They say that camping for three days straight will reset
your body clock. I say they’re right. My body clock is reset after spending a
week camping. I go to bed when the sun sets, I wake when the sun rises. I cook
dinner on a hexamine tablet fuelled trangia and light my way with torches and
solar powered garden lights. I sleep underneath a mozzie dome on a bed I picked
up cheap. My toilet is a set distance or further from the camp. I hand crank my
laundry in a camping washing machine and hang it out to dry on my rickety
clothes horse. All my foods are dry goods including the milk, which is
powdered. Mozzie coils keep me sane and no lights are used after sunset to
avoid the barrage of bugs.
You may think this scene idyllic, what a joy it would be to
be able to camp so peacefully and for so long. Let’s rub the shine right off
that though, shall we? Because it’s not. This is my life. And this is my
journey from living out of a dilapidated caravan and eventually into house of
some variation and then much further down the path into a home I’ve designed
and mostly built for myself. I will be camped out for the better part of 2016.
And November 2015 is only the beginning.
I shower at work so that I may wash properly and I fill up
my meagre water supply from here too. The cogs in my head are constantly
turning “how can I afford the next step?”… “How do I make this work better for
me?”… It never ends. People don’t see my thoughts and many, therefore, think I
don’t have any. I make lists, I run sums; I give myself timelines, goals and
regimes. Every waking moment that’s not spent working my job is thinking about
how to make my dream happen. And for a lot of it, like almost EVERY SINGLE
ADULT IN THIS WORLD, I’m just winging it and hoping it will all work out.
So whilst I’ve set the scene, I will leave you with that,
for I am house sitting and enjoying the comforts that a majority of the people
in the Top End enjoy and take for granted… Air conditioning.
