Road’s end

Yesterday we sold our van and this morning the new owner drove it away.

We stood in the rain and watched it go. It was our home for almost 18 months. It’s taken us all over Britain, from Dartmoor to the Orkney Islands, Snowdonia to the salt marshes of Norfolk. Crows and gulls have trotted around on its roof. Foxes have circled it, yowling and yelping. It got stuck in the mud in Kent and had to be hauled out by tractor. Rocked like a boat on a rough sea in the storms that ripped across Britain through the winter months. It’s inched along narrow winding mountain roads at the edge of terrifying drops. It’s never failed to start and it’s kept us warm, dry and safe throughout our meandering 10,000 mile journey.

In that van, I learned how to be me again instead of the stressed-out and half crazy ghost-version of myself that I’d become. I rose with the sun, walked a thousand footpaths, read books purely for pleasure, finished the edits on my own book, fell asleep at night listening to owls or curlews or the slow rhythms of the ocean or the wind howling through trees.

And now the van is gone. Soon someone else will load it up with dogs and bikes and boots and head for the horizon.

Instead we have a car, a caravan, a tent. In the summer, we’ll move on to a scrap of land with a few ancient milk sheds and resident kestrels, barn owls, foxes, badgers.

But one day, maybe quite soon, we’re going to get another, smaller van. And we’ll be off again.