I’m lying inside a container about six foot by six foot, trying not to lean against its sloping walls and waiting for the blood to come back to my left leg.

The container is made of canvas, and is often referred to as a tent. But there are tents and tents. I’ve seen tents that have three bedrooms, a living room and a porch bigger than most people’s conservatories. This is not that sort of tent. This, my husband assures me, is a three to four person tent. All I can say is that if you crammed another two people in here you could re-christen it a livestock lorry. There are First Great Western toilets bigger than this.

My husband isn’t in the tent at the moment because he woke up several minutes ago and has gone off to gather water to boil his new camping kettle on his new camping gas stove to make us a mug of authentic outdoors tea.

I try not to move too much, because I’m lying on an inflatable mattress that has a sharp sense of humour. Every time I turn over it propels me to the other side of the tent.

I can see its potential as a nice little earner as a bouncy castle for small children and I shall probably take it to our nearest park and charge mums and dads 50p a go next week.

We arrived last night and were allocated a quiet spot away from the main campsite, and just got the tent up before it got dark.

Then we took off all our clothes – this is a naturist campsite, after all – and put on our pyjamas, it’s our first naturist holiday so we wanted to take things slowly, and got into our sleeping bags and went to sleep.

Then I woke up again. And again. Many times, in fact. The tent was hot, the mattress too springy, we’d forgotten to pack pillows, the tent was cold. Then I needed a wee. I lay there as long as I could, then felt around for the torch. After five minutes I gave up, and decided to rely on the light of the moon to guide me to the shower block, five minutes’ walk away. But once I was out of the tent and had caught my foot on a guy-rope and realised it must be the moon’s night off, the logic of stumbling all that way was beyond me, so I went behind a tree and had a wee there.

When I got back my husband rolled over and said “That was very loud. I don’t know what the poor people in the tent next to us must be thinking.”

It turns out I did sleep a bit more than I’d thought, and in the early hours someone turned up and pitched up right next to us. I’m still blushing at the thought. I’m also trying to recall whether the ground leading up to the tree has a gradient. And, more importantly, whether it goes up or down.

There’s a happy chink of aluminium outside, and the water carrier has returned. He sticks his head inside the tent and chirps a bit about what a lovely day it is. I crawl out, and eventually manage to stand up. It is actually a lovely day. There’s a tiny brown tent nearby, but it’s all shut up, and my husband has put out two camping chairs. I take off my pyjamas – I don’t think I’ve ever been on a trip that involves so much dressing and undressing – and settle into the chair without a stitch on. This is very private and quite nice. I close my eyes.

“Good morning,” says a very British male voice. I open my eyes to see a tall, good looking bronzed naked man in his late 30s stretching and then zipping up his tent.

“Hope I didn’t wake you last night – I arrived in the early hours,” he goes on. I go pink. All over.

“Well, I’m off to explore a bit,” he says, apparently not having noticed that I don’t have any clothes on.

“Do you know if they have horses here at all?”

I shake my head dumbly and shrug.

“No, it wasn’t in the brochure, but I suspect they do. I do like a bit of riding. And I’m sure that I heard one last night as I was drifting off.

“Relieving itself, you know. You don’t mistake a sound like that, do you?”