On Sunday I cleaned the van myself, with waterless cleaner and a great heap of rags, there being no water at the storage site. I scrubbed off the dust and the green algae that had crept across the body panels in the damp. The inside needed nothing. It never has. It looked, as it always has, like something just out of the showroom and never lived in.

The drive itself was a hundred and ten miles, up and round to a site near Bedford. The weather was balmy for the time of year, the low twenties and clear. I set off wondering whether I had chosen the right day, the route taking me around roughly half of the M25 (the great orbital motorway that encircles London in a single unbroken ring some hundred and seventeen miles round) from the M23 in the south up to the M1 in the north. I had not chosen well. The north-east quadrant was closed after an accident, so everything heading north had been swung clockwise, all of it piling onto the traffic already going that way. There were long stretches at a dead standstill. The first fifty-five miles, as far as just past Heathrow, took two hours. The second fifty-five, mostly motorway up the M1, took one. The ring road’s average speed is about twenty-five miles an hour against a seventy limit, so the whole hundred-and-seventeen-mile loop takes some five hours to drive round, and my morning sat squarely on that dismal figure.

Three things stood out from the crawl. The first was an aircraft. As I passed Heathrow a large jet lifted off and crossed more or less overhead, perhaps a couple of hundred metres up, the sound of it deep and thundering through the cab. A long-haul twin of that size, a 777 sort of thing rather than the very largest, leaves the ground at something in the region of two hundred and fifty to three hundred tonnes. A few hundred tonnes held aloft because the air moves a little faster over the top of the wing than beneath it. I sat in stationary traffic and thought about that for a while, the plain physics of it, which is no less of a marvel for being explicable.

The second was the road as memory. I drove this exact stretch, south to north, as a daily commute about thirty years ago, home near Gatwick to work in Kings Langley, the very same morning run I was making today. Around eighteen months of it, when I was accountant for a car sales firm. Back then they were widening the motorway from three lanes to four, and five in places. I am genuinely not sure how I managed it. We are far more resilient when we are young, and have less sense of what we are spending. There is a small irony in it, the road enlarged all those years to carry ever more traffic, and here it was today at a complete stop.

The third was the police. At two separate points on the M25, an unmarked car threaded through the stationary lanes with its blue lights going, one a BMW M3, the other a hot version of a VW Golf. Both looked exactly like the cars you would expect to belong to someone with rather grand ideas of themselves: heavily tinted, immaculate, sitting on big wheels, built to the eye for a lap of the Nürburgring rather than for police work. How convincingly disguised these things have become struck me each time, two cars I would never have looked at twice until the lights came on.

I reached the auction site, did the paperwork, took an Uber to Bedford station and the Thameslink home, about two and a half hours of trains. The auction follows next week.

There is a symmetry to the day I cannot ignore, a van bought to cross the world yet scarcely driven before being given up, and given up along the very road I knew intimately three decades back. What is most honest to record, though, is how little I felt as I handed it over. I never bonded with it. I want to be fair: it is not a bad van. It is a genuinely good example, everything working as it should, every control precise and clean. But it always felt like just a van, and nothing ever formed between us. The contrast is with Morrison, which has real character, a more physical thing to drive, noisier, harsher, given to wallowing on its great tyres and raised suspension. You always know when you have driven Morrison. Today I drove a hundred and ten miles to part with a vehicle I had owned for two years, and felt no pang at all, and that absence is the truest thing I can set down about the day.

The mileage tells the truth more plainly than I could. A hundred and twenty-one thousand when I bought it; a hundred and twenty-two now. A thousand miles in just under three years, and a good chunk of those will be today.

I brought it home on the first of July, near enough two years ago, in the same state of excitement I had carried back from Germany. It promptly took over the driveway. It blocked the garage, made a nuisance of itself for ordinary daily use, and stood there far larger than the life around it. I measured the whole chassis end to end and built it up in CAD, and then arranged storage elsewhere simply to have our drive back.

After that I kept at the CAD in the evenings, working through the habitation box, how it might mount, how the living space would divide. The mounting was the part that weighed most. A ladder-frame truck chassis is meant to flex and twist along its length as the wheels ride over rough ground; that is not a fault, it is the design working. Bolt a rigid box straight onto a frame that moves like that and it will tear at its fixings or crack apart over a season or two. The accepted answer is a torsion-free subframe, often a three-point arrangement, which lets the chassis twist beneath the box while the box stays largely unstressed. I spent a great many evenings turning that problem over, and part of why getting it right felt so heavy was that there is no casual version of it.

And yet it never felt right. I could not have told you why. I would go back to the model, move things about, and never once arrive at the quiet certainty of that’s the one. Time passed. The van sat in the storage compound gathering dust, out of sight and, soon enough, out of mind. I had to put it through its MOT twice and have it serviced once over those years, and even those small duties were awkward. At over three and a half tonnes the thing counts as a heavy goods vehicle, so it needs a specialist MOT test station, and there are few of those, generally booked weeks ahead. Servicing was easier in principle, since any garage may service it, but at close to nine metres long very few garages would take it through their doors.

Two things slowly changed my mind, though I did not feel them as a turning at the time. At Allrad in 2025, our second visit, we went round deliberately looking at the smaller vehicles and at the Bruder off-road caravans, asking ourselves what we genuinely needed and how little space it might actually take. Then, later in 2025, we spent a fortnight in a small coach-built camper in Portugal, and we came away thinking that even that had been larger than we needed, given a bit of discipline in the planning. That was the start of the search for the new vehicle, the one we now call Morrison. The dropside, meanwhile, went on sitting unused, immaculate inside because it had never once been put to any purpose.

What finally moved it was not a fresh insight. It was the insurance and tax coming up for renewal. That administrative nudge brought the van back to mind, and I decided there and then to enter it into a commercial auction, which takes place next week.

I have been turning over what to take from all this. The honest version is unflattering. A vehicle bought to cross the world covered about a thousand miles in two years, sat in a compound, and quietly cost me specialist test bookings, the hunt for a garage long enough, and tax and insurance ticking over month after month for a thing I never saw. The deeper lesson is the one about being out of sight. Once it was stored away the problem stopped nagging at me, but it did not go away; it simply persisted, unsolved, for years. The right order of priorities would have had me face the thing that plainly was not working, rather than let distance and inertia decide it for me. I named the conflict only in hindsight, that pull between a big box built for developed-world comfort and a wish to go light and far, and even now I hold the naming of it loosely.

The van (not Morrison) went off to auction today, and the drive up gave me the better part of three hours to think about how I came to own it at all. So I will set the beginning down first, while the whole shape of the thing is in my head.

It began, properly, more than two years before I ever bought a vehicle. There was a plan, an overland tour that would take us right across the world, and for a long time it lived only as reading, calculation and argument with myself and then discussed with Ochi. Then in 2024 we went for the first time to Abenteuer & Allrad at Bad Kissingen, the great off-road and expedition gathering, around two hundred and fifty exhibitors spread across the ground with everything from roof tents and cookers to vehicles the size of small houses. We gave it two and a half days. We climbed inside as many builds as would let us, talked to the people who make them, and learned more in those few days than in the previous year of reading.

The spread of what was there has stayed with me. At the modest end, Toyota pickups carrying a compact living box on the back, or Ineos Grenadiers fitted out with storage, a few pull-out fittings and a roof tent. At the other, six-wheeled all-wheel-drive monsters with four-wheel steering, twenty tonnes and more, and a handful of eight-wheeled things that looked built to cross a continent without noticing it was there. Walking between the two extremes did most of our deciding for us.

I came home full of it and went straight to the classifieds. Within a short while I had found what looked ideal: a one-owner 2016 Sprinter 516 dropside, extra-long wheelbase, full service history, a hundred and twenty-one thousand miles on it. I bought it.

The design brief in my head was by then quite firm. We did not want one of the fifteen-tonne-plus luxury expedition trucks. They are magnificent, but we wanted to take narrow mountain passes as well as open country, and I wanted to be able to mend the thing myself in a field if it came to that. Changing a wheel on one of the giants means wrestling something close to or over a hundred kilograms; a single military-pattern tyre, a 395/85 R20, is around ninety-five to a hundred kilograms before you even add the rim. That just did not seem like any fun at the roadside in the middle of nowhere. So I set a ceiling of seven and a half tonnes and meant to stay under it.

Against that, we wanted the comforts of home, and comfort costs both volume and weight. I had a target habitation box of roughly five and a half metres by two point two by two point two, divided properly into kitchen, shower room, bedroom and living room, with a garage at the back for bicycles, spares and tools. A washing machine. Air conditioning. Working from those, I reckoned on at least two hundred and fifty litres of water, the washing machine being a thirsty thing, and around fifteen kilowatt-hours of stored energy. The box itself I meant to build in composite throughout, carbon fibre and glass fibre according to where each belonged, and bring in at about two to two and a half tonnes.

The dropside made sense for a reason that seemed obvious once I had it. A dropside body is the easiest of all to strip away, leaving the chassis clean and exposed for a separate habitation box to be mounted on it. The extra-long wheelbase I chose simply because, at the time, I thought we needed a large box to live in.

On paper it was coherent. I had thought it through honestly and the numbers held together. Sitting here now, I can see the seed of the later trouble sitting quietly inside that coherence: a big box, sized for living the way one lives in a comfortable house, set against a wish to travel light and travel far. I did not see it then. I see it now, though I am not yet sure I have fully made my peace with it.