Fatal if fitted

A little light reading
Originally uploaded by chicken.loop

Once you have your motorhome, you can forget worrying about little details such as tyres, diesel, engine oil, power steering fluid, transmission, hydraulic etceteras and all the gubbins that's normally associated with owning a wheeled conveyance. That's the easy bit.

You'll become obsessed with its services: fresh water, waste water, whatever goes into the toilet flush, whatever comes out at the other end, gas, mains power, battery power...the list is endless. I've got a 6 kilo gas bottle, THREE batteries (two for the van, one for the motor), a waste water tank, a fresh water tank (well, two: one for the loo, one for everything else, I think) and a tank that contains things you don't want to know any more about. I have taken many photos of switches, some of which look like light switches but which are, in fact, the mains switch for the whole van, thermostat dials, green and red rocker switches, and things that allow you to judge how many amps (or is it watts, volts, or amperes?) you are drawing from the camp power supply before you plunge a whole village and the life support systems for several new-born farm animals into dark and silence.

The picture shows a selection of my holiday reading. There are ten separate manuals, not including anything about the engine.There's a Thetford cassette toilet (yes, it's a new world of branding out there) - a neat little Dyson-style yellow and grey tank lives underneath it, slides out, nothing nasty - until you unscrew the cap. Then wow.

There's the Truma water heater and the blown-air heating system - the latter works on gas, electric, or both at once, according to some metric known only to itself. If deprived of both gas and electric it probably taps straight into your own core body heat and sucks the life out of you to keep itself going.

There's the Electrolux 3-way fridge - yes, that's gas, electric straight from the engine, and electric from the mains if you're hooked up. If you are driving, you switch it to alternator power. If you stop, you switch it to mains power or gas power. You can't have gas while you're moving and you can't have alternator while you're stopped. It seems a lot to keep some Tesco's tomatoes in the manner accustomed.

There's a cooker, with four burners, oven, and grill, a four -position Heki rooflight, a Cobra alarm (yes, the van does have movement sensors inside, as I discovered when I went to the Co-Op and left the dog in it). There's the Fiamma awning, which you can wind out like a French cafe owner in the morning - and which has an acreage of additional bits and bobs to zip onto it (if you can reach) called a 'Safari Room'. I haven't done this yet for fear of elephants.

Anyway, in most of the manuals, they don't know what set up you have, so all the dire warnings are of the most general kind: 'If fitted, DO NOT leave the mains adapter/alternator lead screw connected UNLESS the vehicle is to be left for extended periods of time, in which case see back'. OK, I made that up, but you see what I mean.

So before you fall asleep watching the stars through your Heki rooflight, you'll remember that if you leave the gas on (or was it off?) you'll die, if you connect the mains lead to the electric on-site hook-up without the right adapter you'll make the whole van live, and die, if you leave the cover off (or on, I forget) the vent for the water heater, you'll die, and if you get the various tanks for the toilet wrong, you won't die, but you could be involved in a nasty blow-back incident that will have you under the shower for a week.

I have managed to master most of this, but not without a few phone calls back to an increasingly amused masculine voice at the end of the phone at Oak Tree Motors. I have decided to persevere. Surely, if I wear rubber-soled waterproof shoes, carry a can of Oust, and don't mind my tomatoes a bit wrinkly, I should make it to Scotland.