Plans

It has been a very happy day.

We have spent the day together, which is always a nice thing, it is much better when we can talk and think about things between ourselves.

We didn’t get up early, which was lovely, and when we did eventually emerge it was to discover that Number Two Daughter had already emptied the dogs, so we didn’t need to bother, which was splendid because it is so nice to be lazy in the mornings.

Instead we had a second cup of coffee, made for us by Number Two Daughter, which was another bonus, and then when she went to work we ambled off in the sunshine to take the car to have its MOT work inspected and also to look at lino.

We want some lino to put on the walls of the camper van bathroom. We went to the carpet shop in Kendal to see if they had anything nice, but there was only one that we liked, which had a lovely pattern of pink tiles dotted with blue flowers. Now I am describing it I am suddenly aware that it may not be very tasteful, but it doesn’t matter anyway, because it was £17.99 for a square metre, and we were in agreement that this was a bit out of the reach of our available budget.

After that we took the paperwork for the taxi to the council. This is always a relief because it means that we have got a taxi for the next four months. In fact it is such a relief that we quite often forget completely about the next step, which is to go back to the council later on in the week to collect the licence plate to stick on the back of the taxi, and finish up running about in a taxi with an out-of-date plate on it anyway. Several times the council have phoned us up and been cross about it and it is no good trying to pretend that we have stuck the plate on really, when they know that we haven’t because it is still on their desk.

We didn’t buy any expensive lino. Instead we went back to the camper van shop and wandered around thoughtfully, looking at beautiful camper vans again and wondering what we wanted.

The thing about beautiful camper vans is that when you look at them properly you realise that they are not nearly as marvellous as you think. We went to inspect bathrooms, and some of them were lovely, clean lines and curves and gleaming taps, but when we really looked hard at how we might use them we realised that things were not as splendid as they seemed.

In some of them there was nowhere dry to put the loo roll, or to hang a towel out of the splashing of the shower. One had a beautifully streamlined sink, but there was absolutely nowhere at all that you might keep a toothbrush apart from on the floor.

We thought the same about the kitchens, the ones that had nowhere you might put the washing up liquid apart from in a cupboard on the other side of the camper, and we wondered really quite hard exactly what we needed.

We went home and thought. Then we went to the farm and measured the camper van and thought some more. Then we thought about how we could rebuild things in a way that we might like.

We drew sketches and then we drew more sketches over the top of those, and then we started again with new sketches and checked the measurements again.

When we finally started to come up with some sensible plans that were exactly what we wanted it was very exciting.

It is not easy to plan a camper van perfectly. It is a small space in which you have got to fit four lives. It is not as easy to fit our lives inside a camper van now as it was when Lucy and Oliver were babies. They don’t have accidents in the beds now but they do take up a very great deal of space.

We need private spaces and together spaces and room to have a jolly good wash, and cooking space and places to put everybody’s clothes so that they can be kept tidy and smooth.

Mark wants to put a generator in the locker at the back, and a solar panel on the roof, and some batteries for storing power.

I want the working surface to be at the right height, and the sink to have a draining board, and I want an oven and a grill and some chopping things up space, and the fridge in a handy place, and somewhere to keep nice china plates where we can see them as well as use them, and where they won’t rattle and chip whilst we are travelling.

Mark needs to keep his tools somewhere, and Oliver and Lucy need to plug their endless computer things and play games when they want to be by themselves, and we all need somewhere to put shoes. The dogs need a safe nest, and we need to be able to hang towels up to dry when we have had showers, and we want bookshelves for the dozens of books we always seem to need to take with us.

We need to store ice skates and bicycles, sunshades and picnic baskets, spare blankets and dirty washing, writing things and French wine. It was very sad to realise that we have still got emergency nappies and dummies still carefully squirrelled away in the back locker, and we are never going to need them again.

We think that we have managed to come up with a plan that will include all of these things and everything else.

We are going to go tomorrow and make a start.