Part 1 - 26/03/2004

It’s 12:30am, you’re arriving at your campsite after the journey from hell. You’ve Just driven 250 miles across France, spent a small fortune on toll roads, had two kids asking “how many more miles?” and “are we nearly there yet?” constantly for the last 8 hours – you’re tired and fed up. As you’ve arrived ridiculously late to your campsite there’s no courier to show you to your accommodation. Do you…

A) Feel disappointed at the inconvenience this will cause your family, but realise that it was impossible for the couriers to wait up, so decide to sleep in the car accepting that you can be in your tent first thing in the morning.

B) Dig the torch out of the overnight bag and start searching all the tents to find the one empty tent with your family’s name card in it?
Or

C) Break into the company’s reception tent and claim squatters’ rights because the “bloody couriers” should have waited around until the early hours eagerly awaiting your arrival. After all you are a paying customer and they should be on call 24/7.
Answers on a postcard to the usual address…

We may only just be about to say goodbye to March and the thought of a fortnight under canvas may seem far too much of a distant event to keep you going through the damp squib that will pass for the British spring, but for those who this summer shall be providing the on site ‘face’ of your self-drive camping company, the time to head off to the great unknown will soon be upon us. So as one of the many who will be there to cater to your every want and desire – or if not that, I suppose you’ll have to make do with me being there to change your gas canister at 1am – I shall be keeping a diary of my summer working for a leading self-drive company in the Franche-Comté region of France.

This isn’t going to be some PR stunt to publicise an individual campsite or camping company – but instead a ‘warts and all’ account of what we humble couriers really have to go through to ensure that you, the customer, have “the best holiday ever” (copyright any of the Self-Drive companies). So be warned… if any of you are coming to a campsite in the Franche-Comté you’d better be nice to all the couriers just in case one of them is me – otherwise you might end up reading all about yourself in this very diary! ?

So with this being the first of what will be a semi-regular column, I suppose I should really explain how I went about the process of becoming a campsite courier. For more years than I care to remember I holidayed with my family all over France with all the different camping companies. Each year I looked at what the couriers were doing and said to myself that when I ‘grow up’ I’m going to spend a summer doing that! Now there’s absolutely no way that I’ve ‘grown up’ but having got to the stage where I’m old enough and in a position to be able it to do it, I thought I’d give it a go.

The recruitment process started while the tans were still looking reasonably impressive in October of last year and lasted approximately two months from application to job offer.