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. 

I’d actually bought the sticker as a bluff as there used to be a whole shed load of tools in there every night, but, as I had no shed, the sticker seemed a cheaper option than building one. 

To be honest, even if I had the shed, I wouldn’t have fancied lugging all of those tools out of the van, through my house and into it; who needs the hassle of loading back up in the morning too? 

As it turns out, the shed would have been the better option, as I was greeted today with an addendum, scraped with a finger in the grime on the van door, that struck out the “overnight” on the sticker and offered “now!” as the more accurate alternative.  I had been burgled and edited; wronged and corrected. 

To add insult to injury, when I opened fully, the rear doors that had been left ajar, I noticed that someone had placed a small Fischer Price toolbox next inside the van, right next to the bearded homeless guy who had also apparently taken up residence for the night.  

‘There’s no tools in ‘ere.’ he grunted, before I could speak. ”guy who owns this vans takes ‘em out overnight’. He held up the child’s toolbox and shook it for emphasis; what I now know with certainty to be urine spilled out into the van.  ”nice of him to leave me this though,’ he said. ‘The bloke asked me to give him a hand shifting the tools to his other van and told me I could kip in here if I did.  Do you mind?’. 

‘I most certainly do!’  I said, before realising he was entreating privacy, gesturing at the doors as he pulled at the string that held up his stained trousers.  

He positioned the toolbox down behind him while maneuvering to squat above it, and for an awful moment, we locked eyes as he smiled gratefully, gave a thumbs up and leaned to pull the doors closed.  His fixed, yellowed grin seemed to hang in the gloom before micro shifting subtly,  to convey a desperate, teeth-grinding strain, until the doors mercifully, severed our connection. 

“Clunk”.  

Then Silence. 

Then an eruption of gas and spatter from between what must have been particularly stubborn clots, and I was forced back, like a naked child from a house fire that had claimed both his parents and his teddy. 

So that’s my day so far. And that, Mr Armitage, is why I am late in coming over to do the tip run you requested yesterday.  I’m currently in the house waiting for the homeless man to vacate and air the van but will be with you once he has moved on. 

I must apologise to my other customers today, also.  There may be a slight delay before we regain regular service, just like my new tenant’s bowels.  

The story begins on a cold wet December morning, the phone rings, I was wanted to clear out a garage that had once belonged to a now deceased old lady.

Outwardly the garage was quite ordinary internally there was the usual collection of old mattresses and other unwanted items.

Lurking in a corner was an odd metal box.

At this point I would like to say that before the box was opened I was not in the least bit spiritual I was your regular beer drinking McDonald’s eating white van man!

The box was sealed shut and locked with an old rusty padlock. Now every waste clearance guy has his trusty crowbar in the back of the van for prising open old cases etc so I set to work, after a fair amount of grunting and bashing the lock begrudgingly sprang free.

If ever there is a point in your life when you know things will never be the same again this was it for me.

As the lid creaked open on its arthritic hinges and with that an unmistakable surge of invisible petulant beings rushed past me, it was like they had been trapped for eternity. Immediately I slammed the lid down but it was to late, they were out!!!

Swirling around my head I could hear the voices of animals and the crys of forgotten tribal leaders, it was not scary but rather I felt their anguish I felt uplifted and for a moment I forgot I was a white van man, I felt like my consciousness had been split into a million atoms and spread all around the world.

The crys softened and then disappeared and an eire quietness returned to the garage.

I took these masks home and treasured them, sometimes late at night I can still hear the forgotten war crys and wailing of enchanted creatures.

I sadly have to part with these masks I have to let the spirits free my only wish is for them to go to a good home, a place where they will be free to roam and free to do what all good spirits need to do…

Happy bidding!

For the full set please see my other items.

I’m not sure if it’s important but some of the masks have a strange wax stamp internally?

Close your eyes for a moment, and imagine an old van (long wheel base, high top with battle scars) and it is a hot sunny day, the windows are down and inside the van are three guys (or gals), they are cruising down the A38 with Guns and Roses (Sweet Child of Mine) playing.  They are swapping stories from the weekend whilst slurping hot coffee on their way to a hard day’s work.  Unless you have been there, you can’t really begin to understand the joy of being a WVM.

You don’t stop being A WVM when you don’t own a van anymore, it’s something that stays with you forever, it’s a sense of belonging and being part of a team.  Becoming a WVM is not easy, it requires years of early starts, lifting heavy weights, working long hours in all weathers, compromising with difficult customers and supporting your mates through bad times.  That said, when you get home you feel a warm buzzing sensation deep inside you, and this is the WVM feeling, it’s a feeling of I’ve worked hard, had fun and earnt some good coin, roll on tomorrow!

You will find that in every van there are the unwritten rules that everyone sticks to, for example, in my van we have three rules; absolutely no sexist jokes, no farting on Tuesdays, and no swearing out of the window.   There are different rules in different vans, but there is one overriding rule that applies to all vans, and that is what’s talked about in the van stays in the van!

WVM have a bad reputation of being a bit ill tempered, dirty and foul mouthed, but please don’t forget we are the backbone of the country, we put up the scaffolding, fix the fences, mend the pipes and much much more.  If you are lucky enough to live with a WVM, or have one coming to do a job, please remember they need loving – reach out to them, hug them and say thanks for everything.

I was on a garden clearance job recently and a customer said to me.

“Nigel what is your secret to looking so fit and Healthy?”

To which I replied.

“There is no secret it is simply plenty of exercise combined with a balanced vegetarian diet!”

When mentioning you’re a vegetarian to meat eaters it is common for them to proudly lift their top lip and show you their canine teeth and then proclaim hey look we are meant to eat meat.

These days I have a well-rehearsed facial expression that condenses my inner frustrations into one simple emoji.

Yes, we do have two small canine teeth but that’s where our similarity with carnivores stops.  I am not going to try and argue that we are not meant to eat meat but simply try and put forward a reasoned argument as to why we should consume a lot less meat.

My explanation starts a very, very long time ago, fire was the latest discovery and the must have gadget was a flint stone axe which was great for intimidating those nightmare neighbours next-door but was also handy in the kitchen for slicing and crushing vegetables.  It’s approximately 2.5 million years ago mobile phones are yet to be invented and the must have real estate was a cave with a view over the valley.

Eating was a survival necessity and there were two choices either forage and gather food like fruits, roots and vegetables which was easy and nourishing or go hunting which might have been exciting but it was very dangerous and many of our distant ancestors would of sadly lost their lives trying to bring back a tasty Sabre Tooth Tiger for tea. 

So, faced with the choice of ‘Gathering’ food or ‘hunting’ the easiest and safest choice was the nuts and berries for tea it stayed like this for a very, very long time. 

Fast forward to today and food is plentiful, packaged, processed and does not bite back.  Our cave man brain which has been slow to adapt to these changes and whispers to us, eat, stuff yourself this might be your last meal!  So, we over consume forgetting that evolution is a slow process and ignoring the possibility that maybe our physiology might not be equipped for all this meat.

Physiology, I hear you say, what’s he talking about?  Well take our closet biological cousins the apps their diet is predominantly vegetarian which means like us they have complex and specialised digestive system suitable for breaking down vegetable matter, this is very different to the short digestive systems of carnivores which evolved for breaking down meat.

What about those canine teeth? Well humans like cows and other Herbivores have a mouth full of flat grinding teeth that have evolved to aid the crushing of vegetable matter.  Now compare this to lions, these chaps like other carnivores have a mouth full of razor sharp teeth, claws and a strong neck which aids with ripping chucks of flesh off their prey.   We don’t share any of these attributes except maybe for our little canine teeth.

Different people have different motivations for being vegetarian for me it’s about being kinder to the environment, healthier and saving money.

Disclaimer:  This has been written for entertainment purposes only if you need dietary advice please speak to a Doctor or Dietician and not a white / green or and other coloured van man or me.

The power of laziness is being taken seriously in business, for example Amazon is trialling a 30 hr week with 75% of full pay and benefits.   The thinking is, if staff are allowed more time off their productivity and creativity increases.  Please don’t confuse laziness with sitting around watching TV and eating fast food.  Good quality laziness is time spent doing nothing important, strangely its quite hard doing nothing important!  When you are not doing anything important your free to think and thinking about nothing important can lead to new ideas and perspectives.

Laziness and mindfulness go hand in hand, here are some tips on how to be a better loather:

1. Most importantly unplug from technology.
2. Take a lazy walk with nowhere to go. 
3. Advertise your new silly business idea. (Fortune telling for pets maybe)
4. Learn a circus skill, who knows where that might lead…
5. Spend all day in just your pyjamas.
6. Listen to your favourite childhood pop songs.
7. Go barefoot around the park.
8. Eat dinner by candlelight.
9. Do something silly – have a pillow fight.
10. Try and peel an orange in one piece.
11. Feed the birds.
12. Gaze at a tree or cloud.

When I go to the zoo I always find watching the monkeys most interesting, these guys are our closest biological relatives and they have it all figured out.  Basically, when not sleeping they spend most of the day socialising, picking bugs from each other, eating and generally messing about.  I’ve tried to find my inner monkey but somehow it does not pay the bills and after not washing for a week I found socialising quite difficult…

Disclaimer:  This has been written for entertain purposes only, if you need advice on being lazy its best you speak to a teenager and not a white van man, green van man or any other coloured van man or me.

The job had seemed relatively straight forward and all we were to do was collect a musty stack of old carpets and bring them down the large flight of steps from the front door to the road and our waiting van below. When we arrived, our employer had already brought two carpets down to the kerbside and was perched on the end of the rolls, smoking a cigarette. He waved us in and we proceeded to bring the others bundles down one by one.

What we were not aware of was that the ongoing feud between our employee and his neighbour, with several historical incidents and minor disputes over car parking, noise and their shared staircase to their front doors.

Knowing his fussbudget neighbour’s proclivity for curtain-twitching, our employer had staged a noisy ruckus in the early hours and then drawn ample attention while carrying his rolled carpets down the staircase and had given his neighbour a further something to notice from behind his Venetian blinds, with the thoughtful addition of a pair of boots protruding from one end of his shouldered burden during both his journeys. We had not noticed them hidden from view as he sat smoking on our arrival.
With the rest of our employer’s housemates all away since the early hours of that morning, the scene was set for the resident busybody to make a leap of judgement and squander police time with the ill-considered assumption and report of a mass murder in which we were then, by extension, complicit.

I have to admit to being quite impressed with the resourcefulness of our employer in his ploy to irk and embarrass his rival, but the inconvenience of detention while the police unravelled exactly who was at fault here, put the kibosh on our plans for a cooked breakfast at cafe fusion. Apparently, we had been required to complete the gaslighting gambit as our employer only drove a mini and needed a more convincing method of “disposal”. At least he paid us a healthy bonus.

BadaBing! –Of course! That explains why people keep confusing me with Tony Soprano! ‘either that, or the fact that I shall work tirelessly, at any time of the day, sometimes moving around quietly, in the middle of the night, to solve your waste problems, no matter how dirty or difficult (so long as they are in the Westcountry area). 

To be honest, my accent is Somerset at best, and hailing from the region, even if I did drink, it would have to be cider, lest I be run out of town in a hail of over-ripe apples(which incidentally, I am often called upon to clear up).  I don’t smoke cigars, although I was once enlisted to remove up a burned mattress after one of my clients fell asleep smoking a roll-up, but that is a close as I get. 

As for the baldness and the paunch, they are a grim reality that in no way affects my ability to get the job done.  Countless house clearance jobs have afforded me access to many unwanted hats, wigs and girdles, which I will happily don should the task require and I will drive well to a wide range of radio airplay accompaniment.  Whether I drive with my windows up or down is my business, but more often than not, it’s simply weather dependent.                                

I do however, regularly visit a therapist, and she will not mind me telling you that her name is Dr Jennifer Monki.  She is my regular, stalwart support; sometimes thrice weekly, and I am glad to have her.  Doctor Monki’s methods border on the unorthodox, but are nonetheless responsible in part, for getting me up in the morning and enabling me to earn the honest crust that I do.  

Before you reconsider unleashing what you may believe to be an unstable, but competitively priced, refuse operative into your domestic or business environment, I would just like to mention a little more about Doctor Monki’s groundbreaking practices. During her therapy sessions, which focus on the healing power of tactile engagement, it is not unknown for her to bring an entire troop of monkeys into her group sessions, wherein those in need of succour, can cuddle, caper, groom and bond with a variety of Rhesus Macaques, or dress up in furry suits and opt in to the experimental and rather more vigorous, Bonobo and Chimp “Primal Cave” sessions.   

Whether it is scraped from the walls in the aftermath of a hardcore chimp party, or merely swept up from the floor of the multiple primate enclosures in Dr Monki’s rolling country estate, I arrive as many times a week as is needed, to affect the safe and hygienic removal and transportation of the many byproducts of Dr Monki’s apparently effective, zoological primate programme, and she remains to this day, one of my most valued and satisfied repeat customers.   

Doctor Monki, and I suspect that name to be as real as the qualifications hanging on her spattered walls, has often been kind enough to offer payment via therapeutic treatments(she must have heard about me accepting girdles), but I fear I would have to seek more conventional therapy after attending any her classes and I do not entirely trust the lengthy waiver I would have to sign. Having said that, many of the clients I see emerging from the cellar where they are hosed down and given their antibiotic shots, do appear to be relatively happy and have perfectly normal waste-disposal requirements, as I have been glad to discover  

So now that you have read this far and in doing so, have hopefully assuaged any doubts, you may have had about my professionalism or competence, I challenge you to “put your mess, to the test” and phone for a quote today. I also urge you to visit Dr Monki’s place, not necessarily for her services, but to cast an eye over what is undoubtedly a remarkably well-kept and pristine estate, in which I am proud to do my part to maintain. 

Pick up the phone. 

No time wasters, please; but waste-makers are welcome. 

Like most WVM I often get asked for fashion advice and some of you might have been to one of my sell-out talks in Paris, Milan or Worle however if you haven’t then I have two top tips, use stripes to enhance your shape and contrast to spotlight your best features.

As tradesmen, we wear high visibility jackets with reflective stripes, as well as being a useful safety garment they are also perfect for staff that are vertically challenged and horizontally gifted as the vertical stripes give an impression of height which in turn makes someone look thinner.

Stripes are also useful if you want to draw attention to your best assets, for example, if you have a party coming up and would like to draw attention to your fantastic hips then ensure your stripes are running horizontally, keep the stripes narrow to be more effective.

Now be careful with using contrast in your fashion it’s easy to get it wrong, for example, the other day one of my chaps made the fatal mistake of turning up to work wearing tan coloured work boots which clashed horribly with his orange high visibility jacket.  Belt buckles and necklaces are a great way to create contrast in a subtle yet effective way.

Comments to – clevedonmanwithvan@gmail.com

Disclaimer:  This has been written for entertainment purposes only, if you need fashion advice you should speak to a stylist and not a White Van Man, Green Van Man or any other coloured van man or me.