My wife and I are discussing our divergent weekend plans. “I’m leaving early tomorrow,” I say. “About 10.30.”
“And I am also leaving early tomorrow,” my wife says.
“You mean Saturday,” I say.
“No, I mean tomorrow,” she says.
The pit of my stomach drops: because of our divergent plans, I’ve been obliged to lease a vehicle to get the band’s drums, drummer and mandolin player to one of two festivals.
“I’ve hired the van for the wrong day,” I say. “You never said you were leaving tomorrow.”
“Yes, I did,” she says. “Just change the reservation.”
“You can’t just change a reservation!” I shout.
It turns out you can: there’s actually a button on the website labelled “change reservation”. It takes seconds.
“I fixed everything,” I say when I return downstairs. “With enormous difficulty.”
The next morning, I walk to the van-hire office. I’m anticipating problems with my last-minute changes, but everything seems to be in order.
“We’ve given you the next size up,” the man behind the counter says.
“Great,” I say. “Wait, what?”
Behind me something pulls up in front of the office window, blotting out the sun.
“No extra charge,” the man says.
I maintain an air of calm as I climb into the driver’s seat of what is, essentially, a truck. I save my panic for when, seconds later, I gently flap wing mirrors with a parked van on a bend. I do not think about how I’m going to get my giant van to the festival. I need to get it home first.
“I’m glad I’m not driving it,” the mandolin player says when he arrives at my house.
“I can’t believe I’m even allowed to drive it,” I say. “It’s bigger than my sitting room.”
Cornbury festival takes place in a scenic part of rural Oxfordshire that was not laid out with the high-sided vehicle driver in mind. It has only two kinds of bridges: weak bridges and low bridges.
“How much does that thing weigh, do you think?” the mandolin player asks.
“No idea,” I say.
I crawl along narrow lanes, holding my breath. Beepers meant to alert me to the proximity of obstacles go off almost continuously. My hands ache from gripping the steering wheel, but they relax once we pass through the festival gates: the temporary roads laid across the fields are designed to accommodate Razorlight’s tour bus. I’ve got nothing but room.
We leave the drummer and his drums backstage. I park, as instructed, on a sloping grass verge, nose downhill, alongside the dressing rooms. In my mirror I can see three bearded men – roadies, perhaps – watching me from lawn chairs on the opposite verge.
“Well driven,” the mandolin player says.
“It’s really not difficult,” I say, “once you’re used to it.”
The mandolin player goes off to find someone in charge, while I set about unloading. The three bearded men stare as I open the back. With the world-weary air of someone who knows his way around a high-sided vehicle, I climb into the van and walk to the far end where our stuff is gathered. As I pick up my banjo, gravity begins to tug the door closed; before I can get there, it drops into place with a slam.
There must be an inside latch, but my fingers can’t find it in the pitch dark. My phone, I realise, is sitting on the dashboard. After 30 seconds of fruitless scrabbling, I give myself permission to panic. I bang frantically on the doors, then wait. In the endless silence that follows, I picture the three bearded men, who have watched the whole thing, just sitting there.
