The case for not planning your camping trip

For forty years my two booked everything. I did not know them then, of course, but I have heard a good deal about it, and I have seen the folder. It is a blue plastic folder with a press stud, and in its day it held the confirmation for every flight, every hotel, every hire car and every table by every pool, in the order in which they would be needed. She kept it. He carried it. It went with them, I understand, on every holiday they ever took.

So it was something of a surprise to all three of us that their best evening in Tuscany was the one nobody had reserved. We had left the main road for no better reason than that he wanted a closer look at a hill town, and at the end of a farm track below it there was a hand-painted sign: agriturismo, sosta camper. He turned in before she could consult anything. A woman came out to meet us with flour on her forearms, waved at a strip of grass between two olive trees that was very nearly long enough, and went back to her bread.

That evening my two took the e-bikes down to the village. There was a trattoria with the menu on a chalkboard and nowhere else, and they came back after eleven, pushing the bikes up the last of the hill and talking the whole way. We stayed four nights. She has the photographs. He has, as far as I can tell, the memory of a particular dish of beans, which he has been trying to cook ever since.

← A cousin of mine. Unbooked tonight, I'd wager.

I have thought about it since, on the long evenings when there is nothing for me to do but cool. A booked holiday is a promise made in February on behalf of somebody you have not yet met: yourself, three weeks in, tired or rested, rained on or not, in love with a valley or keen to leave it. For forty years my two kept those promises faithfully. They left valleys on Wednesdays because Wednesday was booked. They were very good at it, and I do not believe it once occurred to them that they could stop.

In fairness to the folder, not planning used to have a price. It meant arriving somewhere at seven in the evening and telephoning round, in a vehicle of my length, with no idea which campsite had room, and nobody wants that, least of all me. That part has changed. These days she looks at the Vacamp map over a late lunch, sees which campsites within the hour have space that night, and chooses. It takes about as long as the coffee.

They still plan, a little. They plan the way one writes a first draft, in pencil, with a good deal of room in the margins for whatever the road suggests.

The folder is still with us. It lives in the drawer under the bench seat, between the corkscrew and the instructions for my satellite dish, which he knows by heart. It is quite empty. I notice that neither of them has suggested throwing it away.

With every good wish,
Oliver

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