Notes From the Hard Shoulder - James May [50]
I don't envy these guys so much now. The racing is much more exciting from the inside, but beyond that there's hard graft and too many weekends away from home. For two days, though, I felt the satisfaction of one who has made a contribution, even if it was only a small blob of elbow grease, the sundry of the pit lane. If you watched the races on the telly, you may just have noticed a bloke in the pit lane wearing a regulation Audi paddock fleece but completely the wrong trousers, looking knackered yet apparently doing sod all. That was me, that was.
PART 4 – THE THRILL OF THE OPEN ROAD
(AT LEAST UNTIL THE PHOTOGRAPHER WANTS TO STOP AND TAKE A PICTURE)
A CHEAP HOLIDAY IN SOMEONE ELSE'S CAMPER-VAN MISERY
It is said that an Englishman's home is his castle. Rubbish. Kings and lords live in castles, and I'm pretty sure they're never asked to put some shelves up or do a spot of Hoovering.
It's why so many chaps have sheds. A shed offers the solitude that poets, philosophers and other deep thinkers have always craved; an oasis of personal squalor that some ancient and immutable social law says should not be invaded by anyone else.
Trouble is, a shed first requires a garden, and that, eventually, will need weeding. A more elegant solution is what I would call a camper van but what is more correctly known these days as a motor caravan. A camper van offers similar sanctuary but with a constantly changing vista; a rolling shed giving access to the greater garden that is England's countryside. That same sense of fetid insularity can be enjoyed bang in the middle of a national park, with the added advantage that no one is going to ask you to mow it.
This was the plan – to travel, snail-like, with a microcosm of home at my back and to stay, alone, in those places where I'd often wished I could if only there was a hotel, but which would actually be spoiled by the presence of one. If not the middle of nowhere, then at least well into its interior. Exmoor, then – a part of the world pretty much as Adam would have known it.
On my first morning in the van, I had to acknowledge that I had only half succeeded. From one steamed-up window I beheld an expanse of soft green pasture complete with low-lying dawn mist and whinnying pony. From the other, an uninterrupted view of Exford Post Office.
I pulled back the camper's sliding door and met the postman. There was nothing for me. 'That's a pretty rough breakfast,' he said.
'What is?' I asked, even as the stench of burning reached my nostrils because I'd left the price sticker on the bottom of my new camping kettle.
'Boddingtons,' he said, indicating the array of spent cans on the floor.
'Nah,' I assured him. 'That was last night's dinner.'
This wasn't entirely true. The main course had been a robust steak 'n' chips at the nearby and slightly riotous Exford White Horse Inn, after which I had intended to drive a few miles up a road notoriously haunted by a spectral horse-drawn hearse (the harbinger of an imminent death, apparently) and into an area of moorland reckoned to be stalked by a giant, sheep-mauling black cat. There I would erect the hinged concertina that was the camper's extending roof and settle down to commune with nature, especially as there was no lavatory installed.
But as I drove an Exmoor fog descended so that, by the time I located a grassy pitch some 10 miles away, I wasn't sure if it was a layby or the green of a golf course. I sank into a fitful sleep but awoke an hour later with a thumping head and freezing feet. I'd parked on a slope and was sleeping the wrong way round. Reversing the bed arrangement restored a certain amount of inner calm but by now the pea-souper was host to every