When I was a nipper the early morning Saturday main event was the radio. We'd shuffle out of bed and head for the cornflakes and twiddle the knobs on the wireless set
until we found Junior Choice, the airwave's venue for such classics as "Messing about on the River", "Little White Bull" and our favourite, "Camp Grenada".

Now, back then we really never understood what this American "camp" thing was all about, "Hullo Mudda, Hullo Fadda" we could vaguely grasp, but not the camp thing. For us, "camp" was two or three old sheets strung between the clothes lines, but it was a funny song.

It was many years later when we lived in Boston USA that we finally fully understood what the song was all about. Over worked parents pay exhorbitant amounts of money to send the kids to live in basic huts in a mosquito infested wood, beside a lake.

However, times have changed and from recent, first hand observation, nowadays it seems "camp" is run in a converted concrete, ex retail establishment or possibly a mini theme park where kids can see various feathered friends, llamas, goats. If you're lucky, there's a splash pad full of water fountains, giant buckets filling and emptying onto screaming kids and water slides which the health and safety executive has made so safe, with so little incline, skinny kids with a sticky bum come to a halt half way down and walk the rest.

In my day, slides were in a slightly boggy council park and about thirty feet in the air. If you fell off and survived, you'd either bounce or break. The concept of compensation was as yet unheard of. On the odd hot Scottish summer days "crafting" was playing with the melted tar at the side of the road and a splash pad meant it was raining. Again.

We enjoyed our weeks in North America with the families and now, we're back on two hulls making final preparations to leave behind the winter weather of Cape Town and head north. And of course, having been here for eight months we're now up against the clock to get all the "do before we leave" items off the check list. And if the forecast doesn't improve we'll be here for some time yet.

But wait a minute........it's stopped raining, guys are swimming, guys are sailing.......... kindly disregard this letter.