Getting sunburnt the vantastic way

FORGET hay fever and barbecue-induced food poisoning, because I’ve just discovered a far more annoying summer disease. This week, I’m suffering from Van Driver’s Arm.

That’s right; my arm is redder than a Liverpool shirt, and it’s all because I stepped away from the world of cars and drove, for the first time ever, a Ford Transit. On a day when Lancashire felt more like Lanzarotte, I’d like to say I became White Van Man, but I can’t. I was White Van Man With A Red Arm.

Anyone who’s ever hired a van on a hot summer morning, journeyed north, and then headed home on an even more blistering afternoon will know exactly what I’m on about when I whinge that the sun has to move about so that the same arm conveniently gets burnt again on the return run. It still hurts now.

Van Driver’s Arm is a disease with all sorts of symptoms; elevated sense of driving position, insistence on driving a white vehicle, inexplicable urge to buy copies of The Sun, that sort of thing. Fully fledged cases can even lead to severe bouts of tailgating, but luckily I managed to avoid the more severe symptoms (although I am still suffering from the need to make crass generalisations).

I was only exposed to the world of White Van Man for a few hours, but I thought it rocked as much as the music every Transit driver I’ve ever met listens to. How can something so enormous be so much fun to drive?

It might be the same size as my old student flat but I still decided to take it down one of my favourite driving roads on the way up to Carlisle, and it impressed endlessly. Every modern Ford I’ve ever driven has clearly been set up by someone who loves driving, and even in something as enormous and workmanlike as the Transit it shows.

Even when you’re tootling around town you soon forget just how big it is, so natural is it to drive, and there’s something about its hard-wearing plastics and big, chunky cupholders which suit it perfectly. It might have got my right arm sunburnt but besides that I really couldn’t fault it.

It’s just a shame I forget to tie the boxes in the back down before I took it down the back roads. Oops!