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Why does anyone buy a Tentbox?
Tentbox is a company that makes tents that you mount on top of your car. They unfold complexly and provide a sleeping platform high up off the ground for folks that want to spend the night out in the Great Outdoors. They appear to be spreading like wildfire among folks with Land Rover Defenders and Jeeps and vans with snow & mud tyres.
But I cannot understand why they are spreading so rapidly, because as far as I can tell, they are inferior products sold for an inflated price. As of summer 2024, the cheapest Tentbox that you can purchase goes for just over £1,000. This gets you a 2-man tent that erects in "under 5 minutes" and only increases your car's drag coefficient by like 10%.
Compare this with a reasonably luxurious backpacking tent. Compare this with the Vango F10 Xenon. You can tell that this is a good tent because of how many names it has. It weighs about 5 lbs and packs down to about the size of a sleeping bag. It has a generous vestibule for cooking and packing out of the elements. It has lots of headroom and is wide enough that you could sleep 3 people with flexible personal space tolerances inside. It goes up in under 5 minutes, and costs less than half of what the cheapest Tentbox costs. The Tentbox, however! requires that you climb up a ladder in the dark to access it.
I simply don't understand. The only instance I can think of where sleeping on top of your car could be preferable to sleeping on the ground is if there's a significant threat of animal intrusion into your tent. Make no mistake, however: sleeping on top of your car is not going to stop a curious brown bear after a night of grilling steaks inside of your tent. They're famously good climbers.
I feel like Tentbox is a trend, an offshoot of #vanlife: instagrammable, enviable in a sort of wholesome way, more affordable than finding a used Vanagon and more convenient than a retrofitted Fiat Ducato. It feels in the same way like purchasing a personality to sell yourself online. I suspect that in four or five years eBay will flood with secondhand Tentboxes used less than a dozen times.
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Bad coffee
"The Case for Bad Coffee", by Keith Pandolfi over at Serious Eats, is an oldie by writing-on-the-web standards (October 2019, before the pandemic & at least one whole lifetime ago, maybe two), but continues to read well and reflects another facet of my ongoing journey towards non-preciousness (which probably started in 2014 with #9 on this listicle of 30 tips for living, which in the intervening 8 years has aged really well, and about which I am long overdue for a blog post).
The non-precious approach is usually contrasted against the life's-too-short approach (e.g. "life's too short to drink shitty coffee"), which usually props up financially irresponsible decisions—especially among cyclists and coffee enthusiasts. Among whom I now count myself—since we got ol' Ghyll and my dad brought my 1980s Schwinn over from the States.
I think that "The Case" maybe overcorrects a little bit. "High-end coffee doesn't usually lend itself to [bonding experiences]," Pandolfi writes. I don't think that's quite true—some of my best memories of Japan, for example, are of incredible meals into which chefs put hours of care and fuss. Same goes for some terrific cocktails I had in Newquay a few years ago. Non-preciousness isn't about a disdain for high-end stuff; you can be just as precious about cheap coffee, cheap footwear, or cheap cars as any wealthy snob is about expensive variants.
Non-preciousness, instead, is about extracting the experiences out of the everyday. If Pandolfi's $18 bag of coffee wasn't giving him the same experiences that it used to—if it wasn't sparking joy anymore—then of course he shouldn't be spending the money on it. If a can of Maxwell elicits illicit thrills, more power to him!
The best cup of coffee I ever had was at an IHOP, with Sam, in suburban Orlando, at like 3 am or something. It was like a buck fifty for unlimited refills, and so good that I bought the thick-walled, thimble-sized IHOP cup that it came in. And I still drink coffee out of it.
My trusty IHOP cup -
Polyphasic sleep
Here's a fun side-effect of having a puppy about the house: I haven't slept for more than 4 continuous hours in a couple of weeks.
Puppies have almost zero bladder control, which means that even if he wanted to (& I'm not convinced that he does), Ghyll isn't able to hold it until we get up in the morning. For which reason I get up twice in the night—at 1:00 and at 4:00—to take him outside for a few minutes, coerce him into doing his business, and put him back to bed. Sam and I have arrived at this arrangement mostly out of my inability to cope with his early morning breakfast-related high energy. He's usually up for an hour from 7:30 to 8:30 and then back to napping until 10:30 or so.
The night sky behind my house, 1 am So far I don't think I'm experiencing any catastrophic effects. I think that sailboat racing crews tend to operate on short shifts where they sleep polyphasically throughout the day; and apparently most humans in Western civilisation slept biphasically (that is, waking once for a couple hours in the middle of the night) before the Industrial Revolution allowed us to stay up well past sunset. That being said, I don't think that racing crews sleep like that on shore; and pre-industrial biphasic sleep took place over like 12 hours of darkness, whereas I'm fitting my schedule into the regular old 8 hours. The takeaway is that it's not going to kill me—but preliminary results indicate that it's not doing my long-term memory consolidation any favours.
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Men I Trust
Men I Trust wound up being terrific. A little bit light on the banter, which, I like banter—but we can’t all be Colin Meloy, famously banter-prone.
I think the set list might have benefited from a cover halfway through; Men I Trust have a definite sound that gets a little same-ey after 25 minutes or so. Something 90s with a bit of excitement would have gone over well, like “1979” by Smashing Pumpkins or even “Everlong”.
On the plus side, the sound was extremely faithful to their records, which I guess is a matter of preference but in this case came across really well. I noticed as well that they cut a couple of songs short dropping a verse & chorus on the numbers that are really just glorified basslines with some vocals atop. I think this was probably the right call.
Sam says it was the quietest gig she’s ever been to. She might be right.
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Manchester
In Manchester for a Men I Trust gig. Man what a good city.
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