The camper van I’ve just bought has everything I need except...
I’m not quite sure why but I’ve bought a camper van. Actually, that’s not quite true. I’ve bought a van, which is currently empty other than the sweaty aroma of the hygienically-challenged plumber who used to own it - but the intention is to transform it into something I (with the emphasis on the I, not the family) can go away in on holiday.
I envisaged, when I returned home on Tuesday behind the wheel of my new purchase, Mrs Canavan would be ecstatic and gush in gaily fashion, ‘oh how splendid. What a great idea darling and a reminder of why I married you – you’re such a handsome, spur-of-the-moment, full-oflife kind of guy’.
But weirdly this didn’t happen. As I led her to the front door and pointed to the street where the vehicle stood, her nostrils began flaring slightly and the vein in her neck bulged in a fashion I’d not seen since the time she was stung on the left buttock by a wasp in Barrow-in-Furness.
‘Why in god’s name are you spending £6,000 of the kids inheritance on a (insert swear word) van?’ she spurted, with wild indignation.
I could have eased the situation by giving her an explanation but alas I didn’t have one and so instead answered, 'erm I don’t really know – I was just bored and fancied buying it'. Which is true.
A mate of mine is into camper vans and a couple of nights earlier had showed me the one he has converted, which contained seats that folded down into a cosy looking double bed, a hob, fridge, sink, cabinets, TV … basically everything you need to get by in life, well, apart from one thing. 'It’s lovely,' I said, but added – because I’m a middleaged man and therefore this is now at the forefront of my mind – 'but what do you do when you need to, you know, go to the toilet?'
‘Bucket’, he replied. I laughed. 'No, I mean, seriously, where you do go to the loo?'
‘Yeah, a bucket,’ he said. ‘I got mine for £2.99 from Home Bargains, but if you shop around you’ll get one cheaper.’
This, I confess, put me off a little.
I mean I’m 47 and I go to the lavatory three times a night (four if I accidentally put too much milk in my evening cocoa). The thought of lowering my silk pyjama buttons at 3am and, in the pitch black, standing in the back of a van on a layby somewhere off the A1 taking aim into a bucket, didn’t fill me with glee.
Apparently you need something called a long wheelbase van (basically a bigger van) if you want to fit a toilet and a shower in. I’d bought a bogstandard (pun absolutely intended) van and so there is no room for bathroom facilities.
‘But don’t worry about not having a shower,’ my mate continued. ‘You can use a mobile one.’
I enquired what that even meant. I mean I’ve heard of mobile phones but I’ve never seen anyone wandering round a town centre buck naked while shampooing and conditioning their hair. Well, there was one guy in Preston city centre once but he was handcuffed and bundled into a police van pretty quickly.
‘It’s got a water pump one end and a showerhead at the other,’ he explained, ‘and if you stand outside the van with a little screen around you, you can have a wash.’
I tried to picture myself, at 7am, in some field, au naturel, taking a shower, but failed.
'Right, I’ll have a think about that,' I said in a voice which clearly indicated that under no circumstances would I be having a think about that.
Anyway, lack of toilet aside, the notion of having a campervan appeals to me. The older and more disillusioned with life I get, the idea of being able to jump in it and on a whim drive to, say, the west coast of Scotland - where I could stay for several months fishing, playing my acoustic guitar and embarking on a six-week kilt-making course – is most agreeable.
So, when my friend took me to view a big white van last week, I couldn’t resist.
Off course I‘m not an idiot and I didn’t buy it without thoroughly checking it out first.
I did the thing I always do when buying a new vehicle (and which I strongly suspect everyone else who doesn’t know a thing about cars does), in that I slowly walked around the van, kicked a couple of tyres, stopped occasionally and leant in as if examining something suspect I’d discovered on the bodywork, stood back and admired it from a distance, rubbed my chin thoughtfully, and then said, 'yeah, looks ok – I’ll take it'.
Seriously, where do you go to the loo?