Over a long lunch a friend who is new to caravanning remarked upon wine bottles becoming unscrewed when on the road. This caused me to grin stupidly and drift off into reminiscences.

We used to be weekend trailer-sailors so we know the importance of battening the hatches and everything having a secure place, yet with caravanning no matter how smooth the road and how carefully stowed everything is you will still open the door to what sometimes appears to be murder and mayhem.

We find pot lids love to unscrew themselves without any encouragement. We have a stick-on soap holder in the shower that slides all over the wall of the shower. It’s a guessing game as to where it is some mornings. Bottle tops unscrew, the butter likes to get naked during the day and always pops its lid. The medicine drawer regularly takes a dive leaving a pile of pills in the shag pile bathroom floor rug. Our fridge has rather sensible door locks which seem to work well yet on more than one occasion I’ve found the ice cream or a bag of frozen meat sitting in the middle of the floor whilst the freezer door remains tightly shut. At the mere thought of a kilometre or so of unmade road our bathroom door pops its lock and wedges itself across the width of the bathroom. And on one trip down Highway One, of all places, the table ripped out of the wall and collapsed in a heap on the kitchen floor, but to be fair, the highway had just reopened after major flooding and was seriously potholed. And the table was abetted by the outside door which had flown open and banged into the caravan wall. Miraculously my old well-worn crocs were still sitting in the stepwell after God knows how many kilometres in the open air.

So why do pot lids unscrew when on the road? Stuffed if I know! We haven’t really left the bitumen yet!