In November, Rachel and I bought a van.
Some context, since she has been in the background of this blog for two years without ever being properly introduced. Rachel is my flatmate. We met in first year at MMU, we have lived together on Beech Road since 2023, and she is a graphic designer who has, over about eighteen months, quietly turned into a photographer. Nearly every photo on this site is hers. She also edits them, which is how I keep finding out what I would look like with lighter hair without ever having to sit in a salon and commit to it.
The van cost less than a lot of people spend on a sofa. It has done a number of miles I would rather not write down. It came with a broken wing mirror and an air freshener shaped like a football, which is still in there.
We spent most of December and January converting it in a friend's yard in Openshaw, in weather that made that a stupid thing to be doing. Plywood, a bed platform, a two-ring burner, a leisure battery Rachel understood and I did not. She made curtains. They are wrong — they are about four inches too short and they do not close properly in the middle — and she has refused, on principle, to remake them.
It is not a nice van. There is no reclaimed oak. Nobody is going to put it on Pinterest.
Why, though
Because of the last thing I wrote about charity shops getting picked over.
Every good shop in South Manchester has ten people like me going through it every Saturday. We all read the same round-ups. We all know that Sue Ryder on Burton Road is worth a look. The stock in a town is only as good as the number of people competing for it, and in Manchester that number is now quite high.
Forty miles away it is not. The stock is different because the people donating are different, the pricing is different because nobody has told that shop what a vintage Barbour goes for, and on a Tuesday in a small town you are frequently the only person in there.
You cannot do that on the train, not really. You can do one town, badly, with a return ticket that costs more than anything you will buy. In a van you can do three towns, park up, make a cup of tea, and drive home when you feel like it. The whole thing costs the diesel, which we split.
So far we have done Hebden Bridge, Todmorden, Stockport more times than is reasonable, and one very cold Saturday in Whitby where we bought nothing and ate chips in the rain and it was still a better day than most.
The long-term plan, which I mention lightly because it is a long way off, is to do it properly. Live in it, work from it, stop paying rent to a landlord in Chorlton. Neither of us is under any illusion about how far away that is. But it is nice to have a version of the future that is not just the current one with better furniture.