Dog eats bed

January 29, 2012

WE’RE fairly whizzing along now, and we haven’t even left home. My husband has concocted a fitted carpet for the Hymer from offcuts lying around in the garage, and a smaller table, just wide enough for a bottle of wine, a couple of glasses and a book or two, which will slide into place to give us and the dog a little more legroom.

In fact, the more he thinks about it the more ideas he comes up with to make life on the road more comfortable, and he’s been haunting the local caravanning supplier over the past three or four weeks, coming home with handy gadgets at regular intervals – such as a bargain plastic holder for mugs, to stop them rattling around, reduced to a few pence because it’s got a crack in it which he’s promptly mended.

I really do appreciate his efforts, it’s just that I can’t understand why he finds this kind of thing fun. All I can say is, thank goodness he does.

Meanwhile parcels have been turning up containing yet more essentials. The latest yesterday was a big box of melamine crockery.

 What is about caravanning and camping that encourages designers to throw taste out of the window and indulge in some of the most revolting patterns known to man? We couldn’t find a plate or bowl that we could live with. Plain white was what we settled on, and it took some tracking down because shops only seem to stock up in the summer. Anyway, the internet came to our rescue and it’s here now.

And the new table will be holding a celebratory bottle or two on Tuesday when we spend our first night in the Hymer.

As soon as I finish work we’re off to Taunton to get an alarm system fitted. Not just any old alarm system, you understand, but the top-of-the-range, specially-designed-for-motorhomes kind, as recommended by guru James Brown in his invaluable Motorhome & Caravan Security Handbook.

Auntie B, who lives for part of the year in Spain, has been reinforcing my fears about tyre-slashing robbers lurking at traffic lights to leap on unsuspecting tourists, and I’m up for taking every precaution, regarding the ever-mounting cost as a sensible investment.

I’m also hoping that the dog is an effective burglar-deterrent. I’ve told him he  needs to earn his keep, since he’s just munched his way through the fluffy new bed we bought him for travelling.

The charitable view of this misdeed is that he mistook it for a cuddly toy. I suspect, however, that he was showing off because we’d had to leave him unattended for a few hours and he was bored.

Either way, a shredded mass of kapok stuffing greeted us on our return home, and after a certain amount of bad language (not on my part, you understand) it was off to the pet shop to acquire a bean bag instead. So far he seems markedly disinclined to lie on it, preferring the floor.