I am with Lucy.
We are in the camper van, listening to the rain bashing down on the roof, drinking gently steaming cups of chai, and eating slices of melon. We have lit the candle with the wooden wick, because it makes a nice crackling noise and smells of pine needles, and we are feeling very contented with our bit of world.
When I say contented, I mean as far as it is possible to be contented when one is suffering from a desperate agony of nerves because one has a driving test in the morning, which is poor Lucy’s terrible prospect.
This is why we are here. We do not want any further driving-test disasters in the morning. Hence we have double checked that we have got absolutely everything that anybody could possibly need to take a driving test, and then driven down to the test centre to wait outside it.
I am fully aware that this might seem to be obsessively extreme punctuality, but it is an hour and a half away from our house, and that is simply too much opportunity for passing deities to try out their sense of humour.
In any case, she has got to be there by seven o’ clock in the morning for a final do or die practice lesson. We were in agreement that leaving home at five thirty would not have been a relaxing experience.
Number Two Daughter dropped Lucy off at lunchtime here for a penultimate driving practice around the test routes, and I followed later with the camper van.
This was A Challenge.
I think that I was fully as anxious about driving the camper down here as Lucy is about her test. I have not driven it very often over the last few years, and it is not an easy drive. Imagine taking a canal barge for a bit of tacking practice on the high seas in choppy weather and you will get an idea.
I was awake early this morning having a bit of a worry about it. I realised somewhere around five o’clock that I had not seen any of its towels in the washing pile since Mark came back from Scotland.
This is the sort of thing that you wake up thinking about when you are fifty. If you are still twenty you will not believe it, but I can assure you it is true. All the business about hurtling through life shouting: ‘what a hell of a ride’ is a fantasy concocted by people who have never been truly responsible for their own laundry.
It seemed to be so important in the drizzly grey dawn hours that in the end I got up, trekked out to the camper van and retrieved them. I put them in the washing machine and then was cross with an astonished Mark when he got up to see what I was doing.
He agreed patiently that he had forgotten all about the towels and dishcloths, and suggested that I took some others, since we are not short of dishcloths. I did not at all want to do this, because I have got special Camper Van Teatowels, the others would have been Wrong, and I was already quite worried enough about the day without knowing that I had got the Wrong Teatowels.
Mark made coffee and listened patiently until it was time for him to go out and install rural broadband, leaving me playing the Washing Line Game with the Weather Gods for the rest of the morning.
I left cooked dinners for everybody so that they would know how perfect I was. In the end the time came for me to load things into the camper van and set off, all by myself.
The camper van is not easy on one’s own, although clearly Mark had done something to remedy that in Scotland, because the passenger side mirror, which flaps about a bit, had been given a bit of washing line stretched across the cab in order to hold it in place and to alter it in an emergency. I found this innovation to be very handy, not least for draping still-damp teatowels.
The camper van lacks several important things, including power steering, a steering wheel on the right hand side, a predictable braking system, and second gear on almost every attempt. Second gear only ever materialises into existence when you are trying to find fourth gear, at which time it occupies every position on the gearstick. The whole thing lurches and sways ominously on roundabouts and corners, and you need a washing line to hold the mirrors in place.
Also for me to drive it Mark has got to lever the driver’s seat into position with a long pole, because otherwise my feet don’t reach the pedals. It can only be readjusted with the same system of leverage or by sitting on a cushion.
It was raining.
I ploughed ponderously through the Windermere traffic. I was concentrating so hard that when people shouted and waved, which of course they do all the time, I barely noticed, and when I did it took me a while to work out what they were looking at.
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We chuffed and wallowed up the hill out of Windermere, and then we were away.
Once I didn’t need second gear any more it was lovely. We sailed majestically along the bypass, followed by a long line of impatient people, and coasted joyously down the motorway. There is no happier feeling than being in the camper van.
There was hardly any traffic on the roads at all in Heysham, and I pulled up right beside the sea, feeling ridiculously pleased with myself for such a marvellous achievement.
We are here now. We have walked on the beach and talked about driving and universities and about the puzzling mysteries of the youthful determination to fit into something which might be called LBQT. I can’t remember if this is what it is called or not, and Lucy has gone to sleep now, so I can’t ask. I have discovered that her generation has invented lots of new genders. These are not in the least related to the genital equipment with which one was born, and one has got to tell everybody which one you might consider yourself. This is a self-certification qualification, you have got to work it out, and it is very complicated.
There are all sorts, demigender and pangender and transgender and cisgender, and apparently ‘not being really up for sex’ is now a gender all by itself, although I can’t remember what she called it.
I wonder if that might be my problem. I had always thought that it was down to having a houseful of children and not enough sleep.
I am very glad indeed that my own generation was of the opinion that it was nobody else’s bloody business.
It sounds as though it is hard work to be young.
