In Transit

I need to get an early night tonight to conserve my strength. For tomorrow, I am moving house.

The whole day is going to be a bloody chore, quite frankly. First of all, we have to go to the agency and handover an eye-watering amount of cash, sign a mountain of paperwork, and promise the nice lady behind the desk that we will be good boys for the next six months at least.

Then its on to the joyous task of heaving dismantled furniture up and down stairs, and in to and out of vans, before the real fun of trying to reassemble it in my new bedroom. Aside from pretending to be one of the Chuckle Brothers (Barry, probably), there are very little positives to moving house. But there is one thing. Something I've already mentioned. The van.

There is something incredibly exciting about driving a van. I've never quite managed to put my finger on what exactly. It could be because you're higher up than everybody else, and you have that sense of superiority. Maybe its simply the size of a van. Maybe the fact you have to physically climb in to the drivers seat re-ignites something in you from your childhood days. Or, maybe I'm completely over-analyzing this, and its simply because you can pretend to be B.A. Baracus out of the A-Team, living in the Los Angeles underground, travelling from place to place, helping the poor defenseless townspeople with their heavy-lifting.

I've driven a lot of vans in my time as a painter and decorator (now there's a chat up line that can surely never fail), and it always made me feel grown-up. Only grown-ups get to drive a van. Its a big responsibility. Often, my boss would ask me to take the van to another job with the young apprentice in tow (I was only 18 at the time, so he must have been really young. The laws on child labour are very relaxed in Wales). Being behind the wheel, with my arm resting on the open window, Daily Sport tucked in the sun visor, a generic commerical radio station blaring out the speakers, young apprentice on the passenger seat, I felt like the boss. The man.

In reality of course, I was an 18 year old boy, terrified of crashing his employers only means of income, desperately trying to find something in common with the spotty, drug-addled oik sat next to me to try and spark up some semblance of conversation. Football usually worked.

Tomorrow though, there will be no spotty oik, no Daily Sport, and definitely no commercial radio. Just lots of lifting, carrying and putting down again. Lift up. Carry. Put down. And so on, ad infinitum. But the 15 minute van-journey on each run will make it all worthwhile. Oh, and having a nice new lovely flat of course.

But mainly the van.