Bedtime Adventure Stories for Grown Ups by McNuff Anna

Author:McNuff, Anna
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2021-05-09T00:00:00+00:00

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Come the seventh week of the mini-adventure mission, I had become accustomed to (as one of my mates put it) ‘spending my evenings sleeping in bushes with friends and strangers’, but at last, it was time to take on the mini mothership – a sleep-out in Greater London itself. On the final Wednesday of the project, 40 fully employed, self-respecting city slickers with perfectly decent homes to go to assembled in the cellar bar of a West End pub. By 9 p.m., our bellies were bulging with pub fare and we split into small groups to prepare for journeys to various small pockets of wilderness around London.

The scene that unfolded in the alley outside The Pontefract Castle pub in Soho would have made any big corporate’s HR team-building department dribble with delight. Groups of relative strangers huddled together over smartphones – browsers open on London transport apps, Google Maps and supermarket store locators – discussing how to make their way to their assigned locations, where they would sleep, and (crucially) where they might stop to buy an evening drink and brekkie for the morning. We wished one another luck and departed with our groups – bound for our chosen adventure spots.

I was heading up a North London elite squadron of three, which consisted of me and two friends, both named Andy. It was long past dark by the time I settled down in the middle of an Andy mandwich on a hill in front of the iconic Victorian Alexandra Palace. All three of us sat on a single camping mat and put the world to rights with cups of peppermint tea in hands – gazing at the spikes and curves of the London skyline. We identified the city landmarks as best we could but there was a long debate about what the ‘semi-jagged, mid-height slopey thing’ was to the east. Every now and then social media would offer up a glimpse of what other groups were up to on their own nights out in the capital. Team Hampstead Heath seemed to have gone a little OTT on the refreshments (it was like a mobile wine store up there); there was a wonderful night-time vista shared from Primrose Hill; and it seemed that Team Richmond Park had experienced quite an adventure already, just trying to find and enter the park.

I’d be lying if I didn’t confess to some subtle differences between a camp-out in Greater London and the previous, more rural, locations. In North London, at least, the soft rustle of the wind through the tree leaves was frequently disturbed by a 20-something chundering in the bushes. The brilliance of the stars was partially dampened by light pollution and a police siren would ring out through the still night air every now and then. But there was a deep sense of triumph and satisfaction to be had from finding even a modicum of serenity in an area populated by nine million people. This was London – warts ’n’ all – and with every sunrise and sunset I took the time to witness, I grew ever fonder of its quirks.

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