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.