Monday, June 09, 2008

Steampunk Camping


Louche found himself camping on Saturday night, a chance remark to his little brother became a mission. An ancient tent was found in the garage and brave attempts were made to put it together in the dark after one too many gin and tonics.

Sadly the years had not been kind to the tent so some repairs had to be made. Louche couldn't find any gaffa tape, or a tarpaulin so he had to do the best with what was available. The broken connections on the polls were fixed by using copper piping as a sort of splint and he found an old bit of canvas to throw over the tent to cover the holes. Louche and his little brother stood back and admired their work. What had once been a fairly normal tent was now a twinkling construction of canvas and copper. A tent worthy of a Jules Verne novel or the sort of thing The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen would take on a weekend trip to Cornwall.

Once the tent was constructed they set about filling it with bedding then went to sleep, the door was left open so the cats could amble in and out. This was a double edged sword.

While the little furry things were quite pleasant to have in the tent, later in the night the cats would charge in and then bap sleeping chaps in the face before scampering off again. Later on the cats used the tent as a handy place to store mice while they were hunting more things that go squeak.

At one point there were three terrified mice in the tent as well as two naughty cats having a great time hunting them down across the bodies of not-really-sleeping people. Thankfully the cats juggled the mice out of the tent while playing with them so there was a chance to get a little sleep before the next round of 'bap and run' began.

Morning came not a moment too soon, and the cats were rather despondent when the tent was taken down but soon discovered that tents were good fun to attack when they were being disassembled. Louche crossed 'cats' of the list of good things to take camping.

3 comments:

Kevin Musgrove said...

Generally speaking, as far as tents are concerned, four legs bad, two legs good.

Mind you, most of the time two legs are bad, too.

Kopaylopa said...

.... well???

-K

DJ Kirkby said...

Too funny! We've taken to claling one of our cats 'Frog breath', 3 guesses why and the first 2 don't count!