Best said by @natashaisrani ..thank you for sharing
Posing proudly next to a tent I did not pitch, wearing smudged eyeliner on one eye, consumed by mosquitoes, and some other misadventures too nuanced (!) to be detailed here. Camping is the perfect time I think to revisit gems from British author Jerome K Jerome’s hilarious classic “Three Men in a Boat” on the shenanigans of three men & a dog on a boat trip up the Thames. Cans without can openers, foul weather, packing failures, hypochondriac delusions—biting wit & sharp observations just as funny & relevant today as when the book was first published in 1889.
So many gems, here are a few:
“I can’t sit still and see another man slaving and working. I want to get up and superintend, and walk round with my hands in my pockets, and tell him what to do. It is my energetic nature. I can’t help it.”
“Let your boat of life be light, packed with only what you need—a homely home and simple pleasures, one or two friends, worth the name, someone to love and someone to love you, a cat, a dog, and a pipe or two, enough to eat and enough to wear, and a little more than enough to drink; for thirst is a dangerous thing.”
“It always does seem to me that I am doing more work than I should do. It is not that I object to the work, mind you; I like work: it fascinates me. I can sit and look at it for hours.”
And this on getting a kettle to boil: not watching the pot!
“If it sees that you are waiting for it and are anxious, it will never even sing. You have to go away and begin your meal, as if you were not going to have any tea at all. You must not even look round at it. It is a good plan too, if you are in a great hurry, to talk very loudly to each other about how you don’t need any tea. Upon which the kettle boils over. We adopted this harmless bit of trickery, and the result was that, by the time everything else was ready, the tea was waiting.”
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