Suzanne's children were brought up on a diet of festivals, camping, and compost loos.

Let’s take your kids camping — five words to strike terror into the heart of an urban fox whose idea of wilderness is Hyde Park after 6pm. Mr Fox, born and bred in Hackney, has only been camping once before in his entire life — with me, last summer, wild camping in a forest — and is still scarred from the fact that there were no loos in the woods. No loos and no lattes.

Let’s take your kids camping, I suggest this summer. Like him, they are urban fox cubs, who know how to cross busy roads and how to avoid getting mugged for their lunch money, but wouldn’t know a magpie from a cockatoo, and think blackberries come from Tesco. They possess not a pair of wellies between them.

Lucky their dad met me then — I am a camping evangelist, particularly for kids. Get them outside, hurl them at Mother Nature’s leafy bosom, let them go wild in the countryside. Run free, climb trees, fall over, get muddy, dry off, do it all again until they collapse in an exhausted, filthy heap. Teach them apocalypse skills — they’ll thank you later. How to pitch a tent, build a fire, make dinner outdoors.

The colour drains from Mr Fox’s metrosexual face. "How will we do that", he whispers. They don’t even like sleepovers, never mind sleeping outdoors. "It’s not bivouacking", I tell him briskly. "We will have a big bell tent, a wood burner, fairy lights, airbeds, sheepskins, a cool box, a cooker. It’s glamping. It’s practically a hotel." 

My own child, a young adult who spent her childhood holidays in a variety of tents, from Glastonbury to the South of France, nods earnestly. "You won’t even have to bring a trowel", she says. "There’ll be compost loos. We checked."

"What are they", whispers Mr Fox in a faint voice. He goes even paler when she explains the concept. This is a man who can identify an 18th-century theatre lamp at ten paces, who knows his way around art fairs and antique markets, who could explain what scrimshaw is, but has never heard of a compost loo, never mind used one. A man who has never left the house without a comb, who takes greater care of his clothes than I do of my children. My other child, who also grew up camping but has reinvented himself as an urban man-about-town, all trainers and skin-fades, throws Mr Fox a pitying look. As if to say, mate, run away when you still can.

Send me a list of what to bring, says Mr Fox in the kind of despairing voice you’d use if you were terminally ill and planning your own funeral. I try a different tack. "Imagine you’re taking your kids to the park", I say. "Except there won’t be a children’s play area or a café or any shops or street lights or electricity, and there may be cows and we will be sleeping in the park, so bring warm clothes for later." And head torches.

He looks like he might cry. "What are head torches?", he says.

Why won’t there be lights? Because countryside, I explain. Fields. Off grid. By the time we finish WhatsApping, we have come up with a new syndrome for the diagnostic manual of mental disorders: camping anxiety.

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