Have you tried glamping yet?

“You should blog about glamping,” she said. “It’s all the rage now.”

I know I’m not as cutting edge as I might once have been, but it isn’t often I am so completely out of the loop that I don’t even recognise a word. And what a word. Glamping. Ugly as, formed from the unlikely coupling of glamorous and camping.

Glamping is all the rage, and it’s even got as far as New Zealand. But this is not number-eight-wire, she’ll-be-right-mate camping (aka Real Camping), where you do more with less: pitch tents, fend off rising rivers, fumble to drop loos at midnight. Instead Glamping is where you do less (actually nothing at all really, someone else is taking care of all of that) with much much more. Think artfully draped canvas on your luxury tent, G&T’s lurking behind every bamboo screen and gourmet meals created from the animals you have just observed at the waterhole.

The library, of course, has resources on all types of camping:

• There are 745 items on camping as we know and love it, for example The Essential Camping Cookbook, Or, How to Cook An Egg in An Orange and Other Scout Recipes
• Beautiful books on luxury safari lodges in Africa
• Good magazine has an article “Glamping for Beginners” in Issue 22. “Check out the luxury trend that’s putting style back into outdoor living.”
• So far there is only one book on glamping: Handmade Glamping. Make up your mind, I say. Either it’s homemade and cheap or it’s glamorous and expensive, but don’t expect me to spend my year embroidering my yurt just so I can glamp it up.

So the jury is still out on glamping for me. But one thing is for sure, it will be a low point in my career if two of the least attractive words in the English language these days combine, and I become known as the glamping blogger.