ARE you a happy camper? Camping has really hit the big time, what with the festival scene exploding in the past few years and glamping ramping up the glamour of sleeping in the great outdoors.

Me? I just don't get it. I never have and I don't think I ever will. For me, a break or a holiday means luxury that you don't have at home, the kind of luxuries that you don't get in a tent.

Things like, for example, hot and cold running water. A loo. A comfortable bed. Shelter - proper shelter - from the great outdoors.

Camping makes day-to-day living so much harder. I thought about taking my children camping when they were younger, prepared to sacrifice my own comforts so that they could enjoy all the fun that goes with the experience: struggling to put up the tent, sleeping in sleeping bags, playing with other children and families on the campsite, and so on.

I even went so far as to visit a camping shop and admiring the big luxurious family tents you could now buy, not the basic little two-person put-up job that was the only kind available when I was a child.

Now you can buy huge complicated tents for up to ten people, specialist tents for festivals, for backpacking, weekend tents, touring tents... the list goes on.

But - and this is a big but - no matter how big and expensive and fancy the tent, you still can't get one with hot and cold running water or a loo.

So why would parents of multiple young children want to spend a holiday in greater discomfort than at home? Cooking would be a nightmare. At home, you have all the gadgets you need, gas or electricity at the press of a button and, if you're lucky, a dishwasher too.

Then you can retire to the living room on the luxury of a soft warm sofa and enjoy the evening.

Out in the field, you're trying to cook over a makeshift stove, your choice of food extremely limited as a result, and how the hell do you even wash up? Everything would just be so much trouble, even making a basic cup of tea.

When you need the loo or a shower, you have to trek across a field to shared facilities - and you don't know who you're sharing with.

Don't even get me started on the notorious British weather. Lovely as it has been over the past couple of weeks, you can guarantee that if you choose to spend time outdoors, it will rain. And if you're camping, imagine the mud! What do you do with small children or teenagers in a tent in a field when it's pouring with rain? How do you escape the weather in the tent?

No, it’s not my cup of tea. The only way I'll ever go camping is if you are in a solid structure rather than a tent, you get your own bathroom and kitchen, hot and cold running waiters to serve you gourmet meals and a TV. And that's called a hotel, isn't it?

But, wait, what's this? I've discovered a website for a glamping company that offers "the wild in comfort and en suite".

Its USP is that you get your own bathroom and your own private loo, you "curl up on a comfy bed under snug linens, beneath the stars, with running water, a hot shower, flushing toilet and electricity all on tap". As they point out, "There's no pleasure in trying to find your way to the shower block in the dark and treading on a cow pat, so why try?"

Perhaps the gap between slumming it in a tent and luxuriating in a hotel room is beginning to narrow and the hardcore of campers who want to get down and dirty among the cow pats is being edged out of the camping market by a new wave of glampers, who are simply not prepared to put up with all the traditional deprivations and instead expect all the luxuries of a hotel.

But is glamping true camping? I might just have to give it a go and let you know.

The Argus: London Road, Brighton

RUBBISH and litter are piling up in parts of the city. On a bus along London Road in Brighton last week, I saw communal bins outside cafes overflowing with rubbish, with black bags dumped around them, stuff on top and empty food bags bowling around.

There’s nothing worse than rubbish to make a place look down-and-out and there’s nothing worse than a tourist town looking down-and-out to turn the tourists off and keep them away.

It’s already a shame that Brighton has to site so many rubbish bins on pavements. Failing to empty the bins just makes us look like a rubbish city.