Wish

I have spent my day sewing.

I have been making curtains for Number Two Daughter’s Canadian camper van.

I have made ten of them, which has kept me busy for quite some time. This is because in anticipation of the Canadian winters they are all made of heavy chenille and then been lined with heavyweight blackout lining fabrics.

I finished the last one this afternoon, and then did some celebratory ironing to highlight my relief.

Mark went off to the farm, he has been spending most of his time lately doing welding to the poor camper van. I am not exactly sure what bits he has welded, because you can’t see them all, and somehow as he starts explaining my concentration just drifts away.

There are bits that you can see, and every now and again he shows me some photographs, which look very impressive, it looks rather as though he has welded on a whole new front corner. He has cut big chunks of flaking rust away, and scrubbed and polished with the wire brush on his drill until he has got a clean shiny bit, and then he has painstakingly rebuilt the cut off bits with his welder and bits of sheet steel bought from Autoparts. This has not been easy because some of the bits were funny shapes.

We took the windscreen out some weeks ago, because the metal all around it had gone rusty. There were horrible dark patchy holes in the body all around it, and now lots of them are mended and it is shiny again.

I am very pleased about this, it is such a happy thought that it is coming along so well, it has been almost a year.

It is impossible to imagine that in the past, usually at moments of serious financial trepidation, occasionally I have considered that it might possibly be a good idea to sell the camper van.

Having managed without it for a year I am relieved beyond words that we never did. A camper van-less year has been dreadful.

Of course it hasn’t been dreadful, regular readers will be perfectly well aware that there have been many moments of happiness, some of them sublime in their wonderfulness.

All the same, there has been a loss of freedom which has been painful in ways that I can hardly describe.

We bought the camper van when Oliver was a tiny baby, as you probably know, blowing our entire savings during an intoxicated moment looking at French ebay. We went off to Paris on the train to retrieve it, and drove back in a state of paralysed horror at what we had done.

It was freezing. Not only did the heater not work, but there was a blower which constantly pumped a chilly wind all around the van. There was a terrible rattly curtain, and the doors inside all bounced open and closed whenever we drove anywhere, the bathroom seemed to lack everything that a bathroom ought to have, and the walls were lined with a shiny white plastic.

The man who sold it to us was a mechanic, more notable for his courage than his abilities. Ever since then we have fondly recollected him as Mr. Banana Fingers, and he had indeed had a go at fixing almost everything, with his enormous shovel-like hands and absolute absence of dexterity.

We managed the slow chug back across France to our house without actual breakdown, although it took us at least one cold overnight stop when I began to wonder if I would ever be warm again: and then Mark proceeded to take the van to bits.

You know the story after that, of its first rebuild. This was followed by several minor rebuilds, including some repairs caused by our own small calamities, some of which were caused by French alcohol. We have moved house in it, and driven it to London to watch the Royal Wedding, and crossed Europe in it, and lived in it when we have been in between fixed abodes or working away.

In all that time I can only recall a handful of nights spent in legitimate camping sites. We don’t like these because they are inevitably run by the sort of people who think that dogs and children should be kept on leads, and in any case most of them won’t let us in.

We have stopped in alleys and lay-bys and supermarket car parks and on beaches and in people’s driveways: and once, on an adventure, for several nights in the driveway of an empty house. We have driven for thousands of miles, although we don’t actually know how many, because the dial bit which tells you this stopped working around six or seven years ago, and even then it was in kilometres, so we couldn’t work it out in English, especially if we had been drinking.

It has been there for all of Oliver’s life, and most of the sentient bit of Lucy’s, and I miss it dreadfully. For all of that time I have kept it packed and ready to depart at a moment’s notice, with clean sheets on the beds and towels in the cupboards, clothes in the drawers, so that all we needed to do was to fill the fridge. It never quite happened that way, and a trip always involved massive upheavals and lists and forgotten things, but all the same the principle held true, in the event of a zombie apocalypse we could have left in less than five minutes.

When I get inside it it is as if a weight lifts from my shoulders, and the association with happiness is so strong that even now, when the poor thing is dismembered and bleeding oil, still I walk in through the door and my spirits automatically lift.

There is still a very lot to do, both inside and outside, the bathroom and the kitchen and the wardrobe to finish, and the welding to finish, and the engine to go in. We are hoping to get it done before the carol services in December when it would be nice to go and stay in it.

I am crossing everything.

It is my Christmas Wish.

I have included some of Mark’s pictures. The bits painted red are new.