“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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