11 oct

The hell, it’s cold. It might have been freezing during the night. Not the kind of weather where you have to push the shower button twenty times before there is a shallow imitation of warm water trickling out.
Not the kind of weather either where you would want your heater to break, which is exactly what it did, yesterday. That means suffering, reading with blankets over legs and fingers that get so cold that they can hardly move anymore.
When we bought Merlin we were happy to see there was a gas heater in it. That would be an essential asset for the long winter months we were planning to spend in France. Paul, the guy that serviced our camper – not to be confused with Paul, the seller of the camper, the servicer is Good Paul, the seller Bad Paul – quickly helped us out of that dream. With all the things that were wrong with the camper, the heater was the most threatening. It leaked tremendously, to use it would be to commit suicide, he warned. So out went this lovely antique heater.
“It was no problem”, Good Paul said. “Just use one of these little electric blow heaters. Not one of the ones you use at home, but one of the low wattage ones we sell in the store.” He helpfully suggested Julie to buy the least expensive one. “That’s the one we use in our caravan”, he told Julie.
£15 the heater costed and it helped us through the first cold and rainy week here. Then we forgot about heaters when the temperature reached thirty degrees.
Those days are gone and we needed the heater again. For some reason the heater didn’t like the bumpy rides we have. It constantly had fallen from its ill chosen travelling spot. When we tried to start it the fan wouldn’t move. But just hitting it very hard, my only way to repair electronics, proved to make it work again. Quite magical.
Another ride, another few falls later and another few hits later the fan started working again, but the heating element had stopped working. Circulating cold air is even more unpleasant than plain cold air, we found out.
A new heater seemed to be the solution. The closest caravan store was closed. Fermeture exceptionelle, it said on the front door. We weren’t going to face another cold night, so we went out to find a Mr. Bricolage, Julie’s favourite stomping ground, as you know. It turned out they sell regular fan heaters for as little as €6,90. Which is an unbelievable price, if you ask me. Just to imagine that they fabricate it in China and send it all the way over here for the price of two cups of coffee makes one appreciate the wonders of globalisation.
But it was not one of the low wattage ones, of course. We had visions of exploding circuit boards and burning down campers when we plugged it in. But nothing like that, it just worked, making Mervin warm and comfortable in a red hot second.
It didn’t take long to get warm, it didn’t last long either. After about two hours, we hadn’t even started dinner, there was a short ‘snap’ sound. Julie and I looked at each other when we heard the fan slowing down and eventually stop. Well, that was €6,90 of heath, we said. Come to find out it blew the fuse, not the one of the camper, but the one from the transformer we have to be able to use European sockets in a British outlet.
Julie went to get the heater from the little public area in the campground, that we only use. It got us through the evening and the night. Now we’ll have to go and find a more permanent solution, or as we are getting ourselves prepared for, another temporary solution. The real solution would be that the sun would start shining again, which it just did, writing this down.
Ah, saw two more churches, 244 to go.