Finally, at long last, at the eleventh hour before Mark had to go away again, we dashed over to the camper van today.
We had a very happy afternoon.
I think I have absolutely not the smallest reason to feel disgruntled really, it is hardly an imposition to have spent the week being wined and dined in absolutely First Class everything, from the train to the gorgeous hotel, visiting the ballet and the theatre, and generally having a glorious time.
All the same, when we talked about it, we both felt the same. It has been utterly delightful but we have both been furiously itching to get back to the van.
The problem is that there are so many lovely things to do with life, and just not enough time to do all of them.
We couldn’t go to the van yesterday. Yesterday was Saturday, which is only ever a little bit of a day anyway, because of work, and somehow there has been a lot of clearing up and organising to be done since we got home. There is always a very lot of laundry after a holiday, and Mark and Oliver went off to the farm to load the trailer with firewood to fill the woodshed at home.
The fire is out now, but I think it might be recklessly optimistic to imagine that it is likely to stay that way. We might be in June but the weather has not yet become sufficiently clement for us to manage without the stove, pumping out heat and dust in more or less equal quantities, at the heart of the kitchen, and so more wood was called for.
I hope very much that we don’t need to use it. That would be brilliant, we will have a shed full of summer-dried wood to start us off when next autumn crawls around again.
Also I would like to get the dusting done and have a wonderfully dust-free house for the summer. That would be a satisfying way of spending the next three weeks, perhaps Oliver might like to help.
Today, however, nobody dusted anything. Today we dashed off to the van.
I can’t tell you how happy this made me feel. Of course I loved London, and all of our adventures there, but I can promise you that there is absolutely nothing to beat van-construction, especially on a warmly welcoming June afternoon.
It was warm, if not exactly sunny. I took my jersey off, admittedly not straight away, but certainly as soon as my labours warmed me up.
I was not constructing anything. I am sorry to say that when we last left the van, we did so in such a hurry that we simply dumped everything and abandoned it, and it looked as though it had been burgled by somebody who had forgotten to bring a trailer to take anything away with them.
The mess was dreadful.
I volunteered to tidy up whilst Mark painted the new back panel and installed the new windows. I chucked all of the tools into a box and swept up.
The outside of the van was almost worse than the inside, because of a very noisy nest of house martins in the shed roof. They make the most wonderful noise but there is an awful lot of poo, which is beginning to feel like a bit of a theme to my life at the moment.
I have added a picture of the back of the van, now that it has been restructured. There is a lot more restructuring to go, because we are going to put a door in the bottom half of it, but that is a problem for another day. For now we are just feeling rather smug about its newly bewindowed state.
Once we could see the floor again I unearthed the gaffer tape and crawled around sticking lengths of it to the carpet so that we could see where the walls will be when eventually we get to that glorious day. Mark can do three dimensional thinking anyway, so he just looked at it without much interest, but for me it was the first time I have really been able to envisage how the space will be shared out. After we had been considering it for a little while Mark helpfully put a bit of aluminium up to show me where the wall will be at the end of our bed, and that made it all seem very believable as well.
It is almost the Orient Express already.
It is beginning to feel really possible. When we got home Oliver showed us a video of some other people who have built a camper van, who had some very interesting ideas, several of which we had thought of already. I watched it twice on the taxi rank tonight, but it was so exciting to think about it gave me indigestion and I had to stop.
Everything has got to stop for a few weeks now, because Mark has gone away again, and I will have to try and persuade myself to think about dusting instead.
I am sure I will manage to get excited about it if I try hard enough.
