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Tents also a f**king nightmare when it's hot, family confirms

A FAMILY returning from a week in Weymouth has confirmed that camping is no better when the weather is gloriously sunny.

The Whittakers at first believed themselves amazingly fortunate to be away during a heatwave rather than their usual week of rainstorms, but soon realised it made living conditions equally intolerable.

Dad Ryan said: “For a day, it was luxurious. Not waking to the sound of rain on nylon. Not managing a dwindling stock of dry clothes. Sitting out watching the sunset with wine.

“The problem is that the sun rises at half-f**king-five and shortly after the tent becomes so hot you flop out of it gasping like a fish on shore. And the sun’s still staring down at you, unblinking, eager to burn.

“By mid-afternoon, even going in the tent to get sun cream is like venturing into an oven. The sun is merciless. You spend all day darting between patches of shade. The children drink from taps like dogs.

“We’re living on farmers’ hours. The ice-cream budget’s easily exceeded what we normally pay for a day sheltering from the elements in a tank museum. The sun is my enemy and I yearn to kill it.

“Still, it’s nice to have scientifically proven that camping is impossible in all circumstances. Now we can burn the tent.”

Where on earth has all this right-wing hate suddenly come from? By columnist Charlotte Phelps

I’M flabbergasted. Right-wing thugs are rioting in the streets and spouting their hateful views with no apparent cause at all. None whatsoever. Totally out of the blue. It’s like magic.

Most likely they spread their vile opinions by word-of-mouth or hate sheets printed out in their Swastika-draped homes, while the mainstream media – like the newspaper I work for – only publishes balanced, fastidiously fact-checked articles urging tolerance and respect. 

Articles such as my last one: ‘By not stopping the boats we have given dusky Islamic fanatics a licence to turn England into Iran’, or my recent plea for calmness and sanity: ‘Are jihadis taking over your Waitrose?’ 

Journalists like myself have an obligation to research and double-check every story. My piece ‘Black Lives Matter means Go To Hell, Whitey’ required me to spend hours reading comments by anonymous strangers on Facebook and Twitter – an exhausting task when they insist on confusingly using ‘are’ for ‘our’ and eschewing lower-case letters.

And yet we are witnessing riots in sleepy English villages like Southport, where right-wing agitators have hijacked a tragedy caused by successive governments’ policy of uncontrolled immigration and free pizza for the rapist scum of the Third World.

My colleagues are equally concerned. A friend at the Sunday Times says it depresses him to hear people spreading fake news when quality journalism such as ‘There’s only one book your children will be studying at school – the Koran’ can be found in his own publication.

Like me, you are probably asking: what can be done? I believe we in the established media must reclaim the political space the hatemongers have occupied by writing articles that reflect the views of ordinary people in the street who we have imagined. 

Articles like: ‘Stop these pervert doctors giving our little boys vaginas’, ‘Must we be so squeamish about mass deportations at gunpoint?’ and ‘Why IS there no black in the Union Jack?’ It is the only way to stop the march of the far-right.

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