Summer Camp

Did you ever go to camp as a kid?

I did, but we don't have sleep-away camps in this country, at least we didn't when I was a kid. I went to day camp many times. I can remember a handful from when I was pretty young, but there's one particular one that I remember really well, from when I was about 13. It was called Camp Aldenham. You paid per day, so you could go as often or as rarely as you wanted. Most kids went for a week, or a couple of weeks, but I went all summer on Wednesdays and Fridays (I preferred that to going every day, because it gave my weeks some structure but also let me have time off to hang out with neighborhood friends and do nothing), so each week I got to meet new people who hadn't been there before, as well as some old faces who came for blocks of weeks, and a couple who stayed all summer.

I don't know how it worked for the little kids, but I was in the oldest group (13-15 year olds) and when your parents signed the release form, they also signed a form that allowed us to go on and off the campsite at will, as long as we were with a counsellor. So our main counsellor - his name was Paul, and he was between AS and A2 age, and every girl there fancied him like mad - took us on all sorts of surprise excursions. It wasn't unusual for him to randomly get a bunch of us together and say, "Hey, wanna go to Watford to play Quasar?" Which was really neat, because none of us ever knew what would be in store for the day, and the camp had a contract with several different places, so we didn't have to pay extra for our excursions or anything. If you didn't want to go and do whatever he suggested, you could stay at camp with one of the other groups - plenty of kids did, it wasn't like you'd be alone - and there were always things to do.

It's so funny, I haven't thought of that summer in years, but it was probably one of the best summers I ever had. I can't remember all the friends I made, and I don't think I stayed in touch with any of them, but it was wonderful while it lasted. I'd only played Quasar once before that (and I honestly don't think I've played since), but I managed to kick everyone's butt a lot of the time, and of the three times we went, I got the highest score twice. Once we went to Activity World in Hatfield - usually a place for kids, but still fun at 13 (and I have to admit, still fun in your twenties; I went there for a birthday party just a couple years ago) and slid down the rainbow slide and through the black tubes, and swung on the ropes, and rolled around in a giant hamster wheel, and pelted each other with hollow plastic balls from the ball pond. I made a good buddy, I think his name was Joe, and I remember shoving gooey rubber spiders down his shirt and annoying him by calling Bon Jovi "Von Bogey". We went to Roller City once, and ice skating twice, which I loved - ice skating is one of my favourite things ever. I remember eating forbidden McDonalds burgers (technically we were supposed to get all our food from the camp shop, or bring it from home in our packed lunches) and having Malteser fights, and learning new makeup techniques from the other girls. And one particular day, when we were having a girls-against-boys fight (I can't even remember what precipitated it) and all the boys stayed at camp and refused to let us use any of the equipment, Paul took us out for a drive in the minibus, and I have this incredible picture that I'd forgotten until now: five girls, six including me, plus Paul; Paul driving and trying his hardest to keep us in our seats, but all of us jumping up periodically and changing the channel on the radio; and the six of us singing along - probably very badly - to Seal's "Kiss From a Rose" while Paul did his best not to wince and hurt our feelings. Bless him, he really was a nice guy. It's so weird to think that he'd be nearly thirty now.

We never went on far-off excursions, to Alton Towers or Chessington or Southend Pier, the way I did at a lot of other camps, but it was definitely the coolest camp I'd ever been to. I loved Paul, and I loved the other kids, and I loved the little trips we made. And I also loved staying at camp. When we weren't out, there were hundreds of things to do. There was a climbing wall, which I learned to climb, and by the end of camp I could get to the top of a fifty-foot wall in a little under three minutes. There were several trampolines, which were one of my main joys of camp - although I've never learned to trampoline well, I still love doing it. There was a pool to swim in, and a lake where we weren't supposed to swim, but sometimes did anyway, so the boys could get handfuls of mud and shove it down our bathing-suit tops (cue the fake-horrified screaming, and howls of "You beast!" "You perv!" "You horrible animal!"). I windsurfed a little (although this was a couple of summers before I learned how to do it properly), and waterskied (badly, again this was several years before I learned, and I STILL can't waterski very well), and rode a banana boat. Outside the lake, I drove hand-built go-karts round a track that we made ourselves, and played softball, and had water-balloon fights, and made a waterslide on one of the hills using tarpaulins and a hose. One day, unbeknownst to our counsellors, we all brought in cans of cheap hair mousse, and had mousse fights in the afternoon. (This then caught on at home, and for several weeks the neighborhood kids - Lara and Lisa and Daniel and me, mostly, with Wendy on occasion - would spend our pocket money on cheap mousse from Superdrug, and surprise each other by squirting it all over them when they weren't looking. And sometimes even when they were.) The counsellors weren't happy about the mousse, saying that too much of it would ruin the grass, so the next day we changed it to whippy cream fights (you know, the stuff that comes out of an aerosol to go on top of your trifle).

I played computer games. I even made a very simple game. I played with building electronic stuff, and helped one of the computer guys make a remote-controlled car. I kicked serious ass in archery, and I wish I'd kept on learning, since that was the last time I shot a bow, and I probably wouldn't be any good at it now.

And I met, and fell in like with, Oliver Levey.

Ah yes. Oliver Levey. My first proper crush. Before him, I'd confined my crushes to celebrities. But I fell head-over-heels for Oliver. Of course, he never saw me as anything more than a friend. But friends was fine with me, as long as I could sit next to him and hug him and look at him.

It's so funny. There are guys I went to high school with, guys I've seen at least in the last couple of years, and I can't remember what they look like. I forget faces easily. But I still remember Oliver, more than 12 years after I last saw him. Tall - perhaps five foot ten, even at 14. Gangly, as most teenage boys are, but with nice arms and the promise of muscles elsewhere - while he'll never be Schwartzenegger, I imagine that by now he's got one of those perfect male bodies, lean but strong. Caucasian, but with dark olive skin, darker than I ever go even at my most tanned. Probably about the same colour as my mom in the summer, which made me think that there must be some middle eastern or Indian in him. Dark brown curly hair, kind of wild. Eyes that were usually sea-green, but sometimes looked hazel or even brown. A blade of a nose, a lean jaw. Long shorts and an Orlando Magic basketball vest - the same team that I supported, and the only clothing I ever saw him in - and a matching cap, jammed backwards onto his head. And the most adorable eyebrows: heavy, straggly, almost black.

He looked a lot like my friend PJ must have looked as a kid. When I first met PJ, before I knew his name, I wondered if he might be named Oliver, and I never knew why until I started answering this question. Oliver isn't someone I've thought of in a long time: even though I've never forgotten him, he's been tucked in a safe little drawer in the Library of Congress of my memory banks.

Part of me wants to do an internet search, see if I can find an Oliver Levey who lived in Little Gaddesden in the mid-nineties. There can't be too many of them. But chances are that I won't, because he's such an integral part of my childhood, and bringing him out of it might well make me lose him as a memory. So I'll tuck him back into his memory box again: that wonderful, light, joyful picture of a beautiful boy that I once knew.

Bah Humbug To All Men

SO I woke up late today, having had many bouts of insomnia in the last month, and washed my hair, and dried my hair and then threw some clothes on and walked to the bus stop. And while I was waiting at the bus stop, SIXTEEN CARS BEEPED AT ME, and at least three times that many stared.

I've examined every inch of myself in the public toilet - twice. There is nothing that I can find wrong with the way I look. No blood spatters. No flaps of skin hanging off where I grazed myself without realising. No "SHAG ME" written on the back of my sweater in red lipstick. I'm chubby, but no chubbier than I was yesterday.

The only thing I can assume is that you can see my panties through my skirt. It's a white skirt, a bit diaphanous (although only a bit)...but it's summer, and a lot of women are wearing gauzy skirts, and anyway since when has a woman's underwear been a newsworthy event? From the way they've been acting, you'd think I was standing here naked.

Which is making me wonder, is there something else? Because even when I was sitting on the bus, with my bag in my lap so nobody could see anything, people were still staring at me. I don't know what else it could be, though. Sure, my hair looks like it's been cut with the kitchen scissors (which is no coincidence; I hacked most of it off the other night and haven't managed to get to the hair salon yet), but it's not really that obvious, especially compared with some of the things I've seen on TV and models recently. And there's nothing on my face except bare makeup and a couple of (not particularly noticeable) mosquito bites.

So seriously, WTF is going on?

I'm not really all that keen on attention, to be honest. I get far too much of it, and any novelty value has long ago worn off. People seem to like to talk to me and touch me, and it doesn't seem to occur to them that maybe I don't want to be touched or complimented by strangers. Mostly it's pretty polite, as far as it CAN be - the touches mostly come in the form of tucking in my labels or brushing away non-existent lint or admiring my clothing, and since they happen at least a couple of times a week I've learned to deal with them with a "thank you" and a smile, even when I'm freaking out a little inside. Likewise with the compliments: unless they're leering at me when they say them (and even sometimes then) I smile and thank whoever it is that stopped me. Half the time it's not even remotely sexual, anyway - it's old people wanting to tell me how much I remind them of their granddaughter, or women, or kids wanting a hug. It's only when I go alone to places like Camden or Barking that I get enough male attention that I start to feel harassed, so I mostly stay away from those places, at least when I'm on my own.

But days like today freak the hell out of me. Even if the skirt weren't gauzy, even if my hair were normal, even if I had absolutely nothing wrong with the way I look and could only assume that the car beeps and the stares were complimentary...it would still freak the hell out of me.

I don't know why all the attention, either today or in general. It's not like I'm some supermodel, for pete's sake.