Notes From the Hard Shoulder - James May [51]
Still, breakfast – taken out in the sticks – would be a belter, and it was. Bacon, eggs, sausage, kidneys, beans, mushrooms, black pudding, tomatoes and some local and healthy-looking wholemeal bread. Everything except the tea, and including a few areas of the upholstery, was fried.
It's amazing what you can forget to take with you on a camper van holiday. Much of it is obvious – bedding, pans, pants – but those little things that are crucial to the smooth running of a household, and are taken for granted at home, are easily overlooked. Brown sauce, for example, and a pan scrubber. A sprig of Exmoor bracken makes an effective substitute – for the pan scrubber.
Bloody hell, I'd only spent one night and cooked one meal in the van, and it already looked and smelled like a student bedsit, an illusion enhanced by jazzy seat fabrics suggesting that the place hadn't been decorated since the '70s.
I suppose I should take a moment to introduce my unflagging ally on this trip; the Celeste Motor Caravan, converted from a Volkswagen Caravelle mini-bus by an independent company called Bilbo's Design. It's incredibly well thought out, and comes with a rear seat that converts to a double bed, a smaller bed area for an infant inside the accordion roof, a compact cooker, a fridge, a sink with electric pump and drainage tank, and curtains all round. There are two tables, a swivelling front passenger seat and battery-powered mood lighting.
If you want full sanitation and servants' quarters, you have to move further up the range and buy a true motor home, with a bathroom and what have you, but that will be something much bigger. The compact Celeste is really designed for use on organised caravan sites with shower blocks, and can be hooked up to a permanent mains electricity supply. It's a metal tent, if you like, only much better – it's properly equipped, entirely waterproof and comes ready assembled.
It's also a lot better than a normal caravan. For the enthusiastic motorist, towing a caravan is pure misery. They are slow, cumbersome, wide enough to become wedged in several parts of the Exmoor landscape, they create all sorts of rearward visibility problems and generally have even more tasteless interior trim. The Celeste is as wieldy as a large estate car and its rear-view mirror shows exactly what's behind you. The duvet, usually.
The downside of the motor caravan is that if you're going to own just the one vehicle, then you are committed to taking your holiday accommodation with you on every journey, even to the supermarket. This is deeply ironic in an age when so many of them will deliver to the home.
The mini-bus on which the Celeste is based is in turn based on a humble builders' panel van but, independent artisans being a much fussier breed than they once were, vans are pretty good these days. The Celeste – daft name, but it's a caravan tradition – fairly bowls along, the oily throb of its gutsy 2.5-litre turbo diesel overlaid with the rumble of an errant beer can somewhere in the back. It's worth taking a bit of care over correct stowage in these things. There's a place for everything in the Celeste and on the largely straight A-road route between London and the West Country everything seemed to be in its place, in accordance with the old maxim. Once on the winding stuff, however, I became reacquainted with a few items of unfinished washing up from the breakfast. I also forgot to latch the door of the fridge and got egg all over the floor.
I felt a bit of a fraud after the earlier Exford incident so my determined plan for the second night was to spend the day exploring the area and eating ice cream before locating a remote spot with a sea view for the night. And so I simply roamed Exmoor, returning the vigorous waves of other motor caravaners (this had me confused –