Smudger Snippets
Created | Updated Jan 12, 2006
I suppose it's because I have so much time on my hands these days that all these memories come flooding back to me.
A Cold Winter
Today I find myself at loose ends; my wife is out for the day with her sisters and for the first time in ages I actually feel lonely. This is particularly strange for me as I have quite often spent the day alone here at home with my computer. When I first got this computer, just over two years ago now, I thought it would be impossible to get bored with it as it has so much to offer. It actually brings the world into your own house. Yet here I am, sitting in front of the screen desperately trying to think of something to write about. I think this has probably come about as I have written so much about my life in the past that I have run out of stories to tell. Then again, I thought to myself, this cannot be true. After all, it was only a few Snippets ago where I was bragging about how much life I had crammed into my first fifty years.
So I got up to go outside for a smoke. We have recently banned ourselves from smoking inside the house, as some of you may already know. When I say 'we' I mean my second wife, as we both had previous partners when we first met. I had returned from my job in Russia and was working away from home on an oil construction site in the South of Scotland when we met at my local pub. I think we both knew straight away that we were destined to be together, as we have been from that day on.
It was quite cold outside as I shivered standing at the door with my cigarette. That's when it suddenly hit me. I remembered the bitterly cold winter that we spent on the caravan site on our very first winter together — the first of many, we hoped at the time.
We had been living on a site just three miles away from my home town in a small touring caravan which we bought, naïvely thinking that my house would sell in the few weeks that the estate agent had said it would. Of course, the fact was that it had not and we were facing the winter in this small caravan together. So we asked the owner of the site if any of the larger static caravans he had on the site were for sale. He explained that we could not stay on his site through the winter as his license did not allow that. He did, however, have one for sale. The asking price would take every last penny that we had left between us, but he did say that there was a way round the licensing law which would be in our favour.
The idea he had was to sell us the caravan on the condition that we stayed in it all through the closed season as the site security and that he would place the static at the top of the site near the main entrance. We had no choice, really. I was still out of work and had been since being made redundant from the site where I last had worked — and besides, we had nowhere else to go. So we went ahead and bought this larger static caravan which, I must admit, was a lot more comfortable to live in with its built-in toilet and bathroom. In fact, it seemed ideal for us. So we moved all our worldly belongings from the small touring caravan, which he bought from us as part-exchange, into our new home. That was when we realised just how few possessions we actually had, but at least we were happy.
For the next few weeks it was great fun to be living in this new static and, in fact, we even had some of my new partner's family come up to visit us on occasions. Then, gradually, the winter began to creep in as the temperature dropped. It was around this time that I was contacted by an agency for temporary work out in Egypt. This brought along its own problem for us as I had already told my new partner that I would never work away from home again. Yet we both knew that we needed the money that this job would give us, money for a new start for us both. So, in the end, I agreed to go and with a heavy heart I left for my first part of the journey for my flight to London.
It must have been fate that took over because, after only a few weeks, the job in question was cancelled as the contract was taken over by another contractor. This meant I was no longer required and was given permission to return home. I must admit it was the first time ever in my life when I was actually glad to be paid off. It took me a few hours to contact the UK by phone to tell the good news of my return but, believe me, it was well worth the aggravation I had when I heard her voice on the other end of the phone.
A few days later I arrived back at the Highland airport from which I had left only a few weeks earlier, only to find that I had arrived home in the middle of a blizzard! It was freezing cold in the taxi as we drove back to our cosy caravan; I shivered all the way, as it had only been a couple of days since I was out in the scorching desert of Egypt working on a pipeline.
The weather closed in over the next few days and the temperature dropped even further. The side sheeting of the caravan was totally white with the frost and it cracked as the winters' sun tried its best to melt it with its feeble rays during the shorter days. The windows were all frozen on the inside, making it impossible to open them for the much-needed ventilation required due to condensation which ran down the walls inside the caravan as we tried to cook our meals. All of a sudden, the novelty of caravan living left us as we struggled to cope with the weather conditions. I think the final straw for us was the day we awoke to find that the water in the toilet had frozen overnight, both in the bowl and the cistern, despite the small heater we had left on overnight. In fact, it had been so bitterly cold during that night that the water-supply pipe to our van had frozen solid between the ground and the underside of the caravan. I had to rig up an extension and crawl underneath with a hair drier to try and defrost it; eventually I had to borrow a heat gun meant for stripping paint for the job. It took about an hour before the ice eventually melted, so while I was under there I wrapped all the pipes including all the drain pipes to try and prevent that from happening again. After that, we had to de-ice the water cistern for the toilet, which we eventually managed to do by boiling water on the gas stove and pouring it over the ice.
I suppose that, looking back on it now, it all seems by the way, but at the time it was really serious for us. The sense of humour we both shared was put to the test later on that evening when I was having a shower because I had got really dirty crawling under the van earlier that day. I had just finished washing my hair and I was all soaped up when the gas bottle ran out! I had to get dressed as best I could before I got the spanner and went outside to change over the bottle. I put the tea cosy on my head because I didn't have a hat but needed to cover my head as it was still blowing a blizzard outside. It was when I came rushing back in and tried to stop the door from being blown away whilst standing there shivering with this tea cosy on my head and wearing old blankets that we both burst out laughing at the same time.
So I suppose, looking back on it all now, there were some good times along with the bad.
