I have spent the past three weeks in a tent. And I have decided that anyone who does this kind of thing for fun must be either nine years old or absolutely insane.

What disturbs me most of all is that all tenting equipment is obviously designed specifically to not work. Let us take the zip as a perfect case in point. For 47 years I have raised and lowered the flies in my trousers without getting it caught in the fabric once.

And yet, in the world of tenting, every single zip gets stuck all the time. So there you are, outside in the freezing cold, jiggling the damn thing backwards and forwards, knowing that with each tug, and each muttered expletive, more and more of the tent is being swallowed by the fastener.

Eventually, and often with the help of a knife, you get through what tentists laughably call the door – it’s a cat flap – and you are presented with your sleeping bag, into which you must climb as quickly as possible because tents are essentially heat exchangers.

They are always seven degrees colder than the ambient temperature outside. And that was a particular problem for me because on my tenting holiday it rarely rose above -17.

So, you dive into your bag, yank the zip and instantly the entire bag disappears into it. And you can’t fish it out because your fingers are bright blue and have become what a horse would call “hooves”.

To warm them up, you must light the stove. Simple, you might think. In the civilised world there are many burners that light at the touch of a button, or with the merest hint of a match. But this is tenting, so the stove you’ve been given is designed to not light at all for two hours, and then blow up in your face.

First of all you must fill the fuel tank and then pump it to create some pressure. That’s a) pointless and b) extremely dangerous in cold climates because skin sticks to metal and can be removed only with the aid of a chain saw.

Finally, though, after you’ve used 600 matches and emptied your Zippo, you get a flame. Which grows bigger and bigger until it engulfs the pressurised fuel tank.

This does at least mean some feeling returns to your hooves, which means you can feel the agony as you plunge your hand into the inferno, carry the bomb back through the slashed cat flap and into the snow outside. So now you have no heating, and your sleeping bag is still stuck in its own zip.

I do not believe that these design flaws can be accidental. I believe that people who manufacture tenting equipment deliberately make their products useless and dangerous because anyone who wants to live under canvas plainly wants their life to be as harsh and as uncomfortable as possible.

That’s why the tent and sleeping bag come in condoms that are slightly too small, so you can never get them back inside again.

It’s why your backpack and trousers have straps and fasteners that serve no purpose except to get tangled up in one another. It’s why the fabric for the modern tent is designed to burn with the savagery of petrol and flap noisily whenever there’s even the hint of a breeze.

And it’s why the sleeping bag is so slim that it is impossible – impossible, d’you hear – to do up the fastener once you’re inside.

You get it so far and then realise that if you keep going, your left hoof will end up deep inside your right nostril. So you attempt to zip it up from the outside, which means your entire arm is left sticking from the bag like the aerial on a satellite phone.

I didn’t find a single piece of tenting equipment, in three weeks, that worked properly. I had to eat from a plastic dog bowl that shattered when you sat on it.

And when you’re trying to get out of a sleeping bag, with a frozen joint of lamb sticking out of your shoulder, in a tent that’s just a few inches tall, and lined with ice, and you’ve had no sleep because of the flapping, it is impossible not to sit on absolutely everything.

Then you have the mattress, which rolls up into an impressively small sausage. But it will not remain flat when it’s unfurled.

You have to put a weight on the far end, which means crawling into your tent with snowy boots. The snow then falls off, melts when your heater explodes and then freezes in the night so you awake to find you’ve been set in aspic.

Food? Well, obviously you could take beans and sausages. But no, tentists choose instead to feast on dried-up copies of The Guardian. You simply add water, which you get by melting snow, and hey presto, you dine on Polly Toynbee’s column garnished with a hint of George Monbiot.

You can’t even go for a pee properly because tenting trousers have no zip. God knows what they’d eat if they did. This means you must pull down each of the eight pairs you are wearing to keep out the cold.

And I can guarantee that when you pull them back up again one or two will remain below your arse, which makes walking difficult.

Needless to say, the only way you can do your number twos while tenting is to squat, like an animal.

And because tenting is so weak when it comes to personal hygiene and washing facilities, I came home after three weeks with a peculiar growth on my face. Doctors tell me I may have grown a beard.

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