The showers and toilets were quite civilised and there was even a bath. We only have a shower at home so I enjoyed the novelty of lounging in a bath one evening. The shop was well-stocked and open all day every day, and a couple of local businesses came along with food vans and parked up near the play area in the evenings.

The fields are right on a cliff edge and there is a path going down to a private (stony) beach. You can cross the chine by a footbridge and go up to the cliffs opposite to join the coastal path and enjoy some excellent views. Not much good when its pissing down and blowing up a gale, but in normal circumstances this would be a great location.

The site itself is based on a farm and there is a herd of goats, a couple of pigs, some llamas, chickens, geese, turkeys, horses and a water buffalo all knocking around. The kids were always willing to go off to do the washing up as we supplied them them with plenty of leftover fruit, veg and bread to feed the animals afterwards.

We had expected to spend a lot of time lazing around the site and on the beach, but it was a bit chilly and damp for that so we went out a lot. The first day we went to Brading, where everyone thoroughly enjoyed the Wax Museum. I was a bit miffed that I left my camera back at the tent but didn’t let that ruin my day.

On Tuesday we went to Blackgang Chine. It has expanded quite a bit since I was last there (at least 30 years ago) and now has a roller coaster and water slide but there was plenty there I remembered – the dinosaur models, the whale skeleton, the lifeboat exhibition.

Its a strange place as it is still family-owned and has a bit more character than Thorpe Park, Chessington and similar places. It is more basic with fewer rides but more attractions, some of which are endearingly old-fashioned. The park is built on the edge of an eroding chine, but it has been expanding inland quite a bit.

The entry ticket allows you to go back once within 7 days so we kept that in reserve for a cheap day out later in the week.

Actually what we did was left the kids there for a couple of hours to exercise their independence on Saturday while we went off in search of a cream tea.

On Wednesday we went to Carisbrooke Castle, just a few minutes up the road. Not that anywhere is very far from anywhere else on the Island: it is not a huge place.

I like this castle. I still have the same attitude I had as a child and I’m always a bit disappointed when a castle turns out to be just a pile of stone with lots of pictures showing where the walls used to be, or when it is really just a slightly fortified stately home

Despite being 900 years old in parts, Carisbrooke has its walls intact so you can walk around them, and climb the 70+ stairs up to the keep. They also still keep donkeys to raise water from the well.

We visited just in time, as the wind started to pick up by the time we had gone all round the ramparts. When I got to the keep it did feel a bit precarious and I was glad to get down again. By the time we did all the indoors bits it really was getting gale force so we did it all in the right order, but it was a scary night back at the tent with the walls blowing inwards.

We stayed quite local on Thursday. I explored the local village a bit and went up on the cliffs and later on we took a walk on the beach and, despite the presence of a seal carcass washed up there, the kids went for a swim.

On Friday we went up to Yarmouth, watched the boats for a while, got ripped-off for breakfast at the Mariners Cafe (not bad, but very over-priced for what it was) and failed to visit the castle because it is closed on Fridays and Saturdays. Charlie was disappointed, but it didn’t look like much of a castle really.

After Yarmouth we went round to the Needles. This is described as a theme park but really its like a land-based pier. We had been looking forward to taking the chairlift down to the base of the cliffs but when we arrived it was closed due to high winds.

After we had done the tourist thing of filling up glass ornaments with coloured sands, the wind had dropped a bit and the ride started up again so we got to ride down the cliff. It was still a bit blowy, but not too bad.

On Saturday we started by going back to Brading to visit the roman villa at Charlie’s request. He is very interested in history. Jayne and Chrystal are as well, but Chas is a bit more obsessed. The villa is in a new building, only a few years old, and a remarkable bit of award-winning architecture. To be honest I found the new building more impressive than the villa it was built to contain. Like most roman villas its just a few mosaics, an indication of where the walls were and a lot of imagination.

Our national inclination with antiquities is to preserve them, but I sometimes wish we were more inclined to restore and renovate. Even cleaning and touching up the colour on the mosaics and replacing the missing bits would be a start. I would be fascinated to see a proper villa with walls and roofs, even if it was not all original. This approach works well on the HMS Victory but doesn’t get tried enough on buildings.

After the villa we dropped the kids off at Blackgang Chine and headed for Godshill village. Godshill is popular because it is pretty, although the popularity makes it less pretty as every other building is a tea room or shop, but I guess that is unavoidable. There are still a few ‘unspoilt’ villages on the island where you can look at thatched cottages and churches, but none of them has a model village like Godshill does.

The model village is a fairly accurate miniature of the real Godshill – as it was before it got taken over by commercialism. It is so accurate that the model village contains a model of the model village. And that model is accurate enough to contain its own model of the model village. I don’t know if it gets any more recursive than that as I didn’t take a magnifying glass with me.

After seeing all those tilt-shift photos on Flickr where photos of real places are made to look like models it was fun trying to take photos of a model to try and make it look like a real place. On the way back to the campsite we remembered to pick up the kids and enjoyed an evening playing cards while the wind and rain came back in force, trying not to think of how we would get the tent down in such weather.

When Sunday morning came it was calm and dry so we got everything together a lot more quickly than we expected, and got up to Ryde with loads of time to spare so we had a look in the town before going to the ferry terminal and had a breakfast twice as good as in Yarmouth and at half the price and still managed to get onto the ferry before the one we were booked on.

Quite a packed week, but we still didn’t see half of what is on the island and will have to return at some point in the future and hopefully with better weather, or in a cottage instead of a tent. The wind and rain did get us a bit down, but we kept telling ourselves that we were still more comfortable than a lot of people in Gloucester, Tewkesbury and other flooded areas.

As I said before, we still seem to have loads of bins in the town centre and the memorial gardens, and an increase in the number bins on Broadfield Barton so I am not convinced this is actually being tried here anyway.

I am only returning to the subject now because I noticed something while I was on the Isle of Wight: a complete absence of litter. When I noticed this I realised that I had not seen any bins either. And then I realised that there were actually quite a few bins but they were not as apparent as the ones here are, which is why I didn’t see them.

Our bins are big, round and in the way. They stand in the middle of pedestrian areas or pavements and can be a bloody nuisance when its busy, especially with all the other street furniture cluttering up everywhere. A lot of the IoW bins seemed to be against walls, square-shaped and covered at the top with slots in the side. Others had hinged lids on them which you have to lift to put rubbish in, and some of them were plain wood which just blended in with the surroundings.

It might be that the lids on bins are a reaction to the fact that the population of the Island is about 150,000 people and (what seems to be) 500,000 rooks and crows. A slight exaggeration maybe, but it does seem like something out of Hitchcock at times.

This is just a theory, but this sort of design and placement of bins could be a major contribution to the tidiness. One argument against bins is that people ball up their rubbish, lob it towards the bin and miss. Well if the bins are big, round and open-topped and then placed right in the middle its very tempting to treat them like basketball nets: the design and placement practically encourages such behaviour. I myself often lob rubbish into the bins from a distance – obviously I never miss.

A closed bin would carry no such temptation so the problem of us chucking rubbish in the general direction of bins so it will then collect on the ground and blow around would be greatly reduced but without the need for everyone to carry all their trash with them until they get home – or pass a convenient bush or low wall. (I used to live near the town centre and had a low wall at the front so I know what I’m talking about! My front garden was always filling up with chip wrappers). As an added bonus there would be less smell and less chance of birds and rats pulling the rubbish out.

Its only a theory but I think its as valid as the others. If there is a debate about the pros and cons of bins I’m going to come down on the side of trying covered bins rather than doing away with them completely.

I was also fascinated by roadside adverts for a garlic festival which was described as “the Island’s largest garlic festival” – how many garlic festivals does one small island have anyway?

But despite all that, this was my favourite sign. I could not stop myself humming badgerbadgerbadger for the next few miles.

I wish I had managed to get a photo of it, but as we passed through Binstead on the way home yesterday I saw that the most significant thing happening there was TEACHER RETIRES AFTER 30 YEARS.

I expect that previous headlines were along the lines of POSTMAN DELIVERS MAIL, WOMAN HAS BABY, or MAN CUTS GRASS and I kind of envy them for that.

In a fit of misplaced optimism about the weather prospects we booked a week camping on the Isle of Wight and just got back yesterday. We had to stay in Crawley for the Broadfield fete but set off the very next day which turned out to be very fortunate indeed.

After a week of solid rain and misery I had nightmare visions of trying to pitch a tent in the middle of a downpour but last Sunday was not too bad at all and when we reached the campsite it was a bit damp underfoot, but not actually raining, so putting the tent up was a doddle but I was a bit worried that the ground was so damp I could just push the pegs in with my finger – how secure can it be if the ground is semi-liquid?

After that it was all downhill though. The campsite was on top of some cliffs right on the South-West coast of the island and in the middle of the week it started to get windy. Not just breezy, but 30-40mph winds. Our tent has a large dome section in the middle so we were able to cook and eat inside, but it was scary seeing the walls curving inwards instead of out. I had to make frequent tours of the perimeter checking the pegs and tightening lines.

Some of the pegs kept getting pulled out and I replaced those with my limited stock of industrial-strength huge tent pegs. The wind kept unzipping the doors and at one point snapped several of the wooden poles on the windbreak clean in half – these are poles at least 3cm across and they just snapped!

Half the tents around us got totally flattened, with metal poles broken. By mid-week the site was starting to look a bit empty as the owners of destroyed tents decided to give up, and cars were starting to get stuck in the mud.

On Friday we we found the site had suddenly filled up. It turned out that every other site on the same side of the Island was turning people away as they were too waterlogged and everyone was getting re-directed to our site.

Somehow our tent (£114 from Argos) survived the gales, which returned again on Saturday night along with more rain. By some lucky fluke Sunday morning was dry and calm so packing up the tent was a lot easier than we feared. We had not been looking forward to trying to fold an enormous tent in strong winds.

As we took it all down we found that the ground under the groundsheet had turned to mush. It was like a little section of Glastonbury or the WW1 no-mans-land under there. When we were dismantling our bedroom we actually found a frog living there!

Taking the poles out we found that 5 of the 9 poles had been shredded. These are fibreglass poles which are quite flexible, but they had been split lengthwise into 3 or 4 sections. Somehow those bits still held the whole thing together though.

In spite of all that, we actually had quite a good time. Most of the bad weather was in the late afternoons and evenings. During the day we were out visiting the various attractions and having fun. The only inconvenience was having to spend the evenings inside the tent – but at least it is big enough to do that.

Having good weather on the days of setting up and striking camp made all the difference.