UP, UP AND AWAY

I now own a small touring caravan. I am still a novice at the game, and can no more remember the sequence for reversing it than I can the main steps of the Polish folk dance, the Polonaise, unless that was, in fact, a horrible Polish car of the 1980s. One is supposed to turn the car’s steering wheel the opposite way to which one wants to point the caravan, and then, having achieved the correct impetus, one corrects the steering lock and simply ‘follows the caravan around’. At least that is what the old salts who have been doing this for thirty years will tell you. Every time I have tried it I have ended up with the van at right-angles to the car, with the towing bracket jammed hard against the back bumper and I have had to disconnect the bally gubbins and manhandle the van into its proper position by grabbing the towing bracket, lifting the caravan bodily off the deck and literally bouncing it around until it can be pushed into place and secured. My wife and I decided to go on a two-week touring holiday with it and I drove it from the storage place to my drive, in order to wash, clean and pack it. I found out that the handbrake wouldn’t hold on my gently sloping drive and, having failed to chock the wheels, I saw the van career backwards towards the front wall of the house. I managed to cling onto one of the front grab-handles and stop it one inch short of the pebbledash. To my relief, I found that the handbrake then remembered how to function. We stayed the first few days in Bellingham, in the wilds of Northumberland, where, for all I knew, the Border Reivers still practice their night-time sheep-stealing pursuits in the likes of Newcastleton. I had joined the Caravan and Camping Club, and it was its site I visited. We didn’t get on, the Bellingham site and I. I had asked for a grass pitch in order that I might try out the awning I had bought but never used, and they ‘upgraded’ me onto a hard pitch without asking whether I concurred. When I subsequently tried to peg out the awning, the ground was so hard that the metal pegs bent double, and I had to dismantle the whole apparatus in front of around one hundred people, all of whom had turned off ‘Emmerdale’ and were watching me with rapt attention. I felt an utter fool and my face turned the colour of Zoidberg, the weird alien lobster in ‘Futurama.’ Seeing as a fellow-camper had had to show me how to thread the blithering cloth bit through the awning channel in the first place, this was indeed a double-whammy. The situation was made worse by Skelmerdale’s answer to Walter Brennan, a toothless old Lancastrian of eighty-odd years, clad in a string vest and Baden-Powell shorts, who told me, in between cackles of delight, that he had never been entertained so much for years, and that the deterioration of my temper as time went on and I got more and more tangled up in the awning cloth as awning-poles fell on my head was the funniest thing he had witnessed since he saw Frank Randle do a stand-up turn at the Widnes Constitutional Club just after the last war. Then, when my aged parents arrived for a visit, they were told in no uncertain fashion that they couldn’t park their car in the visitors’ car park – they would have to park it a mile away in the village. As my dad is disabled and can hardly walk, this was as practical a solution as suggesting that the best way to diet successfully is by eating one’s own weight in chocolate every day. The green-shirted jobsworth who gave out this information with such satisfaction had no doubt spent her formative years studying the field drill of the Hitler Youth. I ended up driving my car and my sister driving my Dad’s into Bellingham, and I brought her and her springer spaniel back. As it is a lunatic dog that growls permanently at the same time as wagging its tail, even a mile coming back in the car seemed too long.