The man is white, the van, against urban tradition, is not; it is actually green.

Technically, that still makes me a “white, van man”, but I look a little more eco friendly and less likely to pull up next to you in the street with a passenger that looks like an extra from the football factory who offers to sell you discount speakers which turn out to be boxes full of bricks.

But I still get the jobs like any other guy with a cargo vehicle and an advertising campaign and so today, I had been charged with collecting some sand and cement from a local home improvement store in St Pauls for delivery to a house in Nailsea.  That is not all i do, I also do fast and efficient house, garage and garden clearances in the Clevedon, Nailsea and Portishead area.

When I got to the store, I headed to the welcome counter and greeted the attendant whose badge claimed that he was “happy to help”. I was in a chatty mood and made a light-hearted comment that I’d mention the store’s name in the old blog here in exchange for a small discount.  The counter guy said he’d seen me drive in and didn’t think too many people would be checking out a “green van man” page and that they’d probably survive without my affiliation.

I kept it jovial and quipped that I was a white van man on a technicality, but I don’t think I sold that rejoinder well enough, because before I could finish the bits about technicalities, discount speakers or eco-friendliness, I could tell that he was feeling uneasy about wearing the badge and any discount I’d angled for was about to become a surcharge for racism.

Looking back on it now, that kind of wordplay probably works much better in the context of a thought-out opener for a white/green van man’s ongoing blog on a website for a logistics business than it does to when used in a shop on a complete stranger who’s only indulging in cursory communication and is half listening to an iPod.  To be honest, I thought I’d kind of fluffed the whole thing together a bit in the store, so there’d been a chance I came across more as a tracksuit-wearing, bald, builder guy banging on about football hooliganism and demanding preferential treatment.

“We don’t accept racialism here, sir”, the counter guy warned with an admonishing finger waggle.  A couple of large patrons who were exiting the store turned to me, eyed me up and down, before the door closed behind them.

“But we do accept Visa!” he roared. “Or cash.”

The counter guy had figuratively put on his comedian badge and to be fair, the deadpan cad had earned it. He’d also proven that I’d done a better job on the real-world van man trope than I had thought.

He chuckled to himself, his body language had become a cornucopia of welcome and he leaned forward on the counter.

“Yeah I actually had a couple of guys in a white van pull up and try to sell me speakers when I was walking home once”, he said. “They had a laminated page from some foreign magazine with some snazzy looking speakers I’d never even heard of and a story about being given extra units in their inventory.  I’d read about a routine exactly like it in a hi-fi magazine in the 90’s. Victims invariably ended up with a pile of shit speakers or a box of bricks with comparable sound quality; either way, it was always a scam.  You’d have thought if they never changed their story, they could have at least mixed up the colours of the van at least?”

Then it was my turn to be deadpan: ” Well you can’t have miscegenation, now can you?” I followed it up with an eye roll just to solidify the irony.

I hadn’t noticed the next patron behind me leaving as I’d spoken that last line, but I felt the door slam behind what I guessed to be quite a large, unimpressed one. He definitely hadn’t seen the eye roll.

“Bad timing,” said counter guy.  “Tell you what, I’ll give you a discount for cash.”

It was a nice gesture, but the saving fell short of the cost of the paint remover I needed to remove the newly sprayed  “WHITE KLAN MAN” from the side of the van.