Even in a small place like Nailsea, there are quite a lot of people. Some of those are men; some of those men have vans. Many of those who drive vans, but not all, have selected white ones.  In fact, there are multifarious folk of different ages and gender, driving about all around the Clevedon area in various cargo vehicles of disparate brand, size, and hue, offering up their numerous services, but it’s the “white van man” who has proven his ubiquity and asserted his dominance enough to earn his own nomenclature. They are many. They are legion.   

And they are competitive.

This epiphany visited me this morning, as I pulled to a halt at a set of traffic lights on the high street.  The sun was routing last night’s frost and was warming the day enough  to allow me the opportunity to lower the windows and air the van’s cab following a house clearance job which had consisted predominantly of transiting huge piles of clothing so musty and pungent, I had suspected the deceased tenant of the house remained swaddled in them somewhere. 

When the white van pulled up alongside me, I noted that the other men of cargo therein had lowered their windows too, apparently, to air their disdain, not their cab, –which probably did need it, judging by the occupants. 

It’s surprising that when wanting to hide or pretend not to notice someone, we can get away with it if we are sitting behind less than 5mm of totally transparent glass window, as long as it is rolled up. As mine wasn’t, when the passenger of the white van turned to look me in the ear, I could not ignore the words he spoke directly into it.  

‘Green van,’ he said. Whether this was statement or question, remained unclear.  I turned to acknowledge the utterance that had come across like the stranded overture of an aborted haiku.    

‘Y–up,’ I said, with not enough of a smile. Hindsight revealed my retort to be way too glib to diffuse the tension. 

The young passenger pushed back his baseball cap as if he thought the peak had cast such a shadow over his face as to hide the fact that his mouth was working hard to chew what appeared effort-wise, to be an entire pack of gum. ‘Little wonder then, that he’d abandoned the sentence.  

I had, unwittingly, issued a challenge. The passenger nudged his driver to attention without breaking eye-ear contact. 

‘Looks like… “Van Diesel” here, has pimped his ride,’ he said, obviously more impressed with the vehicle-related moniker he had bestowed, than my paint job.  He spat his gum into the no man’s land between us, bringing a cyclist who had been attempting to shimmy his bike through the gap, to an abrupt halt. 

‘Oh really?’ Came the voice of the van’s driver as he leaned slowly into view to take in the spectacle that was my non-white van.  He punctuated the move with a little push on his accelerator. ‘Green, huh?’ he added.  

‘Short wheelbase, too,’ said the passenger who had slid forward to cross his forearms along his window’s length.  

‘It’s what I do with it that counts,’ I replied.  Too much of a smile this time; perhaps I should have turned my head rather than remaining eyes front.  

The attempt at a disarming comment had backfired and the challenge in the men’s minds was somehow now more strident.  Assuming I could rely on a liberal adjudication of the scenario from him, I looked into the wing mirror for a hope of succor from our sandwiched cyclist, but noted that he had cocked his head in scrutiny of my van and not and not the uncouth duo spoiling for a fight. If anything, the go-pro toting two-wheeler, appeared to recoil from what he saw, slowly mouthing the three syllables of the hastily sprayed graffito I had recently tried to remove from the vehicle. He met my entreating expression with a raised eyebrow worthy of Roger Moore, and said nothing.  

The silence was filled suddenly, with fervent revving as it became obvious that my foolish retort had been taken as a cocksure invitation to instigate an illegal, pre–breakfast, drag race along our town high street. The cyclist had already begun to back up, scraping a lengthy line of paint off my van with his handlebars as he went, seemingly, feeling totally justified in doing so as he flashed me an insincere thumbs up, announced that Vin Diesel was in fact “mixed race” and rode away on his bike/high horse thumping on the van’s rear doors on the way for good measure.  

I wound my window up in an attempt to avoid exhaust fumes and further conflict and kept my gaze locked forward.  The spurned passenger was not fooled by the glass barrier and was very much put out by my killjoy attitude and apparent rudeness.  He removed his hat and leaned forward out of his window, his eyes full of intent from what I could see from my limited front-biased periphery.  His left arm slid down and twisted to open his door with the external handle.  

The white van man in his white tank top and white paint-spattered jeans dropped down onto the black tarmac in front of a very yellow-bellied me.  The lights were yet to change to match the colour of my van and I scrambled to lock the door, slapping at the button while trying still to avoid eye contact. 

My new enemy crouched below view perhaps trying to gain purchase from the bottom of my door where the rubber seal had perished and left it vulnerable to prising.  I was suddenly gripped with fear that I had not locked the rear doors should he move on to them next, but then the man rose next to me and reached for my wing mirror to adjust it so our eyes met. 

He knew right then, that like all men who drive green, short wheel-based vans, that I was a coward.

In that same moment, the traffic lights changed finally to Amber and off I roared in my van, endangering children and pensioners alike; a proven milksop fleeing Clevedon high street in a van that smelled like a charity shop reject bin daubed with a subliminal racist motif. 

I checked the mirror to see the white van men seemed in no hurry to pursue and I noticed the passenger waving or perhaps gesturing that I was some kind of public onanist, I was not sure which but suspected the latter. In any case, I was safe.

And I had apparently won my first street race.

This hollow victory was indeed confirmed later on by the CCTV footage that was played back to me at the police station later that morning.  

Following my escape, adrenaline fuelled and clammy, I had stopped in a service station to readjust my wing mirror only to discover that the passenger of the white van had stepped out of his vehicle, not in an attempt to start a skirmish or prise my door open. Moreover, it transpired that he had alighted the van to retrieve his chewing gum which he had then, very swiftly, moulded with surprisingly consummate ability, into a sticky, spearmint–flavoured penis, complete with differing sized testicles, which he had then squashed onto my mirror, where it had retained a largely recognisable and undoubtedly offensive, form.   

I was in the process of reaching for the offending gum when I was confronted by a female police officer.  ‘I need you to put that down and step out of the vehicle, sir.‘ she said.   Professional as she was she, she gave me the impression that she was the kind of person who would have been horrified even at the concept of anyone keeping a piece of chewing gum behind their ear for later, let alone somebody who would chew gum, fashion it into an obscene genital caricature, affix it to the wing mirror of a green short wheelbase van, drive around town with it in full view of minors and then, reach for it later, a sweating and panting mess on a petrol station forecourt. 

When the backup the officer had requested arrived, replete with dog units, I had attracted quite a crowd. As cars arrived to fuel up, many stayed to watch the spectacle unfold as I was asked to kneel on the ground with my hands behind my head. The cyclist from earlier had stopped to talk to the group of police officers gathered around one of the many cars and riot van that had arrived. 

‘I’m sorry sir, but we take kidnapping very seriously’ the officer said as she secured my handcuffs. With that I was thrown in a van (predominantly white, with some blue and yellow check pattern) and taken to the local station.  I was left in a room with a table, two chairs and a two–way mirror, where, after some time, I was offered refreshments; tea, coffee and chewing gum.  I accepted tea and refused the tendered gum, but the young male constable who delivered my vending machine beverage produced from his pocket, between finger and thumb a packet of yellow juicy fruit and set it down on the table anyway. There was an uneasy eye contact as the packet was slid toward me with an audible friction, before released along with the PC’s gaze. He turned abruptly and left the room without a word.   

For some time I was distinctly conscious of being surveilled and fancied that I could hear murmuring from multiple presences behind the mirror as they waited to see if I could resist my primal urge to sculpt a phallus.