BIG SKY, LITTLE TENT

The sky was enormous this morning. It was like a huge cavern, its bright blue roof decorated with puffy clouds, twenty thousand feet in the air.

I like a big sky. I like the way it reminds me how tiny I am compared to the Earth. I walked along the high street, gazing up at the trails of altocumulus, which looked for all the world as though each cloud had been painstakingly painted onto a blue-washed canvas. It was a wonder I didn't walk into a lamp post.

Big Sky Country. I bet there are fewer lamp posts in Montana. I'd love to go one day, just to taste the air. Actually, I've been thinking about the great outdoors recently. In a kind of attempt to get closer to it, last night I decided to put my tent up in the garden.

Having scrabbled it out of the loft and having hunted madly around for a peg mallet, broken a windbreak and been unceremoniously pummelled by a falling suitcase, I pulled the bag out through the conservatory and dumped it on the grass. I unzipped it and pulled out the instructions.

The instruction booklet was yellow at the edges. I think it might have been written in Latin - its diagrams certainly resembled the work of Leonardo DaVinci. It would have been no surprise to see Vitruvian Man, sprawled out on the back page, demonstrating that a fully grown man can lie perfectly sqaurely in the confines of the canvas walls, fingers to toes. It's been a while since I used it.

I opened out the inner tent to find a small square of paper. "Dinner at 6" it said with a smiley face. That made me feel rather sad, somehow. I had a little moment remembering and then I pressed on and threaded the poles through the sleeves.

"Push the end of the pole into pin A" said the decipherable part of the instructions. Done. "Next push the other end into the corresponding pin (C) in the opposite corner." I ran round to the other side, grabbed the other end of the flexible pole and tried to bend it into place: pole in one hand, pin in the other. The tent arched up behind me and started flapping in the breeze. I felt like Hercules bending a tree trunk in an epic show of supernatural strength... without the strength. When I finally connected the two things together, I noticed with some degree of deflation, that the other end of the pole had sprung out of its pin and was waving around in mid air at the opposite side of the tent.

"This is easier with two people," said the instructions, unhelpfully. I looked at the sky.

Finally (when I'd rotated the outer tent through 180 degrees, so that the door was conveniently at the front) I pegged down the corners and stood back to have a look.

It's not too bad, I suppose. It's a mark of something unspoken though, that I still slept in the house last night.