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By Root 424 0

are grouped Mawsley’s fledgling commercial enterprises. There’s the One Stop, an antiseptically bright barn housing huge piles of Daily Mails, nappies and lager, together with a notice board offering car valeting, yoga and girlie parties where you get your make-up or nails (‘Real Gel Extensions!!!’) done by Terri or Traci. Should you not be looking quite good enough after that, you could nip across the car park and book an appointment at the hairdressers, Idolz, before heading next door for a skinny latte and naughty bun at The Sanctuary. Meanwhile, your little darlings are bouncing around the Day Nursery, which completes the retail complex. On the internet forum, there’s considerable grumbling that the promised pub has never arrived, and that the site designated for it is now being filled with more brick boxes. It’s a woman’s world, and you get the distinct impression that most of the decisions to move to Mawsley were taken by whippet-thin wives, which their considerably heftier husbands went along with for an easy life.

Nothing can shock us from our complacency quite as thoroughly as a bad photograph. We can suck our gut in a little in front of the mirror and then sally forth into the world convinced that we look that way for the rest of the evening, but then are horrified – and not a little mystified – by the digital image taken only six seconds ago that shows all too plainly how the said gut has now happily freed itself and is having a party all of its own. No wonder people plaster the fridge with these pictures; nothing could put you off that last chunk of pork pie or nicely chilled chocolate bar than the sight of your elephantine alter ego leering from the door.

I’ve had a few of these photos taken, but none slapped me as hard as one snuck by my boyfriend one recent Sunday morning when we were camping. From inside our camper van, he’d taken a photo of me sitting outside, hunched over a map. There’s a look of quiet madness in my posture, a Quasimodo concentration of rounded shoulders, furrowed brow and clenched everything, and all seemingly poured into the OS sheet I’m almost devouring. Worse, he’s lined up the angle so as to have me framed by the two stickers on the van’s windscreen: one proclaiming our membership of the National Trust, the other my membership (he’d have killed me if I’d enrolled us both) of the Caravan Club of Great Britain. Signing up was an insurance requirement, I feel bound to point out, but it’s not much of an excuse, and certainly not enough of one. I’m still debating where I should put this picture as my much-needed warning; where is the equivalent in the house of the fridge door for something that, instead of cautioning me what a fat bastard I’ve become, shows in gruesome detail what a boring tosser I can be if left to my own devices? I’ve just asked my partner that very question. ‘By your map shelves,’ was his immediate response.

One fortuitous by-product of Caravan Club membership is that it brings me something that works as an even more effective preventative than that photo: the monthly members’ magazine, its double-spread letters page in particular. Most of the letters start with the words ‘My wife and I’, and go on to either praise some super new caravanning gadget, something like a tiny kettle that doubles up as a can opener and gets Freeview, or rant fulsomely about the very many horrid ways modern life has gone so hideously wrong. In recent months, there’s been a blizzard of letters on one subject: people who dare to walk across their pitch at the camp site. This they – and their silent spouses – insist is a relatively new problem, for in the Good Old Days, no-one, absolutely no-one, would have dreamed of cutting across the corner of your allotted yardage. It’s Broken Britain manifesting itself in a neatly clipped field just off the A577, and My Wife and I are absolutely furious.

These are the people who would look at a blank wall for a whole day and swear that it’s not as good as it used to be this morning. Their whole life is a sagging balloon, fondly imagined as pert and perfect