Well, we have taken the first step towards our visit to France today, by which I mean my taxi has passed its MOT.
We are not going to France in my taxi, but the MOT needed to happen, because it is due its new licence next week, which can’t be obtained without an MOT. In the absence of an MOT it would have taken about three months to get its licence back, even if it got an MOT a week later.
Obviously it has got an MOT already, two, actually, but the council like them fresh, like shellfish. Once they have been around for a month or two they start to be a bit iffy.
The taxi is going to need a lot of work doing to it, but it was not the sort of work that fails an MOT so it does not matter. We can get it all sorted out when we come back from France.
It won’t be going anywhere until we get back anyway.
For now it is saved, and we can go away without agonies of anxiety about being unemployed when we get home.
Whilst the taxi was being prodded and poked we occupied ourselves doing other holiday-related activities.
We purchased some dog food so that Oliver can fulfil his dog-nurturing responsibilities in our absence. We purchased some bits to stick on the headlights so that we can drive on the wrong side of the road, and we went to the shed, to unearth some catering equipment from our camper van stores.
This was piled up on a large ledge over the top of a doorway at the back of the shed.
We had to move the camper van out to get to it, and that was a difficult moment.
We both knew in that very minute that neither of us cared about houses in France, nor houses in England for that matter. Both of us immediately felt that we would be perfectly happy living absolutely anywhere at all, as long as we had the time and space to build a camper van and then the time and space to buzz off in it.
Obviously we have got to care about houses, because ours most certainly does not have anywhere to build a camper van, and we do not want to have to rent a shed for the rest of our lives.
All the same, we both sat in it very happily for a minute or two, listening to the friendly thrumming of the engine and gazing happily at our welding adventures.
We will try and do some more to it when we get back.
We needed our picnic chairs and picnic rucksack from the ledge, and I climbed up the ladder to try and dig them out from the enormous teetering stack of boxes, rather higher than my head, which was piled upon it.
It was worse than trying to hunt out Oliver’s luggage in the Duffus trunk room.
After some digging about I found the box I needed, and opened it triumphantly.
It smelled of camper van. Not of the new camper van, which mostly smells of dust and welding splatter, but of the old, long-beloved one. A waft of laundry soap and incense sticks and the van’s old, familiar, slightly musty smell wafted over me, taking my breath away for a moment. For a few too-short seconds it lived again and was there, beside me, warm and homely and welcoming, and slightly dishevelled in its old, rusty sort of way.
I did not want to get down. It almost felt as though I could just close my eyes and step back into it.
That is a dangerous sort of fantasy when one is on a narrow ledge at the top of a wobbly ladder, so I closed the box firmly and piled the microwave and the old window frames back on the top of it.
We have got everything we need now.
I am going to spend the next few days getting ourselves organised.
Off on Monday.
Not long now.
