Birvidik

Shame about stage one.

Seventeen blogs ago we mentioned our ten point plan to escape the tyranny of the weather forecast by moving to a canal boat. The more attentive (or bored) among you may also remember that the first step in the grand design was to sell Birvidik and the second was to buy a campervan, with step three being to use said campervan to scour Europe for a suitable canal boat.

Step one has proved to be a bit of a sticking point. We've had quite a few viewings and a couple of nibbles, but no bites.

However, given the events in the previous blog we really needed to get back to Jersey to see our GP and get a quick once over and health MOT. We also needed to get back so that we could produce the rather Kafkesquely titled 'Certificate of Existence'. This was not, as I first thought, a documented answer to the thorny philosophical conundrum of the true nature of being. Rather, it was a piece of paper that the pensions people were demanding on pain of stopping Liz's stipend should we not come along and wave it under their noses. This, I thought, was just another example of Jersey leading the world in introducing more levels of regulation and bureaucracy than you'll find in a Home Office wet dream. As it happens, I was wrong. We were beaten to it by Italy where every adult has to have a notarised Certificato di Esistenza Vivente, or Certificate of Living Existence, before he can so much as fart.

In the light of all this we decided to skip stage one and go straight to stage 2. It was at this point that we found ourselves, once again, bogged down in bureaucracy.

You would think, in these days of gridlock and mass car ownership, that buying and running a road vehicle would be relatively straightforward. So it is for most people. Not for the likes of us, though. Not for us no-fixed-abode gypsies wandering about on the fringes of the bureaucratic mindset.

First of all, we wanted a left hand drive campervan, seeing as we intended to do all of our driving on the Continent. Luckily, there appeared to be plenty of these for sale throughout Europe, mainly in France, Germany and the Netherlands. So we did a bit of research, whereupon which we hit our first snag:

When you buy a motor vehicle in the EU you have to tax and insure it. Fair enough we thought. However, to tax and insure it, you have to register it in your name.

OK - we can go along with that.

However, to register it in your name you have to have a residential address in the country in which you register it. Which we don't. The only other option, apparently, was to buy the van, apply for temporary plates, and then export it. The problem is, where to. The obvious answer was to Jersey, where we do have an address.

This would have the great advantage of not having to bring the thing back to base every 12 months to have the MOT done as Jersey doesn't have MOTs. Over there vehicle safety is ensured by two, far more efficient, methods. The first is to instigate random road checks where traffic is brought to a crawl on major roads at rush hour while mechanically untrained policemen and bored Hobby Bobbies make cursory checks on about the level of making sure you have the requisite number of wheels.

The second is to wait until an accident actually occurs, as a result of say the brakes failing or a wheel falling off or the tyres being as smooth as Wayne Rooney's bonce pre-transplant , and then to bust the driver for driving a defective vehicle.

In view of all this I looked into registering a camper in Jersey and discovered a number of significant drawbacks. Chief amongst these was the requirement to bring the thing into Jersey and submit it to an inspection by the Driver & Vehicle Standards department to ensure that it met Jersey's stringent mechanical requirements. These included such things as a new speedometer showing mph, new headlights which dip to the left and a host of other irritating little details, all of which would make the thing manifestly unsuitable for driving on the continent. The fact that, once made, these changes would never again be subjected to official inspection was, of course, irrelevant.

We went back to the drawing board.

Further research revealed a couple of enterprising Dutch companies which offered an ingenious way round this very problem. They were originally set up to service the demand from antipodean travelers who wanted to buy a campervan, travel around Europe on it, and then sell it. These companies sell you the camper, issue you with a certificate of ownership and then arrange to carry the registration under contract for you and simultaneously arrange road tax and insurance. They'll even arrange the MOT and service it for you. At a price, of course.

Job's a good'un.

We thought this was another example of the Dutch leading the world in ingenuity and pragmatism, but the Italians had got in first again. There they even have a proverb for it - venire la legge, arriva il mezzo di evasione (As comes the law, so comes the means of evading it).

So we booked a cheap Hymer with one of the companies, flew to Amsterdam, picked the camper up from Utrecht and drove it back to Lefkas to pick up the cat.

Tune in next blogtime for the next, exasperating instalment of Three go a bit bonkers in a campervan.