no-one under forty other than a few disconsolate looking teenagers Shanghaied by their parents for a weekend away. Even they looked like an unusually straight bunch, well presented in designer sports gear, no dayglo dyed hair, grungy cargoes, death metal tees or edgy tattoos. I do like a modicum of dissent, annoying youth is one of the prerequisites for a civilised society.

Almost every camper had a pooch in tow. They too are oddly well behaved, doing as they're told and failing in their doggy duty to irritate the neighborhood by yapping and howling half the night. It's uncannily peaceful, normally a nice thing, but after three months of enforced quietness I find myself yearning for a bit of hullabaloo.

We have used two different sites in the New Forest. The previous one, Black Knowl had lovely walks right from the gate leading llnto ancient oak woods. Where we are now, the Caravan and Motorhome Centenary site, is situated within a tangle of narrow lanes; it's tricky to access in a 7m van, the environs would be great for cycling but less good on foot. Still, we took a pre-lunch stroll, passing a nearby memorial to the New Forest's many WW2 airfields. I guess they provided air cover for Portsmouth and Southampton docks as well as defending the central area of the English channel.

The memorial was raised through local subscription and I can appreciate how residents might wish to memorialise the area's role in the defending the country. Little remains of the airfields themselves aside from the one that reinvented itself as Bournemouth International Airport. Next to the campsite is a 300m length of weedy asphalt. It too now serves a more peaceful purpose - as a drive-in movie venue.

At a local level modest monuments and memorials do provide a kind of time capsule from one generation to another, writing history into the landscape. When purloined on a national scale then mass memorialisation is not so innocuous. We have had six solid years of collective remembrance tracking the centenaries of WWI's events and in recent months the 75th anniversary of VE day. It's simply an unfortunate quirk of history that all of these coincided with a decade of conservative led governments who took the opportunity to affiliate their 'let's make Britain great again', Eurosceptic message with the opportunity for a carnival of collective remembrance.

If you repeat a ritual action often enough eventually it will lose whatever significance it once possessed and begin to look ludicrous. I think this is what has happened with officially sanctioned memorialisations. Though I have been sceptical from the outset about them, I can see how some people may have been be moved by the act of remembrance surrounding the Battle of the Somme, for example. By the time we get to the shenanigans surrounding Captain Tom and his charity zimmer frame garden marathon, complete with a Spitfire fly past and a knighthood, then the Ruritanian absurdity of the entire charade becomes apparent. As we all applauded the plucky centenarian, tens of thousands of elderly people died needlessly because the government tragically mismanaged the outbreak of Covid-19 in care homes. It is difficult not to conclude that the razzamataz over the former conveniently drew attention away from the latter. Thursday evening pot banging performed a similar function. Observed from this standpoint it is tempting to regard all acts of officially sanctioned remembrance as a diversionary tactic by those in power to suppress robust debate concerning the present by encouraging sentimental acts of memorialisation based upon a mythologised version of history.

All three of our kids are bewildered by the national obsession with wartime Britain. To them it's the distant past, remote and unimportant compared to the issues that face humanity in the twenty first century. I get their point, we need to confront the challenges of the future not re-enact the errors of the past.

It's going to be difficult to do that so long as we maintain collective delusions of grandeur regarding the past. The campsite we are on right now is a great example of how WW2 gets inadvertently fetishised. Because of the proximity of the airfield memorial the designers of the site decided to name the different camping zones after the aircraft that were stationed here during the war - Spitfire, Mosquito, Mustang, Liberator. 

Surely it's a bit weird to name parts of a camping field after weaponry, especially the Liberator which is associated with carpet bombing the civilian population of Germany, an act now regarded by many as a crime against humanity. Imagine if you were touring in the Moselle and happened upon a campsite with zones Messerschmitt, Dornier Junkers and Fokker - it would not feel right at all, so why is it acceptable here?

Still, whatever the minor irritations of our immediate surroundings it has been good to escape Buxton for a few days. However, what we really need is to exit the entire country for a while. Our planned big escape in the Autumn has been scaled down in stages. Plan A, head back to Greece - weeks ago we concluded it involved crossing too many borders; plan B, a tour around Sardinia - though that only involves two borders, French and Italian if you use the Frejus tunnel, we decided that Italy can be difficult to negotiate at the best of times and might be even trickier right now; our conclusion - ferry from Portsmouth to Santander, only one national border and Spain is the easiest going place we know, the roads are great, the people friendly and accommodating. So, September 15th off we go.

I think the reason that the UK is driving me nuts right now is that by the time we leave in mid September we will have been stuck here for over six months. The last time we were at home for so long was 25 years ago in 1995. We took a trip that Easter to Lake Garda. Laura was born in July and needed major heart surgery when she was less than a week old. It was a scary time, amazingly though, Laura recovered very quickly, small but determined - then and now!  We managed a few days in The Lakes during the following October half term, but it was not until the next Easter that we went abroad again, to the Chianti I think. Ever since, a five month stretch during the winter months has been the most we ever managed without a quick exit. Since 2014 we have split our time - five months abroad, seven at home, but chunked-up, maybe two or three months at most in one place. I'm happiest when I have the sense that very soon I am going to be somewhere else. That said, it's a warm and sunny Sunday evening here in the New Forest, the BBQ is sizzling away, time for a Rioja!

Here's to escapes great and small.