FUN AND GAMES WITH THE CARAVAN MAN

We finally got the awning up, after a struggle.  It took a couple of hours. It didn’t help that a stiff breeze blew up from the south, causing the side of the awning to flap about like a sail, moving the awning along in the caravan channel, causing the poles that make up the frame to fall on my head and the awning to wrap itself around my ears.  Pegging down was no picnic, either.  The ground was as hard as pig-iron, and I could hardly hammer in the pegs.  I ended up pouring water on the grass before inserting each peg.  Several of them still bent like reeds in the wind, and I had to straighten them with a mole wrench. Meanwhile, the site assistant buzzed around on his mower, a cockerel cock-a-doodle-dooed in a distant back garden, and an RAF jet flew past so low and noisily and I got such a fright that I let go of the front cross-piece and the poles fell on my head again. The mobile caravan repair man came round on his weekly visit in the early afternoon.  I waved him down. ‘I’ve got no brake or indicator lights on the van.  Can you help?’  He couldn’t.  First of all, his circuit tester failed, then he couldn’t make a proper earth connection, then he snapped one of the connectors to the rear caravan lamps.  Finally, he sucked a tooth and said, ‘Sorry mate, I can’t help you.  Look at the time.  I ought to be somewhere else.’ He left me with a new black connecting plug, a second-hand stop and tail bulb and, quixotically, an elastic band.  He took a tenner from me for his pains. It will be hand signals all the way home. Later in the afternoon, after the customary bout of drizzle, I took the dog for a walk to the park.  A notice on the gate read: ‘No dogs allowed, except guide dogs.’ How petty! How stupid!  I was enraged by the mindless bureaucracy. There was not a single soul in the park, and it was the only place in the village in which I could use my tennis racquet to propel the ball sixty yards to give her something decent to chase.  On my return, I picked up HG Wells’s ‘The First Men In The Moon.’  It was an illustrated edition, and it showed a picture of the narrator, Mr Bedford, and the inventor, Professor Cavor, stepping from the spaceship wearing Norfolk jackets and deer-stalker caps, despite the temperature being minus 273 degrees Celsius. The good professor had invented cavorite which, when painted onto the hull of the spaceship, caused all the air around it to implode, thus enabling the ship to be propelled to the moon on a carpet of collapsed air.  It seems risible now, but it wasn’t 100 years ago when it was written. It’s a rattling good yarn, anyway, so who cares if it’s not that scientifically accurate?  It had turned into a fine evening, so, after dinner, we drove into Malton for supplies. It’s a picturesque little town, with a splendid market square. An air of timelessness hangs over it, and you could imagine that HG Wells would recognise it instantly, perhaps zooming in on a cushion of collapsed air in his cavorite-painted horse and cart if, indeed, he’d ever been there in the first place,