James Hannah

I have just won a car­a­van. Not just any car­a­van, but Jols and my ‘win­ning’ song has bagged a Princess Nova that has been pimped, with retro wall­pa­per on the out­side, and a mini-bar and a chem­i­cal toilet.

I know what you’re think­ing: ‘But you hate caravans’.

Mm.

So what this leaves is a series of ques­tions to which I don’t know the answer. I’m now going to try to answer those ques­tions, for my own sake.

1) Where are you going to put it? You haven’t even got a dri­ve­way or a guar­an­teed park­ing space. Yeah… I sup­pose if Jols and I really thought about this, we wouldn’t have entered the com­pe­ti­tion. Per­haps it’s best we didn’t, eh?

2) Why did you enter the com­pe­ti­tion? The whole point of enter­ing the com­pe­ti­tion was to cre­ate some­thing really good that was going to make the peo­ple at White Stuff laugh. So lit­er­ally: for a laugh. But we did want to win (with­out ever really enter­tain­ing the idea that we actu­ally would).

3) Won’t the wall­pa­per come off in the rain? I have absolutely no idea if they’ve accounted for this at all. We’ll find out when we see it…

4) Are you going to keep the car­a­van? Now, I thought Jols and I had agreed between our­selves that if we won it we’d sell it. But win­ning seemed so unlikely we didn’t really have to firm that agree­ment up. When we did win, it became appar­ent we had agreed no such thing.

Believe it or not, I do actu­ally enjoy (read: have grown accus­tomed to) being plunged into such things. Like, say, find­ing out I’m sud­denly and unex­pect­edly a cat owner. That was a great oppor­tu­nity to tackle my chronic cat allergy. This is merely the oppor­tu­nity to fig­ure out what it is that makes car­a­van lovers… well… love caravans.

After all, what else am I going to do with my time? Watch DVD box-sets? Become a high-class alcoholic?

On 29 Sep­tem­ber we’re due to go to Worces­ter to pick up the car­a­van. We’re going to meet the White Stuff peo­ple who organ­ised the com­pe­ti­tion, who seem very nice, and very fond of the Princess, and we’re going to be photographed.

I know what you’re thinking.

‘But you hate going to places you’ve never been to, meet­ing peo­ple you’ve never met and, more than any­thing, hav­ing your pho­to­graph taken in an offi­cial capacity.’

Mm.

It’s an exis­ten­tial quandary, all right. Bet­ter meet it head-on or I might dis­ap­pear all together. The only con­struc­tive thing I can think to do is grow a beard. For the pho­to­shoot, like.

Watch this space.

jx