Van Plan

We have had such a splendid day.

It has been very short, because of Saturday night and its attendant nightclubbing intoxicated customers, which meant that we did not wake up until twelve.

We compounded the shortness of the day even further by not actually getting out of bed until half past one.

This was not because we went back to sleep, but because Mark brought coffee, and we sat in bed thinking and thinking about the things that we were going to do to the camper van in our exciting new shed.

Eventually we got up, and Mark dashed around the Library Gardens with the poor cross-legged dogs. Do not waste too much sympathy on them because they could perfectly well have had a wee in the yard, but were too busy sniffing out the rat and then basking in the wonderful sunshine, and forgot all about it.

I put the washing into the washing machine, and then we got on with our day’s project. It was not intended to be our day’s project, because there were so many things that we should have been doing like sawing up firewood, but once we started we were so enthralled that we could not stop.

We stuck some squared paper together and started doing a proper design of the camper van, exactly to scale.

After a little while we rushed out to the real van, and measured it. We should have done this first, obviously, but we know it well by now and it turned out we weren’t very far off.

Then we dashed home again and pored over the design, scowling.

We looked things up on the mighty Internet, to make sure we had exactly the right measurements, and then we cut out lots of coloured shapes to represent the furniture, all to scale, and moved them around, pondering and considering. Then we dashed back out to the camper van and measured it all again, and then came back to the conservatory and shoved our little coloured shapes around a bit more.

I don’t know what it is about the camper van, but my soul instantly becomes happy the moment I walk in through the door. It is rusting and collapsing, crumbling and mouldy, but it fills me with a quiet joy every time I struggle up the too-large step. There is a foldaway stick on step which we don’t use because we kept forgetting to fold it away and then things got messy when we drove too close to other things. Also it is now in a pile of rust in Mark’s shed.

I did not want to leave the camper van. Actually I would have liked to pack it up and chug away into the sunny afternoon, but we couldn’t, not least because the throttle cable is also in Mark’s shed.

We bounced back home, now thoroughly excited.

After that we talked about all of the splendid innovations we had seen on the new camper van in the shop, and talked longingly of its glorious state-of-the-art heating system. This used all of the ideas we had invented for ours, things like the engine heat being borrowed to heat the water tank, except because it came from an expensive American factory with expensive American advertising and aluminium spelt without the extra i. Also it all worked brilliantly and was not bashed together and secured with gaffer tape and nails.

We sighed enviously, and then looked it up to see how much it would cost. A very lot was the answer, and we were just dismissing the idea and going back to the gaffer tape and nails when suddenly one appeared on eBay.

It had been retrieved from somebody’s poor broken motorhome, and was almost new, except it wasn’t. It was a very lot of bits, all neatly arranged on somebody’s lawn.

Readers, we now have a credit card bill and a thousand bits of state-of-the-art heating system.

We were so excited we could hardly think straight, and accidentally purchased a shiny new cooker as well, new to us anyway, before we noticed that it had to be collected from Peterborough and the chap would not post it.

Fortunately I have got some generously accommodating relatives in Peterborough so that turned out all right, much to my relief.

I have included a picture of the final Camper Van Plan, although it had lots and lots of colourful and optimistic incarnations before finally reaching that one.

I am prepared to accept that you will not think that it is mind-blowingly thrilling, but we do. I am embarrassed to tell you that I am so excited I can hardly sit still in my taxi, just as if I were six years old and it was my birthday tomorrow.

It is the consequence of an entire day spent drinking tea and pondering.

I didn’t even go on my walk.

Life had better start again tomorrow.