The Campsite Shower Block

The campsite shower block is one of those places that ought to be marketed honestly.

Not as "modern facilities" or "heated amenities", but as a sort of damp holding pen for people whose bodies now come with terms and conditions. You shuffle in carrying a towel, a washbag, and a level of quiet determination usually associated with polar expeditions. Around you are your peers, also elderly, all pretending this is still a simple business of having a shower and getting dressed, rather than a daily re-enactment of the decline of the West.

The first difficulty is the changing. There was a time when putting on underpants involved no planning at all. You simply stepped into them. Now it is a manoeuvre. A calculated operation involving balance, grip, and a brief internal negotiation with whichever knee has lately decided that lifting itself six inches is an unreasonable demand. One foot goes in, then the whole enterprise pauses while you steady yourself against a damp cubicle wall and hope not to die with one trouser leg round your ankle in a public shower block in Dorset.

All around you, others are engaged in similar acts of muted heroism. Nobody speaks of it. Nobody says, "I appear to have become too old to put my socks on standing up." That would be vulgar. Instead we carry on in silence, wobbling gently, with the grave dignity of men trying not to topple over while naked from the waist down.

Then there is the gathering at the sinks, which has the air of a pharmacists' convention held in a bus station lavatory. Out come the pill organisers, the foil packets, the little bottles with childproof lids that no child could open, but nor, frankly, can we. And of course nothing is ever straightforward. You do not take one tablet. That would be far too elegant. No, your dose has to be assembled like a small chemical puzzle from a selection of 4mg and 1mg pills, with the concentration of someone balancing the books at PwC, except in slippers.

After that comes hearing aid maintenance, which is a task no younger person ever imagines featuring in their future. Yet there we are, lined up under strip lighting, excavating yesterday's ear wax with tiny brushes and solemn expressions, as if servicing precision instruments. Which, in this case, are Danish. GN, no less. I used to work for them in a previous life, which adds a certain professional pride to the whole exercise. There is something magnificently undignified about standing in a Dorset shower block, maintaining Scandinavian micro-electronics while trying not to drop a wax guard down the plughole.

And still, oddly enough, there is a sort of fellowship in it. A quiet recognition that we are all in much the same state. Knees shot, backs stiff, hearing intermittent, digestive systems maintained by committee. Nobody says much, but everyone knows. We are the generation that once marched briskly into communal washrooms with a towel over one shoulder and emerged ten minutes later fully dressed and ready for the day. Now it takes half an hour and a pharmaceutical supply chain.

You come away from it all feeling clean, approximately assembled, and faintly triumphant. Not because you have conquered anything very grand, but because you have managed a shower, your pills, your Danish hearing aids and your trousers without requiring outside assistance. Which, in the motorhome world, counts as a very decent start to the morning.