"I stopped planning routes in 2019"

Margaret Hale spent twenty-six years as a structural engineer before selling a house in Sheffield and buying a nine-year-old panel van. She has since covered, by her own estimate, 180,000 miles.

We met at a site in Dumfries and Galloway on a morning that produced four kinds of weather before ten o'clock.

On the practicalities

"The first eighteen months were expensive because I bought badly. I bought for the summer I imagined instead of the January I got. Insulation, then heating, then everything else — I'd tell anyone that in the order I learned it the hard way."

"I rewired the whole thing in year three. Not because it was dangerous, but because I couldn't understand it, and you can't fix what you can't read. Now there's a laminated schematic in the locker."

On the romance of it

"There isn't much. There are good mornings, and there are three days of rain in a car park in Fort William waiting for a part. The good mornings are extraordinary and they don't cancel out the car park."

On what she would change

"I'd buy shorter. Six metres would have opened up a third of the places I've driven past. Everyone says this eventually. Nobody believes it at the point of purchase."

She is, she says, planning to keep going for as long as the vehicle and the knees permit, and has no interest in a fixed address. "I've got a postbox in Sheffield. That's plenty of house."