Rum, Rolls and a Spitfire: Camping with Mum

At what age does taking your mother camping stop being a wholesome family activity and start requiring a formal risk assessment?

I suspect the answer is somewhere around the moment your 76-year-old mum pours another heroic measure of rum, asks when you are finally getting married, and later wanders into the tent naked while you are innocently doing up Dana’s dress.

That felt like the point where the weekend changed category.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

This was the Retro Festival at Newbury Showground, August 2026. A weekend of vintage dresses, classic cars, fairground rides, jive dancing, Spitfires, rum, bacon and the sort of family moments that are funny almost immediately and even funnier once enough time has passed.

We arrived on Friday at about three in the afternoon with Bandit, the bell tent, the dogs and enough camping equipment to make anyone watching assume we had misunderstood the event and were staying for several weeks.

The bell tent went up. Beds were arranged. Chairs were unfolded. The little blue toilet tent was positioned with all the dignity one can reasonably give to a portable loo, while Bandit sat beside us with the solar panels permanently fixed to her roof, quietly getting on with the serious business of turning British daylight into electricity.

The dogs, having contributed absolutely nothing to the operation, found somewhere soft and immediately went to sleep.

It was a strong opening from them.

Once camp was established, there was really only one sensible thing left to do.

Open the wine.

Mum had barely settled into her chair before she turned towards Dana and me with the sort of question mothers can apparently store for months and release the moment alcohol is available.

“So then, when are you two getting married?”

Ah.

Story time.

Some family conversations begin over tea.

Ours began over rum.

And not pub measures either. These were the sort of measures that would make a barman quietly put the bottle back on the shelf and ask whether everyone was all right.

One glass became another.

Mum had wine.

More rum appeared.

The bottle of wine was cold, the afternoon was warm enough, and before long we were sitting outside a bell tent discussing marriage, weddings and all the things that come with them.

By the third rum, which was roughly the size of something you might serve gravy in at Christmas, the wedding conversation had become impressively detailed.

Whether any of us remembered all of it the following morning was another matter.

The Bell Tent Incident

Eventually it was time to get ready.

Dana had a gorgeous red spotty dress that looked completely at home at the festival. I had my green Manchesters, which I believed showed commitment to the retro theme without requiring me to grow a moustache or learn the Charleston.

Dana turned around.

“Can you do my zip?”

I was halfway through doing it up when Mum wandered into the tent.

Naked.

There are moments when the human brain handles danger with extraordinary efficiency.

A football flying towards your face.

A car suddenly braking.

Your naked mother appearing six feet away in a bell tent.

My response was immediate.

I looked straight at the roof.

Not slightly upwards.

Directly upwards.

Suddenly I was fascinated by canvas construction.

“Interesting stitching,” I may as well have said.

Dana saw my face and immediately knew exactly what had happened.

Mum, meanwhile, carried on getting ready with complete confidence.

The problem with a bell tent is that there are very few escape routes. There is no spare room. No hallway. No kitchen to retreat to.

There is one door, one central pole and nowhere to hide.

I stared at the ceiling with the intensity of a man hoping a trapdoor might appear.

The wine was definitely talking now.

I decided another rum might be medically necessary.

Friday Night Goes Retro

By early evening, the showground had completely changed.

Music drifted across the campsite from marquees and tents. Vintage cars rolled past at walking pace. Women appeared in beautifully styled dresses, men wandered around in braces, waistcoats and hats, and hairstyles became increasingly ambitious as the evening went on.

Thai takeaway became dinner.

We sat eating and people-watching, which at a retro festival could easily have occupied the whole evening.

Every few seconds somebody went past looking as though they had stepped out of a black-and-white photograph.

Then someone else passed looking even more committed.

Some people had clearly spent months planning their outfits.

Dana looked the part.

Mum looked the part.

I had green trousers.

I felt I had contributed.

We wandered through the stalls and found one packed with old motoring signs, car badges and enough vintage garage memorabilia to furnish three pubs and a petrol station.

Naturally, I spotted several things I wanted.

Dana noticed me looking.

“No.”

“I haven’t said anything.”

“You were going to.”

This is one of the difficulties of travelling with someone who knows you well.

You lose the right to pretend your bad ideas are spontaneous.

The fairground was glowing by then.

The carousel was lit with hundreds of bulbs. The chair-o-planes swung people around against the evening sky, and everything was flashing, spinning and making exactly the sort of noise designed to attract an overconfident middle-aged man.

I pointed at the rides.

“Which one are we going on?”

Dana looked at me.

Mum looked at me.

“No.”

“Not even that one?”

“No.”

“What about the swings?”

“No.”

I had somehow brought two separate women to a funfair and created a united front.

That first evening was noisy, colourful and wonderfully odd. Music came from different directions. People danced outside tents. Flags moved in the evening breeze and the whole showground felt like several decades had been shaken together in one enormous field.

Eventually we headed back to camp.

Then Mum discovered the less romantic part of outdoor living.

It got cold.

Very cold.

Camping has always had a clever marketing department.

At six in the evening, you are sitting outside with a drink thinking how lovely it is to be close to nature.

At three in the morning, you are wearing most of your wardrobe under a duvet and wondering why humanity spent thousands of years inventing insulation.

Mum woke up freezing.

Welcome to camping, Mum.

Bacon Versus Renewable Energy

Saturday morning began with breakfast.

I had brought an air fryer.

Because apparently frying bacon in a pan while camping had become too primitive for me.

The air fryer was plugged into the Jackery battery.

On it went.

The display read 80%.

The bacon started sizzling.

Then 70%.

I watched it.

Then 60%.

“That’s going down quickly.”

The bacon carried on cooking while our weekend electricity supply disappeared before my eyes.

I looked at the Jackery.

Then at Bandit’s roof, where the permanently fitted solar panels were doing their best with whatever the British sky was prepared to give them.

Then back at the Jackery.

Suddenly I had become personally invested in the performance of the sun.

“Come on.”

This was no longer breakfast.

This was national energy policy, conducted from a campsite in Newbury.

Eventually the bacon was ready.

I proudly handed Dana hers first.

She looked at it.

Then looked at me.

“Why isn’t it in the rolls I bought?”

I looked down.

Ah.

The rolls.

I had successfully used stored solar power, a portable battery system and an electrical appliance to cook bacon in a field.

Unfortunately, I had overlooked the final stage of the bacon-roll production process.

Putting the bacon inside the roll.

Dana gave me the look.

Fair enough.

Dressing for the Occasion

Saturday was when we properly committed to the retro theme.

Dana’s hair alone deserved its own engineering certificate.

The curls were pinned neatly into place, every section apparently knowing exactly where it belonged.

I have no idea how women do this.

My entire hairstyling routine consists of getting out of the shower and hoping for the best.

Then Dana emerged fully dressed.

White dress with black polka dots.

Huge white sunglasses.

Red lipstick.

A bright pink flower in her hair.

She looked fantastic.

The sunglasses were particularly good.

Not normal sunglasses.

Huge white frames that looked as though they had been designed specifically for arriving somewhere important and demanding a cocktail.

Then came my outfit.

I had the straw hat, waistcoat and what may have been the loudest shirt in Berkshire.

Red circles.

Blue circles.

Orange.

Pink.

Green.

It was less a shirt and more an incident.

Standing next to Dana in black and white, I looked like someone had accidentally turned the saturation up too far.

But somehow it worked.

And more importantly, we were enjoying ourselves.

Dana Finds Her Era

Dana had another outfit too.

A lovely floral dress, white shoes and a large parasol.

The parasol completed the whole thing.

Standing beside a polished red classic car, she looked completely at home. The dress, the sunglasses, the flower, the parasol - everything fitted.

For a moment, the campervans and modern cars in the distance disappeared.

She looked like she belonged with the classics.

Then we found a beautiful blue hot rod.

There were polished cars everywhere. Chrome flashed in the light. Owners sat nearby looking relaxed but also quietly monitoring anybody who wandered too close with a zip, handbag or belt buckle.

Dana posed.

I took photos.

Then more photos.

Then a few more.

She looked brilliant, so I make no apology.

Reality Returns

Of course, retro glamour can only survive for so long when you are camping.

Back at the pitch, I caught Dana looking considerably less 1950s.

The dress was gone.

The sunglasses had disappeared.

Dana was in shorts and a white top, arms raised, looking as though she was either stretching or surrendering to campsite security.

I actually like those photos almost more than the posed ones.

The glamorous ones tell you what the festival looked like.

The in-between ones tell you what the weekend was really like.

We Become Photo-Worthy

Once dressed again, we headed back into the festival.

Then somebody stopped us.

“Can we take your photo?”

Now this was more like it.

I immediately assumed my shirt had finally achieved the recognition it deserved.

Dana may have had a different interpretation.

We posed and smiled.

There is something rather liberating about dressing up when absolutely everybody else is doing it too. Nobody is particularly self-conscious. People compliment complete strangers. They ask where outfits came from. They admire cars. They pose for pictures.

For one weekend, normal clothing rules simply disappear.

3.15pm

Then, at exactly 3.15pm, the sound above the showground changed.

You heard it before you saw it.

A Spitfire.

Heads turned almost together.

Conversations stopped.

Someone pointed towards the sky.

And then it appeared.

For a few minutes the whole festival suddenly made sense.

The vintage dresses.

The cars.

The tents.

The music.

The uniforms.

And above all of it, the unmistakable shape and sound of a Spitfire crossing an English summer sky.

Nobody needed telling where to look.

For that brief moment, it felt as though the distance between the decades had become a little smaller.

Then, naturally, we went for a drink.

Jiving in the Spitfire Tent

Later we found ourselves in the Spitfire Tent.

There was music.

There were people dancing.

And somehow Dana and I ended up jiving.

Dana can actually move.

I can also move.

The question is whether what I was doing meets any recognised definition of jive.

“Ready?”

“Yes.”

We started.

A step.

A turn.

Another turn.

For about four seconds I knew exactly what I was doing.

Then I didn’t.

Dana grinned.

I continued with confidence.

This is an important principle in life.

If you lose the choreography, carry on as though you have invented a new version.

We laughed our way through it.

That was enough.

Then came drinks.

Rum and Coke for me.

Rum and Coke for Mum.

Cider for Dana.

By now Mum and I had established a highly effective rum-based partnership.

Saturday evening brought pizza in the Spitfire Tent while music rolled around us and couples spun across the dance floor.

We sat there eating, watching, talking and doing absolutely nothing urgent.

It was lovely.

The Photo I Keep Coming Back To

There is one photograph from the weekend I particularly like.

We are standing above the campsite.

Behind us is a sea of caravans, motorhomes, tents and flags stretching across the showground.

I have my straw hat, waistcoat and magnificently unsubtle shirt.

Dana has the white sunglasses, red lipstick and flower in her hair.

We are both grinning.

Nothing extraordinary is happening.

And that is exactly why I like it.

Travel has taught me that the photographs you remember are not always the ones in front of famous buildings or dramatic landscapes.

Sometimes they are taken twenty minutes from home, surrounded by caravans, wearing ridiculous clothes with someone you love.

And there was something else quietly running through the weekend.

Mum was with us.

Life had changed a lot for her in the previous months. We did not need to turn the weekend into a big emotional occasion, and we didn’t.

She was simply there.

Drinking rum.

Getting dressed up.

Laughing.

Freezing in a tent.

Watching a Spitfire.

Eating takeaway.

And joining us in something slightly ridiculous.

Sometimes that is enough.

One Last Pose

By Saturday afternoon Dana had completely embraced the camera.

White sunglasses on.

Flower perfectly positioned.

Red lipstick.

And a kiss towards the camera.

Somewhere between arriving on Friday afternoon and Saturday evening, we had stopped simply visiting the Retro Festival.

We had become part of it.

Tomorrow the dresses would be packed away. The parasol would disappear. The bell tent would come down. The Jackery would begin what I can only assume would be a lengthy emotional recovery from the air fryer, and Bandit would be packed again.

We would return to ordinary clothes and ordinary life.

But for one weekend there had been rum with Mum, jiving with Dana, pizza in the Spitfire Tent, a fairground revolt, solar-powered bacon and a Spitfire roaring overhead.

And I had learned three useful lessons.

Always put the bacon in the roll.

Never underestimate the electrical appetite of an air fryer.

And if you are sharing a bell tent with your mother, always knock first.

Sunday: Tea, Cake and One Last Dance

Sunday began at the positively civilised hour of eight, although nobody seemed particularly interested in rushing anywhere. After two nights in a field, we had reached that stage of camping where simply getting out of bed felt like something that should be approached carefully and perhaps followed by a rest.

Outside, the festival was slowly waking up around us. Tent zips opened, dogs appeared for their morning walks and people emerged from caravans looking considerably less glamorous than they had twelve hours earlier. The carefully styled hair had relaxed, the vintage dresses had temporarily disappeared and several people were wearing sunglasses despite the distinct lack of sunshine.

Retro Festival on a Sunday morning was less 1950s Hollywood and more survivors of a particularly well-dressed village fête.

Our own ambitions initially stretched no further than tea and bacon rolls.

This time I remembered the rolls.

Progress.

The Jackery had survived Saturday’s air-fryer assault and Bandit’s permanently fitted solar panels were quietly collecting whatever electricity they could persuade from the British sky. I wasn’t taking any chances with breakfast this time. The previous morning had taught me that there is little point having sophisticated off-grid electrical technology if you subsequently forget the bread.

The Mystery of Mum’s Frozen Night

We had also finally solved the mystery of why Mum had been so cold on her first night camping.

It wasn’t the bedding. It wasn’t the weather. It wasn’t even my camping arrangements.

Mum hadn’t done all the zips up on the tent.

She had essentially spent her first night camping with part of the tent open to Berkshire.

No wonder she was freezing.

On the second night we made sure everything was properly zipped up before going to bed. The difference was considerable and Mum had been much warmer.

“So you were warmer last night?” I asked.

“Much warmer.”

“Because we actually closed the tent?”

Apparently so.

After spending Saturday discussing the cruelty of the British nighttime temperature, the weather had now been cleared of all charges.

The culprit was Mum.

I decided not to make too much of this discovery. Only twenty-four hours earlier, I had successfully used solar-generated electricity to cook bacon in an air fryer and then forgotten the rather fundamental requirement of putting it inside the rolls Dana had bought.

As a family, we were probably even.

One More Dance

At about half past eleven, Dana and I headed back into the festival because there was still dancing to be done.

Mum sensibly decided to have a slower morning and take things a little easier. After two nights camping, a considerable quantity of walking and the previous day’s excitement, this seemed an entirely reasonable decision.

Dana and I apparently lacked this instinct.

We found the dancing and joined in again.

By now, I had developed what I considered to be a reasonably effective jive technique. If I knew the move, I did it. If I didn’t know the move, I smiled confidently, kept moving and waited for Dana to rescue the situation.

Confidence can disguise a surprising amount of incompetence.

Dana, naturally, knew what she was doing. I made the mistake of watching her feet, then watching my feet, then trying to work out how the two sets of feet were supposed to relate to each other.

“Stop thinking about it,” she said.

Easy for her to say.

There are few things more difficult than not thinking about your feet immediately after somebody tells you not to think about your feet.

Still, we danced. We turned, stepped and occasionally even ended up where we were supposed to be. Whenever we didn’t, we laughed and carried on.

Nobody seemed to care.

Or, if they did, they were polite enough to judge us from a distance.

Mum Discovers the Civilised Side of Festival Life

Mum eventually joined us in the tent, although she had chosen a much more sensible activity than dancing.

Tea and cake.

She looked completely at home sitting there in her lovely floral outfit with a yellow flower tucked into her hair. In front of her was a proper china cup and saucer filled with tea and, beside it, a generous slice of cake served on a floral plate.

Not a paper cup.

Not a cardboard plate.

Proper china.

This was festival catering with standards.

The cake looked substantial too, with enough icing in the middle to undo most of the exercise Dana and I had achieved through dancing that morning.

Mum was beaming.

Friday afternoon had started with chilled wine, enormous measures of rum and questions about our wedding. Friday night had introduced her to the importance of actually closing a tent. Saturday had brought retro clothes, music and a Spitfire.

By Sunday lunchtime she had discovered tea and cake served on proper china.

She was adapting to festival life remarkably well.

The Bit Nobody Photographs

Eventually, reality intruded.

We still had an entire campsite to pack away.

The bell tent that had gone up relatively cheerfully on Friday now had to somehow return to its bag. The beds needed dismantling, the chairs needed folding, bedding had to be squeezed back into bags and the little blue toilet tent had to come down, which is one of those jobs best completed without reflecting too deeply on the previous forty-eight hours.

Every time we camp, the same strange phenomenon occurs.

We arrive with everything neatly packed inside Bandit. We buy virtually nothing while we are away. Yet when it is time to go home, our belongings appear to have increased in volume by about thirty per cent.

I have never understood this.

Tent manufacturers are particularly guilty. They sell you a tent packed neatly inside a bag approximately the size of a large loaf of bread. You remove it once, and from that moment onwards the tent appears to regard returning to the same bag as a personal insult.

Eventually, after the usual combination of rolling, squeezing, sitting on things and insisting that they definitely fitted on Friday, we got everything packed away.

The dogs had also had enough.

They had coped brilliantly with the crowds, music, smells and general chaos of the festival, but by Sunday they were suffering and clearly ready for some peace, familiar surroundings and somewhere to sleep that didn’t have a rock-and-roll soundtrack.

So we took them home.

Bandit was unloaded, the dogs were settled and any sensible family would have declared the weekend finished.

We aren’t that family.

There was still one person Mum wanted to see.

Geno Washington and the Ram Jam Band

We headed back to Newbury Showground for one final performance.

Mum wanted to see Geno Washington and the Ram Jam Band, and for her this wasn’t simply another act on the festival programme. Mum and Dad had seen them back in the 1960s, when they were both young and Geno Washington was one of the familiar names on the British soul and club scene.

More than half a century later, Mum was about to see him again.

Geno was now 82, and there was a feeling that this could be his final appearance at Retro Festival. That made our decision to return after taking the dogs home an easy one.

The marquee was already busy when we arrived. The relaxed Sunday morning atmosphere had disappeared. The lights were down, the stage glowed red and orange, and the Ram Jam Band were playing behind him.

Then there was Geno.

He was at the front of the stage with the microphone in his hand while the band played behind him.

He wasn’t pretending to be the young man Mum and Dad had watched all those decades ago.

Why would he?

He had something far more interesting now.

History.

He had been performing these songs for decades and there was still a marquee full of people who wanted to hear him sing them.

I glanced across at Mum.

For her, I imagine the music travelled rather further than the walls of a tent in Newbury. Perhaps it went back to clubs in the 1960s, to being young and to standing there with Dad when neither of them could possibly have imagined everything that was waiting ahead of them.

I didn’t ask.

Some moments don’t improve by turning them into an interview.

The Slosh

As the music continued, something else started happening around us.

Women began getting up and dancing together. Their arms went into the air and the same movements started appearing all around the marquee. They turned together, moved their arms, changed direction and somehow everybody seemed to know exactly what came next.

I watched them for a while.

Unlike my jiving, this clearly wasn’t being improvised in a mild state of panic.

Mum recognised it.

“It’s the Slosh!”

The what?

Apparently this wasn’t simply a marquee full of women enthusiastically waving their arms around. It was a proper dance called the Slosh, and Mum remembered it from Grandma’s time.

This was news to me.

I’d spent most of the weekend attempting to jive by watching Dana and moving approximately half a second behind her. These women required no such assistance. Once the music started, the movements seemed to come back automatically.

Above us, the black ceiling was covered with hundreds of tiny pinprick lights that looked like stars. A line of warm bulbs ran along the centre of the tent, while underneath them people danced, clapped and raised their hands together.

It was one of those scenes that looked even better when you stopped trying to photograph it and simply watched.

There were people of different ages everywhere. Some were sitting and singing along. Others were standing. Plenty were dancing.

Nobody cared whether the person beside them was thirty, sixty or eighty. If you knew the moves, you joined in. If you didn’t know them, you copied somebody who did.

Which, now that I think about it, was basically my entire jive strategy.

The only difference was that these women made it look intentional.

Three Generations in One Tent

Standing there, I realised there were several different generations somehow meeting in the same place.

Mum was watching Geno Washington, someone she and Dad had seen when they were young.

Around her, people were dancing the Slosh, something Mum associated with Grandma’s time.

And I was standing behind Mum, watching her enjoy both.

Three generations were connected for a few minutes by music and a dance floor in a marquee at Newbury Showground.

There was something lovely about that.

Not sad.

Not sentimental.

Just lovely.

I kept looking across at Mum.

She was smiling, her arms were in the air and she was joining in.

And I think that became my favourite moment of the whole weekend.

It wasn’t the Spitfire flying over on Saturday afternoon. It wasn’t the vintage cars or the fairground. It wasn’t even dancing with Dana.

And it definitely wasn’t the unforgettable sight of my naked mother appearing in the bell tent, although unfortunately that particular memory appears to have secured itself permanent accommodation.

It was Mum, moving to the beat.

She was listening again to music she’d first heard with Dad more than half a century earlier.

When they had first seen Geno Washington, they were young. An entire life was still waiting for them. They couldn’t possibly have known what that life would contain or where it would take them.

There would be marriage and children, then grandchildren. There would be work, holidays, birthdays and Christmases. There would be arguments about things nobody remembered a week later, ordinary Tuesdays that seemed unimportant at the time, and countless moments that eventually became a shared life.

Now Dad wasn’t standing beside her.

There was no need to say that aloud. It was simply there, quietly, somewhere underneath the music.

But Mum was there.

And that mattered.

She had spent her first weekend camping with us, even if she’d initially overlooked the fairly fundamental principle of closing the tent. She had drunk rum from measures that could reasonably have been described as structural. She had dressed up, watched a Spitfire, eaten cake from proper china, slept in a field and survived my solar-powered breakfast experiment.

Now she was sitting beneath a ceiling of tiny lights, listening to Geno Washington and joining in with the Slosh.

For a festival devoted to looking backwards, it didn’t feel as though anybody was trying to become young again.

They were simply enjoying music and dances that had travelled through life with them.

The songs had got older. The dancers had got older. Geno Washington had definitely got older.

But apparently nobody had told the dancing.

And as Mum raised her hands again and the Ram Jam Band played on, our first camping weekend together came to an end in about the best way it could.

Not quietly.

Not sensibly.

But dancing.