White Van Envy
Went to a club meet at the weekend. In Borrowdale, where, despite it being apparently one of the wettest places in the UK, the weather stayed dry. All the usual things happened: everybody went climbing, nobody got hurt, I had a minor wobbler on something I should have cruised, our pet novice seconded lots of routes and did his first abseil, food was eaten, beers were drunk, and once the pub shut everybody congregated on the campsite for one very quiet beer before bed.
The post-pub session (and indeed, the post-crag tea, the pre-climbing tea, the bacon butties, and the ohmigodwhydidigetoutofbed coffee) happened, as usual, in Mike’s tent: one of those three-lobed mothership jobs that looks like it’s about to spawn lots of little tents and take off in the general direction of Pluto. Mike and his wife sleep in one of the lobes and the rest of the club party in the rest of the tent, which gradually fills up with empty beer cans, pringle tubes, bacon wrappers and used tea bags. Nice bloke, Mike.
This time, however, we had a splinter group. In the car park.
Yep, in the car park
Two scruffy little white campers giggling happily to each other like two little boys doing something awful at the far end of the playground. Very much a family resemblance between the two - I think they were brothers. You could almost imagine them swapping marbles, comparing farts and cribbing each other’s homework.
I was lucky enough to get a lift up to the meet in one of them. The noise level in the back was far too high to hold a sensible conversation (the classic phrase “skeleton having a wa*k in a dustbin” springs to mind . . . apparently sound insulation is for wimps) and I spent most of the journey trying to take my mind off the near-puke-inducing boingyness of the suspension by studying the interior. The tidy, no-space-wasted, everything-fitting-exactly-together interior. There was even a fridge for the milk and a little cupboard for the cups. And then we got to the campsite where, being a wannabe-hardcore little nut, I pitched my very small, very cramped, proof-against-several-inches-of-snow-howling-winds-and-pouring-rain tent and spent the rest of the weekend sleeping in a pile of ropes, dirty clothes and escaping metalwork while drinking increasingly cheesy milk and trying to keep slugs out of the bacon.
And I lusted after white vans.
Now don’t get me wrong here - I’m well aware that I *could* acquire a much larger tent, some deckchairs and a folding sideboard (and a much bigger car to put it all in) and camp in luxury . . . until the weather started to turn nasty. Trying to dry a small tent in a very small flat is a pain, but trying to dry a large one would probably be more easily achieved by putting the flat inside the tent. Large tents feel colder than small ones, take longer to pitch - which means you get a lot wetter when it’s raining - and have far more surface area to catch the wind.
White van man, of course, doesn’t have to pitch anything. He just puts the handbrake on and nips into the back for a cuppa.
Just as there are tents and there are tents, there are white vans and there are white vans. There are some absolute monsters about - the motherships of the white van world, big enough to intimidate HGVs, equipped with a fully fitted kitchen, an onboard toilet (into which we do not pass solids), a TV dish, four bikes, an inflatable boat, a paddling pool and, given the execrable fuel economy, a Nissan micra clinging grimly to the back to avoid being left behind. I keep expecting to see one with a spare car on the roof. Watching the owners trying to get them down narrow country lanes is always amusing and they never fit under car park height restrictions. At the other end of the scale, we have the Daihatsu Bambino, somewhat akin to a bivvy bag with wheels. (I have a friend who sleeps in his but finds it a bit cramped . . . he’s five foot one.)
The quasar of the white van world, however, has to be the VW transporter. Just big enough without being so big as to be totally impractical, just adequately equipped without being fussy. And we had two of them, sunning themselves smugly on the campsite. So yes, I lusted.
I am not getting a white van. I can’t afford a white van. I don’t have anywhere to store a white van.
But, as a confirmed gadget-lover, I am still suffering from a classic case of white van envy. Mmmm, white vans.
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