Goings and comings

We have done it.

We have scrapped the camper van.

I cried.

Nothing ever makes me cry, I am as heartless as one might expect for an embittered elderly taxi driver, but today I cried.

We got up early. I didn’t take the dogs out. Instead I insured the van for a final hour, and we went over to the shed.

It started first time, enthusiastically, in case we might be taking it somewhere exciting. Mark drove it out into the sunshine where it sat, blinking happily, and wondering confidently what adventures we had planned.

We took some photographs of it. Then we stood inside it remembering all of the happy times. Then Mark drove it and I followed behind. It was a bit of an anxious journey because he drained its diesel tank yesterday, we had no wish to give the scrap man eighty quid’s worth of hard-earned diesel. He had left half an inch in the bottom, and we hoped optimistically that it would be enough.

The scrap man is in Kendal. It is not a long journey along all of the back lanes from the shed. I drove along in the usual fog of exhaust smoke that happens to anybody who follows the camper van anywhere, with my heart in my mouth, but we made it.

The scrap man stared at it. Then he rolled his eyes and held his hand out for the cash.

We handed it over.

Yeh Fanks, he said, and wandered off.

We got into the car and looked at it for a last time.

It sat there, amid the towering heaps of crushed metals, gazing curiously about itself and wondering where we had brought it. It has visited lots of scrap yards in its time, and was not alarmed. It waited, patiently, for us to come back and leap on board once again.

Then we backed away and around the corner, until it was out of sight.

Shall we go back and get it? said Mark, but of course we couldn’t.

About two hours later I had the most peculiar, horrible feeling. It felt as if the camper van had suddenly ceased, as though the little part of me where it has always touched my soul, had switched off. I felt suddenly lost and empty, and terribly, dreadfully sad.

I thought it should have a proper epitaph, so here it is:

Elegy For A Camper Van

Brake lights are red
Exhaust smoke is blue.
You were our van
And we won’t forget you.

After that Mark and Oliver took their cars and whizzed off to the great empty void in the shed where the camper van used to be, to take Oliver’s engine and gearbox out. They had to come back after five minutes because they had taken the dogs with them and I had forgotten they had an appointment with the vet.

The dogs were good at the vet, well, good by their standards. They were absolutely longing to join in a fracas with some collies in the waiting room, and lay under my seat, whimpering and quivering with the desperate urge to belt off and behave like idiots, but common sense and some growling on my own behalf prevailed, and they followed me meekly into the surgery to have needles stuck in them like Good Dogs.

The vet suggested that I put Rosie on a diet, whilst adding in some surprise that both of them were remarkably fit and healthy, which made me think I could completely ignore any dietary advice. This is just as well because it would make Rosie very miserable, she likes eating very much.

After that we came home, because something wonderful was happening.

We had been talking about the new camper van last night, and Mark said, frowning a bit, that he wondered what I might like to do when it was finally on the road. Where would I like to go.

I knew the answer straight away.

I would like, I said, decisively, to go and visit my old, old friend, Dave Next Door, who has not lived next door for the last thirty years because of living in Wales. I have not seen him for ten years, or even heard from him beyond the occasional Christmas card, but I would like to see him. Once we got the camper van on the road in a year or so, it would be the first place I would like to go.

This afternoon a text arrived on my phone.

It was from Dave Next Door, who had things to do up here, and who thought he would like to drop in and see us.

I was so pleased I could hardly contain myself.

He came and had dinner, and we talked and talked and talked. It was one of the happiest evenings I have had for a long time.

He has stayed the night.

I will be able to say goodbye at breakfast time tomorrow.

It has been a happy day after all