Mel fitted our new leisure battery this morning. His workshop, his tools, most of a day gone on it, and he wouldn’t take proper money for it. By the evening we were sitting in his van instead of ours, eating dinner, watching a cow walk past the window like she owned the place. She more or less does.
People ask us what the community is like out here. That day is about the best answer we’ve got.
The battery
A leisure battery isn’t interesting. It’s a heavy box shoved somewhere awkward, and its whole job is to be boring. Lights, water pump, fridge, fan, the laptop this is being typed on. You never think about it until it starts letting you down, and then you think about it constantly, because it doesn’t fail loudly. It makes about twenty small things go slightly wrong and leaves you to work out that they’re all the same problem.
Swapping one out isn’t a job we’d want to attempt at the side of a road. There’s cable to run and connections to get right, and if you get it wrong you’ve got a fault in the thing you also sleep in. Near enough doesn’t show up for six months, and then it shows up all at once.
Mel has a workshop. He also has the patience for that kind of work, which we watched up close today and don’t have ourselves. He took his time, did it properly, and gave the van back with everything where it should be.
What the community actually is
There’s a version of this life that happens mostly online. Meet-ups, matching mugs, a lot of photographs of van doors open onto a view. Nothing wrong with any of it. It just isn’t the part that keeps people going.
The part that keeps people going is favors. Somebody who can crimp a connector. Somebody whose address your bank will accept once you haven’t got one of your own. Somebody with the right size of hose, or a mechanic’s number in a town you’ve never been to, or a driveway you can sit on for two nights while a part turns up. None of that photographs well.
Mel and Becky already hold our mail, which is a bigger thing than it sounds. You still need an address, and somebody has to be willing to be it. Today Mel put a day of his own work on top of that, and did it the way you’d help somebody with a door that sticks.
Then Diane made Cullen Skink from her family recipe, smoked haddock and potato and onion and milk, and we fed it to the pair of them. A day’s work on one side of the table and a pot of soup on the other. Nobody was counting. As far as the four of us were concerned, that was that. One kindness for another.
Neither of us was raised to leave a thing unsettled, and it has taken a while to get used to the fact that out here it rarely settles the way we grew up expecting. Sometimes it’s soup. Sometimes it never comes back at all, and something else turns up years later from a direction you weren’t watching.
The common
We ate on the common above Stroud. It’s limestone grassland, grazed for centuries under rights older than most of what surrounds it, and the cattle have the run of the place. They wander the grass, they wander the road, they look at you for a second and go back to what they were doing.
People come to this part of Gloucestershire for the Cotswolds and mostly end up in the same handful of villages, parking badly and photographing the stone. This is the same county. No tearoom, no coach park, nothing to buy. Grass, a long view down the valley, and the cows.
We ate in Mel and Becky’s van rather than ours. It’s a Mercedes Vario he converted himself out of an old work truck. We’ve said before that the inside of it looks like a boat, and after an evening sitting in it we’d say it again. Everything is fitted the way it would be on a boat, because that’s what you do when there isn’t much room and it all has to stay put while you drive.
Mel films his work at Mel’s Big Van Small World and Becky is at Sacred Traveller, if you want to see a conversion done by somebody who wasn’t in a hurry.
Four of us round a table in a converted truck, on a common, with cows going past the window. That’s our version of the Cotswolds.
If you’re heading this way
The commons above Stroud are looked after by the National Trust and a commons committee. Cattle and horses are out through the grazing season, so drive across at a crawl and expect to meet one on a blind rise, because you will. Dogs on a short lead near livestock. Park in the car parks rather than on the grass, which is limestone grassland with pasqueflowers and orchids in it, not lawn. The car parks are open dawn to dusk.
On the battery: it’s one of the things worth paying properly for. Everything else in the van runs off it. Get it fitted by somebody who knows what they’re doing, whether that’s a friend with a workshop or a firm you pay. A cheap job isn’t a saving.
And if you’re wondering whether you’d find people out here, we didn’t find them by looking. We stayed put long enough to be useful to somebody, and we said yes when help was offered instead of insisting we were fine. That’s all it was. It took us longer to work that out than it should have.
The van is running on a battery a friend put in this morning, and we ate at his table tonight. Tomorrow we move on. Somewhere down the line somebody will want something we happen to have, and we’ll hand it over without thinking about it.
