Camping isn’t fun.
I knew this. As a kid, we used to go camping quite often, and back then, it was fun. We were kids; we didn’t have to think about hard ground pegs, where the facilities were located, or when on earth we were going to dry the tent out on our return home. And we never woke up cold, and sweaty (how is that possible?) with a depression-inducing hangover.
Since reaching adulthood, every camping experience I’ve endured has been cold, wet, curiously miserable, and ultimately unfulfilling. Thankfully, I haven’t undertaken many.
Quite why I decided to go camping for work, therefore, is beyond me. But go camping I did, and this little venture came during a week when I’d been doing a lot of soul-searching about this business.
Let me give you a quick rundown of my week so far (I’m writing this, as always, on Friday morning).
On Monday, I had a relatively normal day. This involved heading to the studio to create content, and waiting for a large review unit (a car) to be delivered, before heading to the gym later that day to clear my head and get them dolphins doing their thang*. On Tuesday, I took the Mini Countryman review unit to London, where I attended a briefing for the new Edge 50 series Motorola devices (a last-minute decision which required a 5AM alarm). Driving back with another new product about which I needed to make content, I ended up back at the studio to hurriedly shoot an unboxing of said device, before finishing the filming of today’s main channel video (which I consequently stayed up until 9PM that night editing).
On Wednesday, I headed south to visit Pete Matheson and filmed reactions to him using my Vision Pro headset and yours truly to his Meta Quest 3 headset. Good fun was had and, once again, a boatload of content consigned to the can. From there, I headed a little further south into the beautiful New Forest, where the team had booked a pitch at a campsite and given me nothing more than a postcode for the satnav. On the way, I began shooting the a-roll for the review I was undertaking of the Mini Countryman.
Camping ensued. I froze my you-know-whats-off during one of the coldest nights of the week. I woke up, still cold, hungry, and without coffee nearby, and filmed a beautiful sunrise with my drone. I then packed up the tent and continued the day’s shooting on my own (not an easy task when the subject is a car).
By 3PM I was done and ready to head home. That car journey was full of deep thought about the week’s activities, and what’s to come over the next few weeks. Beyond the stuff I’ve described today, there was, of course, a load of other things going on behind the scenes; sponsor negotiations, travel arrangements, wrestling with the video calendar (which is currently booked up until mid-June) switching the Mark Ellis Reviews website over to a brand-new ad platform, the arrival of yet more review units - the list goes on, and I wasn’t involved directly in any of it.
Next week, I head to a country I’ve never visited before. It’s a big trip, which I’ll be able to tell you about next week, and I cannot wait to jump on that plane and experience whatever lies on the other side of the door once we land. I’m heading overseas again a few weeks later, and in between that, I have an invite to several other product launches - one in particular which could be huge for the channel.
It’s worth bearing in mind that, recently, and as documented in this Substack newsletter, I’ve given up much of what I used to do. Sponsor negotiations, incoming emails, hourly YouTube Studio checks, diary management, elements of the publishing process, website management, and thumbnail design are all taken care of by other people. You’d think, therefore, that I’m now sitting on oodles of time that make everything I’ve described today far easier to undertake.
That isn’t the case. Those gaps in my time have been immediately filled with other stuff. Whether it’s taking longer to make the best videos possible or to travel to press events and do the ‘key person of influence’ thing, I don’t have a minute to spare, anywhere. That’s not right. Editing until 9PM on the eve of a trip that will see me away from home for a few days isn’t right. Spending last night on the return to my family organising the mountain of media generated by this week’s camping trip, ready for the edit I’ll inevitably have to undertake this weekend, isn’t right.
I love this job. I love my business. I have an incredible, blossoming team. This is the best thing I’ve ever done, professionally. But, as someone once said (I wish I could remember who - a quick Google suggests it’s taken from an Aboriginal proverb), we are but ‘passing through’ this world, and we don’t get much time to make the most of it.
More stuff is going to change. Soon.
*I told you it has been a long week.