I DIDN'T LAST long in the Boy Scouts - a matter of days, in fact, after tying the requisite number of knots and learning the accepted salute was made with three fingers, not one. But the whole experience left me with an undying appreciation of life's creature comforts.

In the years since, I have been around the world four times, popped in on 69 countries and sampled a score of different cultures, and what I've learned is, never get too far from your supply line of baked beans, refrigeration is second only to godliness, and adding a dash of cocoa to instant coffee can make it almost drinkable.

Right now, I am wrapped in a blanket and shivering in my cottage, and my three cats, Currant Bun, Ali Magraw and Teddy Bear, are huddled hopefully around the darkened fireplace. It is the December weekend of the Big Move from London, and I've forgotten to order up coal and wood.

Atop the empty coal bunker are a couple of quarts of milk, a bowl of leftover grits for frying, a few strands of bacon, a container of cottage cheese and a soggy apple strudel. They are there because I've sent the cottage fridge off to the dump and the one from London is supposed to be here but isn't.

The idea was brilliant in its simplicity: Use the December outdoors as Nature's own refrigerator until one with a proper electrical cord arrived. Of course, English weather being the perverse thing that it is, this has become one of the warmest Decembers on record. Also one of the wettest.

The result is that I am doing a form of "camping out." Now when it comes to life's little pleasures, I view camping out with the sort of joy I usually reserve for amputating my left big toe with a straight razor, finding a dead mouse in the banana pudding or explaining ballot chads to a monarchist.

My wife Elizabeth and I don't agree on much of anything, from whether it's advisable to get carpets in the color of cat barf so the spots wouldn't show, to whether sticking on postage stamps with the queen's head upside down is a divorceable offense.

But one point we firmly agree upon, a sort of superglue that holds our marriage together, is that camping out should be limited to serial killers, reformed smokers and double-glazing salesmen, and restricted to forest areas overpopulated by grizzly bears on crack. When we close our front door, we are on one side and Mother Nature is on the other.

My outlook on Ma Nature and all her works I owe to my brief rite of passage as a member of the Beaver Patrol, Troop 14 of the Boy Scouts of America, in Knoxville, Tennessee.

I had, somehow, passed the knot-tying exercise and managed to chant the "A Boy Scout is brave, honorable, kind, etc. ad nauseum" mantra, to mixed reviews, when someone announced that we were off to spend the following weekend camping out at Camp Pellissippi, on the shores of Lake Norris.

Or, more accurately, on the frigid shores of Lake Norris. When I naively asked my Brother Beaver Patrollers what I should bring along, I accepted their word that a can of fruit cocktail and a blanket would suffice. I failed to appreciate that two days can be a long time, particularly in mid-March in temperatures that bring tears to the eyes of male possums.

I won't bore you with the further grisly details. But when the rented school bus dropped me off at Arlington Drug Store, I betook my enfeebled frame to the soda fountain, ordered the biggest chocolate nut sundae I could afford, pledged the remainder of my life to the worship of creature comforts and vowed never again to stray too far from them.

I also submitted my resignation to Troop 14, BSA, the following Monday.

In the ensuing years, I've never found it possible to totally avoid camping out, except it was now called "covering the war." In Vietnam, no matter what jungle rain forest or rice paddy I was dumped into, I never traveled with less than about 65 pounds of C-rations - assorted beans and sausages, turkey rolls, canned tuna, cocoa, coffee, even fruit cocktail, plus sugar, salt, ketchup and Tabasco sauce.

(No ham and lima beans, however. These I gave to any GI or Marine to lob at any enemy they particularly disliked enough to try to kill with agonizing attacks of indigestion.)

I did overdo the creature comfort thing a bit on one occasion, but it was purely accidental. I had been sent north to cover the "air war," as it was called, and anticipating that I'd spend my time lolling about the Da Nang Press Center between flying missions with Marine pilots, I dumped all the survival stuff out of my backpack and took along a portable TV to pass the hours over a few scotches and water.

When the pre-dawn call came the next morning that there was some fighting near a place called Hoi Anh, I instinctively grabbed the "pack" and the next helicopter. A few hours later, I found himself sitting in the rain in a rice paddy with zero food and one TV.

There was a lull in the action, so I ran up the antenna, a few of the Marine chappies huddled around and we were watching an episode of a series called "Combat." Then the commander, a captain named Cunningham, went ballistic, raving about how the VC were about to zero in on our glowing TV screen, and so on.

Anyway, for a few minutes, a few soggy marines and I took time off from the war for a little taste of a creature comfort - and a reminder of how important those comforts are, however small. Even a tiny TV set amid all the flying bullets.

I should add that it was a hell of an improvement over the Boy Scouts and a March weekend at Camp Pellissippi. Yet here I sit, early in the 21st century, using an outdoor coal bunker shelf as a makeshift refrigerator and stuck with an apple strudel that looks in bad need of Viagra.

It's like being in the Beaver Patrol, Troop 14 again.

Thought for the Week: When the chips are down, the buffalo is empty.

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