Issue #10 Zut Alors! Van life exposed and the importance of re-remembering your purpose.

Suffering from FOMO of crones ‘living their best life’ in insta-ready camper vans? Well as always mes amis, ‘Tits to the Wind!’ is here to make you feel better!

This Travel Log of Crone Van Life is coming to you from the van of The Hairy Scottish One in le Vendee en France! 🇫🇷

Nothing quite embodies the spirit of ‘Tits to the Wind!’ more than the allure of the open road Crone Camper Dream. The promise of a simple life. An outdoor life. Camper van door wide open, clutching a stove-top coffee by the sea. Avec one’s insta-gold petit chien. Evidemment.

Indeed, for many of us, the #vanlife hashtag has become the new crone porn, along with jaw-dropping ‘wild swimming’ spots and, of course, SheSheds, (covered in Issue 2 TTTW link here).

So when my partner, ‘The Hairy Scottish One’, announced his intention to go to France for three months in the camper van he has lovingly been converting, of course Stan (‘the wee dug’) and I invited ourselves along.

“I’m going to be a digital nomad!” I announce excitedly to friends and family, partly taking the piss, partly trying on my new crone dream for size. (The Hairy Scottish One later advises me to perhaps avoid using that term for tax purposes, though on reflection he also concedes, that to worry about such matters, I’d have to actually earn money. 😳)

The three month plan was quickly downsized to five weeks after we both acknowledged that the success of our four-year relationship was, in part, not just down to separate bedrooms, but separate houses…in separate villages.

We both conceded maybe three months in a tin can sharing a small double with a sweaty menopausal autistic who ‘needs her space’, a 6 ft 4” Scottish fella who is also neurodiverse in needing things to be ‘a certain way’, and a ‘smelly wee dug’, might be a bridge too far.

And so last week, after three months of packing (it takes longer to pack less)…Le Grande Depart!

Tempers started to flare in Portsmouth, as it transpired that opening and closing the main van door was beyond my skill set. Opening things has always been a challenge, and it unfortunately transpires that van life is full of opening challenges.

On the first 12 failed occasions to open the door, The Hairy Scottish One was kind and patient, calmly giving me instructions and numerous demonstrations of a firm lift of the handle and gentle nudge of the hip, though he increasingly struggled to hide his horror as I frantically ‘yanked’ at the door handle like a toddler stuck in a bog cubicle.

Seasoned campers amongst you will know that ‘yanking’ is a mortal sin in van world. It’s right up there with using your own hot water to wash the pots when there’s a ‘perfectly good sink on site’, or pissing in your own shitter when there’s somebody else’s toilet within a perfectly reasonable five-mile stagger in complete darkness.

As we stood in the road in Portsmouth ‘discussing’ which direction looked most likely for lunch, Stan was staring at us both, wondering if we’d made a terrible mistake.

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We’d planned to spend the first few nights in Houlgate in Normandy, so I could share this pretty village, rich in happy memories of family holidays and spread some of my Dad’s ashes in the place he loved.

After a stressful drive in the pissing rain, we rocked up at the campsite I’d vaguely earmarked. The barrier was down, and the woman in the office looked us with incredulity.

“We are full,” she says.

“You are full?” I repeat, in English, in my best French accent.

She throws in a Gaelic shrug to emphasise our stupidity for turning up at a campsite, OUT OF SEASON, without booking 12 years in advance.

It transpires that this is the case for many campsites in France.

Open road my arse.

It also transpires that it was actually my responsibility (in fact, let’s face it, my ONLY responsibility), to book the first few nights’ campsites.

The odd thing is, I research my solo trips meticulously. For my trip to Corfu, I read all 602 reviews of the apartment I was considering booking until I felt I had an accurate assessment of how soft the mattress was. So on reflection, I share The Hairy One’s bafflement that I didn’t afford the same rigour to my one responsibility in our joint venture.

Hours into van life, I can feel my cortisol rising.

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My secret history of shitness

If you’ve seen my TED talk, you’ll know I’ve spent my years trying to hide my innate failure to function as a human being on even the most basic of levels. In Autism World, I’m known as ‘high functioning’, though, as I’m sure The Hairy One and Stan will now testify, ‘Barely Functioning’ would be a more accurate assessment.

I still can’t cook a simple meal without taking at least a month off work. And then the seething rage as it reaches its bad-tempered, sweary crescendo means that no partner has ever expected me to cook again.

And I still can’t brush my teeth without getting it all down my arm, elbows and on my feet, adding to the humiliation and shame that van life is starting to expose.

They say it takes a village to keep a neurodivergent menopausal creative alive. The Hairy One is well aware of my incompetencies and failure to function, and does what he can to compensate and keep me alive, as do my family and even my neighbours, who pass me a cooked meal over the fence when they know I haven’t been to The Hairy One’s for a feed.

Mostly though, it’s just my close friends, family, and the dog, that know of my true staggering failure to function.

Dad used to get annoyed with my clumsiness when I was young and I lived in a constant ‘fear-of-getting-done’ state.

Recently, I discovered the irony of this.

At Dad’s funeral, one of his friends recounts Dad’s ineptitude for opening doors, reciting an incident in a French restaurant where Dad returns from the toilet clutching the toilet door in front of him like a gladiator’s shield. It turns out it was a sliding door, not an opening-out one.

It seems that an inability to open things may, in fact, be genetic.

At the same time, Dad also truly appreciated the flip side of my lack of common sense - my creativity. I would glow with joy as his beautiful hands held my latest story, watching his body shake with laughter, or hearing his howls above everyone else’s and his tears of genuine mirth which he would dab away after a watching a film that I’d made.

I know deep down that this is one of the most selfish griefs I carry with me since his death this year - that there will never be another man who can unconditionally forgive my incompetence at life, in exchange for a film or a piece of writing, quite in the same way that a Dad does for his daughter.

After Dad died, I was looking through his autobiography that we’d completed together, and I saw that he’d written a message for me in the inside cover, as he did for all the books he gave out. It said in his beautiful looped handwriting:

“To my unique, talented and beautiful daughter’.

Now I smile as hear his addition of a posthumous postscript:

“Just don’t ask her to open a van door.”

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Since menopause, my incompetencies have amplified and now extend to a particularly frustrating inability to get out a full sentence or remember the names of complex nouns such as ‘table’ and ‘shoe’.

Getting an autism diagnosis in my mid 40s helped me find some kind of self-forgiveness for my shitness at everyday tasks - and led me to a rich seam of other labels that spoke to me too - dyspraxia, dyscalculia, dyslexia, A.D.D.

And I know many midlife women have had similar ‘ahaha’ experiences of relief, even joy in collecting labels that create a bit of space between rage and self-loathing at one’s inability to function on the most basic of levels.

Like fellow autist, Chris Packham, my solution to my shitness in the past has been to live alone. That way, the only people rolling their eyes or suppressing their rage about your incompetence to perform the simplest of tasks is you, and tragically in more recent times, the dog. Even he recently seems to be losing all respect for me. I long for the days when a bit of wee comes out in excitement of my arrival, though it’s probably just as well it doesn’t as I’d start thinking about the word for ‘shoe’ and forget to clean it up. Maybe he’s just being helpful after all.

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We are now in the stunning Medieval town of Dinan. Despite actually ringing the municipal campsite to check they had spaces before we set off on our three hour drive, on arrival, we are greeted by the man we spoken to on the phone who is gleefully waving a sign that says “FULL.”

“But we rang earlier and you said to come!” Says The Hairy One in desperation.

“Others came,” he said, and for the second time in two days, we are met with a Gaelic shrug.

We’d have angrily ‘taken our leave’ by speeding off into the distance in rage if we were able. But it was a one way system, and so we were forced to do a slow lap of shame around the whole campsite.

Thankfully, after an impressive hair-raising manoeuvre by The Hairy One squeezing us through a narrow medieval portal, on the way out of town, we spot a few ‘camping-cars’ on a rain-soaked field underneath the impressive viaduct beneath the ramparts of the city walls.

We follow the winding road down towards the field with low expectations, but sure enough, you can really camp there! And guess what, Mr Municipal Camping Man, not only is it a million times more impressive than your shit site, it also has the river on one side wot I did kayak on (pictured below), immaculate allotments on the other, a boulangerie and bars just 5 minutes way. But best of all, it’s FREEEEE!

Stick that in your Smokey Smokey Thing and Smoke It.

Me kayaking next our FREE CAMPSITE! Fk u Municipal Man!

The next day, we’re both starting to get more into the swing of van life. We decide to have a morning apart doing our own thing, and arrange to meet for lunch at ‘the moule frite place’ that we spotted on the first day.

For the first time in the trip, I successfully manage to close the van door. Buoyed by such a milestone achievement, I set off across the field with confidence. Stan seems to know the way anyway too, he’s picked up a sent of The Hairy One, and is dragging me up the ramparts.

We arrive at the cobbled, narrow street, dripping in sweat, but the moule frite place has mysteriously disappeared.

I look around frantically.

I feel my cortisol rising and the all too familiar hot flush of shame rise from my toes to my cheeks.

Since peri-menopause I can sometimes picture where I want to go, but I just can’t work out how to get there. I know it’s the same for many Crones-in-Training out there - the menopause fairy came down one night and borrowed our sense of direction. Then forgot to put it back.

I’m starting to feel that all too familiar rising panic of ‘getting things wrong again’ as I realise I have absolutely no idea what the name of the restaurant is or what road it’s on. Not that Google maps would have been any use anyway. ‘Head north’ to a woman in menopause translates as ‘no fking help at all.’

Despite being bloated with the necessary doses of Prozac to facilitate the most basic level of human functioning, I feel my eyes sting with tears of frustration. I am an eight year old again and lost in Marks & Spencers. I want my Mum.

I ring The Hairy One. He starts to ask me to describe where I am.

“Street…don’t…different…”

Now fully in defence mode, the very few words left in my menopause-depleted vocabulary have long departed. Thankfully he can hear the rising panic in my voice and is calm and kind. He agrees to send me a dropped pin of where he is. I set off, following Google’s shit directions.

Ten minutes in as I am about to walk out of the walled city straight onto a busy dual carriage way, I realise Google thinks I’m a car.

I can’t work out how to change it to pedestrian setting.

I feel the burn of shame raise up from toes through my body again.

Van life is pulling back the curtain to reveal my deepest, most shameful fear that I have long suspected…

…that I am, indeed, the bastard love child of Bridget Jones and Frank Spencer.

(On a bad day).

I ring him again and in between my splutters of extreme frustration, we agree to meet by the toilets, which it turns out, is the only word I can say, and the only place that I can say with any certainty that I know where it is.

He greets me with a sympathetic bear hug and gently steers me towards a jazz bar that he’d noticed I had eyed longingly as we’d walked past.

“I saw you looking at it the other day and guessed you’d pictured it as the kind of place your Dad would have loved.”

While he’d been waiting for me, he’d gone there to check out the menu to find something that would be better for my tummy. (Oh yeh, I’d also had the shits for 24 hours - forgot to mention that bit. 😂)

And OMG, it was so beautiful. As we sat outside the little jazz bar on the hill on the narrow cobbled street, white butterflies flitted in between the shade and the bright sunlight, the red geraniums tumbling from the light blue window boxes against the bluest of blue skies. The church bells rang. The most beautiful girl with delicate features and effortless French style presents us with a ‘bol’ and lovingly unwraps the cage around the neck of a small-but-perfectly-formed bottle of local cider, and gently nudges the cork with the perfect ‘pop’. It fizzes and shimmers like liquid gold in the sun, capturing the joie de vivre of the moment. As the gentle French folk-jazz voice of a beautiful female singer drifted from the little windows inside, I can feel the cortisol dissolving through my feet and we smile at each other.

“You’re right, Dad would have loved it here.”

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Tracey in the trenches

My friend Tracey once described a camping trip, where one of the lads brought along his new girlfriend, who then proceeded to do FK ALL, except gobble up the food that was given to her, like a fat, greedy chick, and laughed as she watched Tracey stagger off to the stream with yet another bowl full of pots to wash up.

“You wouldn’t want her down the trenches,” was Tracey’s summary of this woman’s total contribution to humanity.

And now, here I am in France. I am that same fat, lazy cuckoo, doing nothing but gobble and shit. Contributing nothing.

I wouldn’t want me down the trenches either.

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I am now writing this from the bed of our van. The dog has crawled between my legs, forcing me to sit in rather a ‘louche’ position. The van door is of course, wide open in case I couldn’t get out again, while The Hairy One stoically embarks on a twelve-day trek to find the nearest ‘Super U’ that sells Stan’s make of dog food. (Oh yeh, that was my only other responsibility for our trip - to make sure my dog’s needs were covered. 🙈)

Snuggled in from the safety of between my legs, Stan is enjoying his favourite pastime of barking threateningly at happy campers as they pass, clutching their morning baguettes or piss-pots of shame.

As they turn to look for this menacing beast, their eyebrows raise as they see me slumped awkwardly in bed, partially dressed, legs akimbo, the head of a scruffy terrier barely visible in between. I smile as I reflect on how different this image is from the one I had pictured in the insta-gold version of my ‘digital nomad life’, where I’d be sitting at a tidy table with my laptop and beautifully-yoga-erect back, donned in a Finisterre fisherman’s roll neck.

But little do they know that this awkward, imperfect lummox, is not a lady of the morning touting for business.

She is, in fact, a Crone-in-Training, re-remembering her life purpose.

Maybe in the trenches, I’ll write.

It worked for Wilfred Owen after all.

The Hairy Growler. Woof!🐶

Postscript: Just been into a bar in Nantes - check out the instructions on the slidey toilet door! 👇 😂

He does, indeed, move in mysterious ways…(side-to-side, not outwards).

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And finally. A happy Crone Birthday Bonjour to Crone Tiina Carr, Crone Lisa Ritson, Crone Gill Wilson, Crone Ellie Keegs, and to those I’ve missed! 🍻 💚 Also big thanks to Elie Orry and Kazza, Kettle of Fish Designs, for their help with Crone Club.

A bien tot.

Juzza.

Xxx