Free Here and There by A. A. Gill

flattened by the All Blacks. Luxury, apparently, is over. Conspicuous consumption is inconspicuous again. Gold bath taps, restaurants run by swanky chefs, are all over. Jewellery on the beach, rose petals in the bath, bikini bottoms floating in the Jacuzzi: that’s also utterly, utterly passé. Apparently the rich still left with money and time to enjoy it don’t want to look like the past-it rich, the over-rich or the idle rich with nothing but hedonism and hair extensions on their minds.
    They, and by implication the aspirational bits of you, want an adventure. You want to learn something. You want to come home with more than pictures of a sunlounger and an abused lobster. You want to boast about something that isn’t a tan-line, and who you saw at the next table. You want to come back with a traveller’s tale, a saga, not a holiday drink-alogue. You want to get out into the corners of the world that room service won’t reach. The future of travel, I was told, is going to be [drum-roll; keen young executive flicks the button on his remote; and the screen flashes up, ta-ra … a tent. A tent. That’s it, a tent. The future of top-of-the-range holidays is a tent. What’s the mass-market version going to be – a refugee camp? Oh no, no, you see I’m not looking closely enough. The images flicker across the screen. This is no ordinary tent: this is a tent you can stand up in, with a bed you can lie down on, with sheets that you could glide across, with a carpet, with mirrors and windows and a mosquito net that looks like interior design. This tent is to other tents what Ava Gardner is to other gardeners.
    What we are about to yearn for is Scouting for liberals. And there’s a name for it. It’s called glamping. (That’s glamorous camping for those of you who are slow at word and concept combining.) Never before have camping and glamour come together. Indeed, they’ve never been in the same sentence before. Camping is almost by definition the absence of glamour. But here we are, in the bush, in some distant savannah, on a river bank. There is a crackling fire on which a clever native bakes brioche and ciabatta in an old tin trunk. The Chablis is chilling, a camp table is set with napkins and a storm lantern. The only glitzy thing here is the Milky Way, and in the distance some questing creature calls. And sat next to you is a guide who has a degree in biology, astronomy, geology and anthropology, and a chest you could tee golf balls off.
    And tomorrow it will all be gone, as if it had never happened. You will leave nothing behind; the whole lot will be packed away into a discreet 10-tonne truck and whisked off to another virgin caravanserai. You have the enormous smug satisfaction of owning not only a singular experience but an unimpeachably organic and green one.
    This is a fantasy of ruggedness, a nursery play version of the wild. It is Marie Antoinette’s weekend picnic farm, which is fine by me: given the choice between Marie’s and a real farm, I’m with the French queen every time. What I mind about this is that however risible and embarrassing and tasteless big, expensive honeymoon holidays are, they do exist in real places and employ real indigenous people, and pay for somebody’s economy, putting real kids through school so that they can grow up and be businessmen and come and have holidays with us. This Peter Pan camping adventure slips through the beautiful bits of the world leaving not a trace and very little cash.
    I asked the man who was selling glamping to me what the most important thing about this new moveable feast was. He thought for a moment, and smiled, and said: ‘Dimmer switches. And proper lavatories.’ So there you have it. The latest must-have extravagance, the chic one-upmanship, is a flushing bog in the outback. We live in momentous times.

Cashmere if you can
    Italians may lack a sense of humour, but Rome is still the