If you went holidaying in the 70’s you will remember a time when holidays meant packing all the family in a car, including grandparents, and travelling down motorways and A-roads to get to a campsite or self catering holiday home. None of the luxury of a five star hotel abroad with sweltering sun all holiday long. You had to be made of sturdy stuff in the 70’s and Emma Kennedy recalls the highs and lows of those memorable days in this hilarious memoir.
July 2009 Guest Editor Louise Wener on The Tent, The Bucket and Me by EMMA KENNEDY I
just finished reading this and it's brilliant. There were points when I
was literally laughing and crying at the same time. A memoir of one
family's disastrous attempts to go camping in the Seventies, which
makes it sound not nearly as funny and fantastic as it is. Lots of
sweet and sour humour surrounding brits abroad, near death experiences
and endless wince-making tent and toilet mishaps.
Growing up in the Seventies, we were on the brink of the modern age. But despite a brave new world of Casio hand-held calculators and digital watches, one thing remained the same: the family holiday. For the Seventies child, summer holidays didn’t mean the joy of CentreParcs or the sophistication of a Tuscan villa. They meant being crammed into a car with Grandma and heading to the coast. With just a tent for a home and a bucket for the necessities, we would set off on new adventures each year stoically resolving to enjoy ourselves.
For Emma Kennedy, and her mum and dad, disaster always came along for the ride no matter where they went. Whether it was swept away by a force ten gale on the Welsh coast or suffering copious amounts of food poisoning on a brave trip to the south of France, family holidays always left them battered and bruised.
But they never gave up. Emma’s memoir, The Tent, the Bucket and Me, is a painfully funny reminder of just what it was like to spend your summer holidays cold, damp but with sand between your toes.
'I love camping! Relive the experience with Emma et al - you can almost taste the smell of the damp canvas' JO BRAND
'I love her writing' JON RONSON
'You really ought to take Emma Kennedy on holiday with you. In book-form only. Never, ever, in person' DAVE GORMAN
Author
About Emma Kennedy
Emma Kennedy is the author of nine books, including bestsellers The Tent the Bucket and Me and I Left My Tent in San Francisco. She has also written the Wilma Tenderfoot series for children. She has adapted The Tent the Bucket and Me for BBC1, renamed The Kennedys and is a regular writer on CBBC's Strange Hill High and Dangermouse. She is also an actress and has appeared in many award winning comedies including Goodness Gracious Me, People Like Us and Miranda. She is the Fun Editor at Tatler, won Celebrity Masterchef in 2012 and is a Guinness World Record holder.
