Campervan Therapy

It’s what I love about campervanning: even the most prosaic task can become an unexpected adventure. So, when Fran the Van needs some minor medical operations and we have to take her back home to Brownhills, the dealer in Newark-on-Trent, we’re going to be on the road north.

That’s when our friends, Mary and Martin, ask us to come on an 8 person jolly on Sunny their Canal Barge. (All good leisure transport should have names). We meet them in the wonderfully named Fenny Compton in Shakespeare’s own county of Warwickshire.

But the fun starts the next day with Derek the Motorhome and Fran the Van following Mary the five miles down to a camping field in the village of Cropredy, over the border in Oxfordshire, only to  return to the starting point, loaded with picnic booty after having posted our £10 camping fee through a tiny hole six feet up into a metal container. 

We wend our contemplative way along the willow-edged South Oxford Canal. Despite the cold north-westerly, the sun dapples the water, the ducks are doing their duck thing, and cartoon-white clouds race across an October-blue sky.

Martin teaches wannabee Barge drivers to steer Sunny through the series of locks while Mary coaches this ramshackle crew with the operation of each one. (It is safe to say, she has a particularly awkward job with me, as I persist in trying to push the lock gates open with tonnes of water behind them each time.)

The colourful canal characters who can’t resist giving detailed and conflicting instructions adds to the merry mayhem.

The date on one lock gate stares at me: 1829. I think of the mammoth task the navvies had digging this amazing network of canals throughout the United Kingdom and in the process transforming society by ushering in the Industrial Revolution. I can almost hear the grate of shovel against shingle, shale and clay.

I marvel too at the engineering aptitude that dreamed up the locks. When I ask Martin who invented them, he tells me it was the Ancient Egyptians who first thought of using the power of water to move boats along canals.

Not for the first time I’m astounded at the ancient world’s sheer invention and just how long it took us to adopt these genius ideas.

Much fizz and feasting canal-side in the sun ensues, accompanied by two plump, white geese, followed in an outrageously short time by Carol’s fruit cake and tea.  

A party boat of young men follow us through the locks, dancing on the deck, and if it weren’t for my vertigo I’d claim a dance on Sunny’s roof-top dance-floor myself.

The evening ends with a convivial meal in the Brasenose Arms in Cropredy before we turn around the next day and go back to where we started. Our canal odyssey is not about covering miles, it’s about living in the moment, day-dreaming and the reflection of the trees in still waters.