Friday 16 March 2018

With a Head Full of Snow... With a Head Full of Snow

“Dad, can you turn the heating on?”

“No, I mustn’t. I’ve just looked out of the window, and it snowed really heavily overnight.”

“Well, you should definitely turn the heater on then.”

“No, that's the thing. It says in big letters in the manual that if it snows, you should check that the little chimney up on the top of the van isn't buried, before you turn the heating on. Otherwise the carbon monoxide can't escape, and it comes back into the van, and then it kills us all.”

“Why don't we put it on, and then if we smell the poison gas, we just turn it off and get out of the van for fresh air?”

“That's quite a good idea, but you can't smell carbon monoxide. We wouldn’t notice it at all. What happens is you just fall asleep. And when you wake up, you’re dead.”

My sons don’t ask how it is possible to wake up dead. They knew I was a fucking idiot when we started out on this tour, and they know me much, much better now. I can see Big E looking at the carbon monoxide detector he remembers me buying about eight months ago, but he decides not to ask about it. This is probably to prevent me from seizing the opportunity to say more stupid shit. Little H speaks again instead. “Is that why Mummy is sleeping in the house?”

In fact, M is sleeping in the house because she is absolutely sick of sleeping in the van. I can sympathise, even if living in a van was her idea in the first place. It’s cold, it’s cramped, it’s on a slope, and it has me and our children in it.

I like to think I have been able to turn this lack of patience to my advantage. At Christmas she grudgingly got on board with the idea of buying a property that she had previously not been particularly enthusiastic about. But what we’d been told would be a quick and easy process has dragged on and on, new properties are beginning to appear on the market, and she is getting very restless, particularly when we go days at a time without hearing anything.

I’ve got si-lence on my ra-di-o, let the air-waves flo-ow…

This incremental lengthening of our limbo reminds me of Mrs Twit’s walking stick. It’s not a coin-sized disc of wood being glued onto the end each time, but another fortnight. It is also being used as a punishment, I think. Or it's a nasty trick to pay me back for suggesting to our solicitor that the housing market is all one big racket and there are loads of pigs with their heads in the trough that aren’t doing anything to earn their share of the swill.

Now I have a hefty pile of electronic paperwork to sift through with repeated references to how I really should consult a surveyor about this or that. Our feeling had been that it was abundantly clear the vendor had spent a fortune on the maintenance of the fabric of these buildings, and they’ve stood for a couple of centuries without falling down, so we don’t want to pay some bloke a grand to sniff around the place, looking at the same things we’ve seen already before printing out thirty pages of cut-and-paste that we will only ever look at once.

Maybe after we scoffed at the services of estate agents and mocked the findings of our buyers’ surveyor last year, our solicitor just wants us to know that there is one type of professional in all this pissing about that we actually can’t do without. And maybe, when you describe a solicitor as ‘fastidious,’ or ‘pernickety,’ you’re simply saying they’re good at their job. Maybe my tendency to use these eight syllables as a slur is one of the reasons I wasn’t very good at mine.

The house Mummy ‘has been sleeping in’ is the same one in which I grew up, at the quieter end of one of the duller villages in one of the less-exciting parts of Suffolk, the English county that your average person is least likely to know or care anything about. We’ve parked outside overnight several times on the tour, and stayed for longer periods at the beginning, around the middle, and now the end. In truth, we would all be sleeping in The Big House (as we invariably refer to the home of anybody we’ve visited) at the moment if my mother were not such an inveterate hoarder.

Living out the final stages of the tour in this way isn’t ideal, and we need to go on a few more little jaunts before we move into our new home and finally get to see if Vanny fits through the archway. I certainly hope the boys won’t forget the fun we’ve had in a hundred different places when the weather has been better.

We might even find that when they arrive in their new home, the place seems more exciting by comparison. A mile’s trudge through snow-covered fields and churchyard to a village stores that makes Ken’s Shop look like Selfridges certainly kept their adrenalin levels in check, but I was struck, once again, by just how beautiful everything was. I can only surmise that giving up your job in your forties and mooching around the country with zero goals and aspirations is a bit like brewing up some mushroom tea when you’re half that age.


Once we are settled into our new home and the shop is up and running, I must remember to close it for a few days every week to spend some quality time with my van.

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