James Hannah

We didn’t enter the car­a­van com­pe­ti­tion to win it. Well, I didn’t, any­way. I entered it so that Jols and I could plough a dis­pro­por­tion­ate amount of time and energy into writ­ing some lyrics that would eas­ily be the great­est ever writ­ten, and so we could then indulge in a hearty dessert of out­rage that the prize had been given to same lame-arsed ‘opti­mised’ effort con­structed by a pro­fes­sional com­pe­ti­tion enterer.

This was the amount of psy­cho­log­i­cal com­mit­ment I invested in the ‘Princess and the P-Reg’ project.

I was not pre­pared to find myself sit­ting in front of a chintzy pimped car­a­van in  the mid­dle of a rain-swept Worces­ter High Street at school home-time, sip­ping cham­pagne and mug­ging for the cam­era. But if I have learned any­thing in the last decade or so, it’s to mask a lack of pre­pared­ness with gusto.

As men­tioned pre­vi­ously, the White Stuff peo­ple had gen­er­ously towed the car­a­van to Worces­ter and decked us out in free clothes in order to get a bit of PR out of the whole thing. Who were we to object?

I haven’t seen the pho­tos – they are appar­ently going to be touted round the high-circulation car­a­van mag­a­zines, of which there are many – but I imag­ine my amaz­ing ‘trap’ double-chin will put in a solid cameo, and my ‘stress eye’ (an unknown char­ac­ter­is­tic prior to our wed­ding pho­tos being devel­oped) will do its very best Cap­tain Dar­ling impression.

Dur­ing the shoot, the good folk of Worces­ter trudged by more or less with­out com­ment, but one or two schoolkids milled around and pro­nounced our new acqui­si­tion “well good”. I man­aged to blank every­thing that was going on around me, and just act as stu­pidly as pos­si­ble, which I’m sure to the White Stuff crowd just looked like I was act­ing like a nor­mal human being.

The only bit of con­trol I man­aged to retain over the pro­ceed­ings was the grow­ing of a cou­ple of mil’s worth of beard, which should have the effect of mak­ing me look tired and/or home­less. Cer­tainly it led peo­ple at work to give me a wide berth, assum­ing I’d got divorced or lost a rel­a­tive or something.

Luck was on my side for one aspect of the event. The White Stuff con­tin­gent let slip that one of my work col­leagues had found a moment in his busy sched­ule to con­tact the White Stuff press office and ask for the photos. After mulling this point for a while, I vetoed the sug­ges­tion (ever the fun suck hole), and we came up with the com­pro­mise of tak­ing a ‘spe­cial’ photo to send him.

As ever,

jx

PS. I with­draw my scorn at Cather­ine for let­ting the Birm­ing­ham Mail pho­tog­ra­pher snap her in a happy-go-lucky ‘elbow on pile of books’ pose – a shot which has yet to surface.

PPS. Oh, look: