I am back on the taxi rank after last night’s extravagant idleness.
It was very lovely to have such a decadent night, but as always the spectre of poverty looms large at my shoulder and so tonight we are back to normal, alas.
We had a little adventure this morning. We are considering doing things to the inside of the camper van to make it more modern and beautiful, mending the external holes in it is just the start.
Mark is busy making it more economical with an improved hydrogen exploder and a new gas tank, and he has almost finished welding the cab back on after it turned out that it had almost completely rusted off and was being held to the rest of the van mostly by the nails in the carpet.
With this in mind we had a little excursion with Number Two Daughter across to the camper van shop which is just two miles away, to have a look at their very beautiful selection of lovely new camper vans.
They are not at all like ours. We were once told that the owner of the place had seen us out and about in our lovely old van and dreaded the day when we might come in and suggest a part exchange. Anyway, we do not want to exchange our van for the shiny new ones, because they aren’t at all as nice, but we thought that we might have a little look at them and see what ideas worked best.
There are some absolutely gorgeous camper vans in the world. The ones at the sale room were sleek and shiny and immaculate, and we toured round them with a growing sense of awe. We didn’t see any at all which looked as though the cab might be in imminent danger of falling off, and some of them were brilliantly designed, with handy corners and bunk beds and discreet bathrooms and all sorts of delights.
I liked very much that some of them were on two levels inside, with a step up halfway, which gave the raised up bit a rather excitingly important feeling, and suggested to Mark that he might consider reconstructing ours with a mezzanine level, although I think he may have been pretending to be deaf at that particular moment, I will have to mention it again.
We all liked that they have got lots of light coming in through windows in their roofs, and Mark pointed out that our van has got an ancient air conditioning unit in the roof, which has not worked in all the time we have had it, which he said he could remove quite easily, and replace with a window. This was an exciting thought. Also there were some beautiful fridges, as tall as me, that I coveted terribly.
The worst design flaw in our own camper van at the moment is the bathroom. The sink is made out of an upside down tin light fitting, think wartime fashion and you will get the idea, because when we were building it in the wilderness of rural France we couldn’t buy a real sink unit that was lightweight and small enough.
Since then, of course, the world has invented online selling, Amazon and eBay are magnificent inventions, hurrah. Anyway in the age before mass communication we had got to be creative with an upside down lampshade which has been rather splendid but sadly is now beginning to rust.
Also the loo is wedged into a very tight space, and if I get any fatter than I am now I will not be able to use it. This is an enticement for remaining less porky, but is not exactly an engaging feature of the bathroom, especially if somebody has just had a shower and everything is wet. Wedging my bottom into a tight, wet, cold space is not an activity that gives my holiday that extra special something, although I can promise you that it is memorable, especially in the middle of the night.
Thus some bathroom redesign is looking likely.
The bathrooms that we looked at were glorious creations made of streamlined white curves with elegant taps. Not a hint of somebody’s unfortunate poo smell could have been predicted from their gleaming interiors, they were smooth and immaculate with not a splodge of elderly toothpaste or black mould in sight.
Of course I was completely smitten, and went home with my head full of daydreams about shining bathrooms with gently rounded corners replacing our rusty upside down lampshade and bottom-squishing loo.
Mark said that he thinks he can probably do something about it, but I think that some supervision might be necessary. Mark is a visionary in his own way but tends to think in terms of low-budget function rather than style, and might need some gentle prodding before he considers the purchase of polished fibre glass luxury to be an important ingredient of my future holiday happiness.
I shall work on it.
Still no CRB check.
