James Hannah

One of the steep­est learn­ing curves of my dri­ving life was learned in reverse last Thurs­day, when we picked up our prize of a Princess Nova car­a­van from the Worces­ter White Stuff store.

Decked out in brand new clob­ber (for the atten­dant photo shoot), I lis­tened as the ever-industrious Mick, who had been tow­ing the Princess from Corn­wall to Scot­land and back all sum­mer, gave me the skinny on how to tow a caravan.

“Have you ever towed a car­a­van before?“
“Urr, no.“
“Have you ever towed any­thing before?“
“Umm…”

He smiled, picked the thinnest roll-up in the world from between his lips, and exhaled smoke.

“It’s a piece of cake,” he said.

Turns out it’s a fairly large piece of sherry tri­fle cheese­cake with whipped cream and a cherry on top.

When your speed limit’s 70, go at 60; when it’s 60, go at 50. If you’re on the motor­way and the van starts to veer, then speed up, don’t slow down, or it’ll jack-knife and you’ll all be dead (or something).

To con­nect it to the back of the car, reverse the car close, man­han­dle the car­a­van into place, lift that and crank that, then when it’s mar­ried, drop that. Then hoist that, and clip the emer­gency brak­ing wire in place. Your caravan’s on. Then you can con­nect your two plug things, black-to-black and grey-to-grey — don’t get it wrong or you’ll blow the lot — and check your car lights are work­ing through the caravan.

I nod­ded through­out this expla­na­tion, employ­ing what I like to describe as my bull­shit nod, which has seen me through uni­ver­sity and many jobs besides. I arched my eye­brow through how to con­nect the wheel clamp and the hitchlock, and I hmmed and ahhed about how the gas bot­tle is connected.

Pulling away after the media cir­cus (of which more anon) I was relieved and alarmed to find the Princess duti­fully fol­low­ing. It was piss­ing it down, so I drove pretty slowly, and pulled some wii­i­ide turns. Jols and I winced and groaned as the satel­lite nav­i­ga­tion dragged us over every speed hump in Kid­der­min­ster, and it was really only after this trial that we started to engage with the fact that we had nowhere to go.

The place where we had arranged to stow the Princess had long since shut for the day, and so Jols had made some enquiries at local car­a­van parks as to whether we could keep the Princess there for a night. One such park had “plenty of space”, but after we’d answered a few ques­tions (“we don’t know exactly how long the car­a­van is”, “we won’t be stay­ing in it overnight”), they sud­denly found that they “didn’t have any space”.

Not only are car­a­van own­ers lep­ers to soci­ety, it seems that clue­less competition-winning car­a­van own­ers are lepers-with-swine-flu to the lepers.

The day was saved (and not for the first time) by deeply gen­er­ous and tol­er­ant pals Lou and Mike, who lent us their dri­ve­way for the night, and kept a cheery out­look even after see­ing the Princess.

Arrival at Lou and Mike’s dri­ve­way brought roll-up-touting-Mick’s final bit of advice back to me:

“The only real prob­lem is reversing.”

As a queue of traf­fic began to form beside me, I strug­gled to recall:

“See, if you want it to go left, you turn right as you reverse. But not too hard, or it’ll jack-knife. You have to turn right, and then turn left to fol­low it on the arc. You’ll get the hang of it.”

That, my old son, is pres­sure parking.

jx