The camper van restoration continues.
It has not continued very much. Today seems to have been full of stuttering stops and starts. Mark took the front door off to replace the hinges but didn’t quite get it back on before it was time to go to work, and I started emptying out one of the colossal boxes of stuff that we brought home with us.
It was stuffed so full that I took both of us to lift it, and everything in it needed to be taken out and either washed or thrown away.
This was not at all easy, I can tell you.
There were all sorts of things that really, I reluctantly supposed, added nothing to our camper van lives whilst adding a great deal to its overweight lack of steering capacity. We do not need a china milk jug and sugar basin, nor do we need delicate cups and saucers, even though they are in my much-loved and beautiful Royal Albert. We have Royal Albert mugs, rare as they are, and we drink our peppery chai tea from those.
I have begun to sort through the mugs. They are all from my treasured Hundred Years collection, except that the ones in the camper van are special modern lookalikes. The Hundred Years collection has ten different mugs in it, but they were produced in two sorts. These look identical if you are not a tedious obsessive, but I am sorry to say that I am, and can tell them apart at half a glance.
Our own mugs are the original sort, exactly the same as the ones we have at home. They are delicate and gently fluted. I could not bear to drink my tea out of anything else, and have half a dozen substitutes laid away against the terrible day when one of them meets a shattering misfortune.
The other mugs are the modern sort, made on a different mould in the days after Royal Albert sold its soul to the cheapened horrors of Wedgewood, and are far more solid and robust. I do not like them at all, but they will stand up to the rigours of being rattled along the motorways at the highest speeds the camper van can manage, and since we only use them as repositories for cereal, and for guests who probably would never know that there was a difference, it does not matter.
I confess, here on these pages, that I have an enormous drawer filled with the original, expensively delicate collection, carefully wrapped and occasionally taken out and admired. I have a search on eBay which flags up whenever anybody is selling one, and if it is rare, or valuable, I buy it, and keep it in the drawer for the day when the Queen comes to visit, although I don’t suppose it matters as much now that it is the new Queen, not the dear old one.
They are boxed and pristine. The children can be incredulous and then flog them all when I am dead.
Today I discovered, rather to my horror, that I had carelessly left one of the rarest of the original set in a camper van cupboard to be rattled up and down the UK’s pothole-adorned roads. It is a piece called Holyrood, and is so rare that even I only have two of them, and one of those is unboxed.
It is, fortunately, unharmed, but I was horrified at my carelessness, and have squirrelled it away to be safely stored with the treasured ones in the attic. Its travelling days are over.
I washed out the milk jug and the cups and saucers, and stored them, regretfully, on the dresser. They will have to become housebound now. Then I threw away the potato peeler that never worked properly and put the tins, and the honey and soy sauce on the shelves. I didn’t look at the sell-by-date, if it is a day later than 2016 I will be astonished, but they will be perfectly all right.
I did not manage to empty the box, and there are several others still to be emptied, and I haven’t even finished emptying the van yet.
It is no wonder that it did not go very fast.
I will have to be more parsimonious with my treasures.
I will have to lighten up.
