Blues Night on Tour by Numbers

0 parking tickets received. I consider this recognition of impressive commitment to toeing the line.

1 is the number of months we have now lived in Richmond, North Yorkshire. The sense of doom has passed (for me, at least – I don’t like to ask the others) but it still feels pretty weird, like we’re on the witness protection programme or something. I’m yet to lift an arm with a paintbrush or roller in it (M has managed rather better), but it is starting to feel like home. To me, at least. The boys both start back at school today and we’ll all be able to put the sorry debacle of Home Ed behind us. There was me thinking I was well qualified to home- (van-) educate my children, but it turned out I was the worst possible candidate for the role.

I’ve developed a morbid fear of education’s Nothing Is Ever Finished philosophy. Too many times when the boys were sat at the table in the van with their books in front of them I accepted their bare-minimum, path-of-least-resistance, typical-boy-approach to work. I think I just don’t want to still have to say, “Yes, but how can we improve on this?” Not to anybody, but certainly not to my own children. After all, I’ve just spent about a year telling them I was done with striving to meet the demands of a world that was offering me peanuts in return.

Admittedly, though, I’d probably have had even less success trying to inspire them with the sorts of things that light my fire. At the time of writing, neither of my sons could possibly imagine something that interests them less than a secondhand record shop. This is par for the parenting course. There have been many less formal, measurable gains made in their development and progress, and they both read more and played together more imaginatively in the last nine months than the rest of their lives combined. They’ve also learned a lot about what England is like, and it’s been mostly good news.

2 record store day exclusives purchased – this is two more than all previous years combined, as I’ve always thought it was just a gimmick. I’m still more or less of the same feeling, but the legendary Sound It Out records had organised themselves very effectively to minimise the hustling opportunism. Stockton was quite the experience after what I’d said about avoiding towns we expected not to like very much, but there were lots of kids enjoying themselves in the fountains, in addition to the great record shop and somewhere to drink really good beer.

Richmond, by way of a contrast, has neither, despite one of our visitors declaring it enormously middle-class. It does have a lot else going for it though. People have been very friendly, I really enjoy the best-kept secret thing about it (very few people from outside of this part of the country seem to realise that this great little town exists) and the opportunity to provide good beer and good records seems like it might be worth the effort.

I’ll know when M has reached the next level in her adjustment – when she recognises that the fact that the alleyways of Richmond do not smell of piss isn’t just ‘weird’ but is actually a good thing. Also, we saw the kind of litter that sets my lips trembling for the first time when my brother was in town. It was that sunny Saturday last week, and lots of young locals and sort-of-locals had been having a good time in the sunshine by the river. The boys were all muscly and the girls all had eyebrows the size of my beard. And not one of them, it seems, thought it might be appropriate to take their litter home with them. But a few grumbles on the Facebook group later, and all this trash miraculously disappeared. Next time there’s a community litter pick going on, I WANT A PIECE OF THE ACTION.

7 visitors we knew from our former lives have crossed our new threshold, four of whom have stayed the night. This has been a huge factor in helping us to settle, of course. We are eager for more, especially people who might be able to give us some feedback on our accommodation before we advertise it to the public. Applications can be submitted in the usual way.

8 Italian restaurants enjoyed. I think this might be better discussed in some detail. I’ll knock up another post later this week.

35 counties visited – or that’s how many we stayed overnight in. All of the others we just passed through, or perhaps stopped in briefly during the daytime. A favourite one of these was a stop for diesel and sandwiches in February, when it occurred to me that I was getting out of the van in Northamptonshire for the first time. Just to check, I asked the young woman behind the Subway salad selection what county we were in. She said she didn’t know.

  

60 percent of what we rub into our skin enters our bloodstream, according to a lady giving a facial at the food market in Abergavenny. I have no idea how accurate it is, but I walked past just in time to absorb this tidbit and it went straight to my brain. The next morning, it returned as I energetically fisted the U-bend of the public toilet I had just emptied Vanny’s toilet cassette into, in the process blocking it with a thick sludge thanks to our brief flirtation with inferior toilet chemicals.

The brand I would like to name and shame is the kinda-racist-sounding Crusader, which proved even less effective than the experiment with biological washing liquid M had insisted upon at the beginning. (I had soon brought this episode to a close when I figured out that I was always going to be the one actually emptying the fucking thing.) I never had even the tiniest problem with Thetford Blue and Pink liquids, and consider them the Technics 1210 Mk2 of making shit easier to pour.

132 / 71 my average blood pressure as measured over the last week. This is still not exactly Sir Mo Farah digits, but is a long way down on what I was told it was around the time I pressed the ejector seat button on my teaching career. I should imagine that most of the difference is about a very gradual slide down the fireman’s pole of stress levels, but I probably drink a bit less beer and eat less salt too. There remains room for improvement.

210 nights sleeping in the van. The boys missed a few, and M several more, when offered a proper level bed in a warm building instead, and who can blame them. I’ve added two more since moving - the sense of freedom that Vanny affords, being able to drive somewhere for a night out – (Norwich to see Crow Black Chicken last week, Harrogate the other night to see Mike Ross) is wonderful. I can go somewhere, parking in a different town just as I did on the tour, and not have to worry about getting home until I’ve sobered up the next morning. This would be a great way to live for a single person in their twenties with a bottomless purse and a rubber liver, but if I keep going for nights out I’m going to keep spending lots of money and drinking lots of beer, neither of which were part of my five-point plan moving forward.

9274 miles travelled in the World’s Best Compact Motorhome. I still hope to add more from our new base, but it seems that if I want a steady flow of content, I’m going to have to turn this into a blog about opening a record shop rather than living in a van. Most of the miles were clocked up going from one place to another, but a few have been added going back somewhere for another look, or more recently by ferrying 4000 records to their new home in the North. If Vanny had wings, and she could fly, I know where she would go. This many air miles could have taken us to Rio de Janeiro. But we would have had to stay there even if we didn’t like it, and adapted to their language, customs and punishing standards of pube management.

Git In There

We moved into our new home on Tuesday. It is brilliant. It’s big, it’s beautiful, and it has the bonus of a building out the back for my business. Still, the whole family felt an inescapable sadness for our first few days here. That dark evil doubt creeps back out of the shadows at every opportunity, whispering foul ideas and pointing at shapeless fears as we step into the unknown. It might just be a form of loneliness.

We don’t belong here… we don’t know anybody here… what are we even going to do with ourselves here? Over and over again. Everything I wanted in moving away from the capital arrives on a great big sharing platter, and we are only hungry for crumby London leftovers. The friends - many of whom we have managed to see a few times over the months since we moved out, the pub we cared so much for, the boys’ schools – shit, even MY school – felt so very far away when we were lying awake that first night in a huge unfurnished room in Absolute Total Silence.

BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU WISH FOR is an adage designed to discourage folk from forcing change. It’s a small-c conservative manifesto. Don’t go looking to make things better - you’ll only make things worse. This feels so very likely to be true when the whole family is trying and failing to sleep in one bedroom, because there’s only one bed in the house anyway and you’re all bloody scared, suffering from post-viral moving cabin fever, unaccustomed to being alone. I wished for an end to my spiraling debt, a way out of a career I never wanted and a mortgage I never could afford. I wanted a chance to see a little more of the world. But that’s not enough. When I was done exploring, I wanted a bigger house in a prettier town nestled in dramatic landscape, and a chance to go back to doing what I was good at – selling black plastic. All of my wishes came true, and for the first three nights I lay there thinking WHAT THE HELL HAVE I DONE?

The key feature of this place that caught my eye was not the ancient barn that will make the coolest little nearly-secret record shop, or the courtyard for which I’d been yearning like life was a Seventeenth Century madrigal, but the archway that was just about big enough to fit a Hymer Swing motorhome through it. On the day we arrived in our new hometown, M driving E in the old Focus we’ve got back on the road pretty cheaply (to my delight – I can’t think of anything I’d be less interested to spend thousands of pounds on than a bloody car, even if I could still afford to), following H and I in Vanny up the long bit of the A1, the first thing I wanted to do once we’d got the keys is drive my van through my new archway. 

Of course, it didn’t fit. The camber of the pavement as it climbs the hill sees Vanny leaning a foot or more to her left, and it won't work. The same top corner where I mashed a light the morning after a very drunken trip to the football in Ipswich (don’t try to park too close to telegraph poles, motorhomers) was only saved far more serious injury by the van’s front wheels slipping on the smooth stone slabs beneath the arch. M, looking on, shook her head pityingly. The van was not, in fact, destined to take shelter beneath the building that had taken its place as our home.

For an hour or so, I was crushed. It was, on reflection, a bit of a stupid dream, to think I could keep the van in my life by tucking it neatly into the gap under the boys’ bedrooms. But it was my dream nevertheless, and I had real difficulty dealing with the idea that it wasn’t going to happen.

And then I realized that this was my opportunity to model how to take disappointments in your stride for my boys. H had sat in silence for the last half an hour of the van journey, and was clearly wondering how he had ended up heading to his doom in this town he knew nothing about. Then brave E was knocked back by the emptiness of his new bedroom, the naked nails in the wall and those dark marks around the things that were once there but are gone now.

If in some small way the evaporation of my Tracy Island fantasy helped the boys understand that we all have to make sacrifices or compromises or something like that, it still won’t stop me being pissed off about it. Even as I began to figure out how badly the van would have been in the way if it was parked behind that gate, I still just felt my misery had been compounded. Now I am in a big empty house in a town where I have no friends, and my van, from being the best thing in my life, is suddenly redundant. So I park her out on the cobbled street in front, a grubby white carbuncle on the smooth sweep of Georgian terrace. And there she has sat, save for a quick run to pick up some records, for ten days now. I suppose I shall have to sell her. And even as I type that, I’m realising that she would have sat around slowly getting old even if I had managed to fit it through the archway.

Am I admitting that the tour is over? Not yet. One of the things that made me keen on a move so far North was that I might use my new home as a base to explore my favourite parts of this island, and new parts too – I’ve banged on about Scotland again and again, and my guilt at not having made it over the border on this tour so far won’t let me sell Vanny just yet.