Andy Richardson: It’s official I’ve become white van man

For at the tender age of, erm, fortysomethingorother, I have reached the greatest station of my life. Forget university degrees. Forget winning awards – it’s only happened once, my acceptance speech was brilliant and I got steaming drunk on the free magnum of champagne before banking the £500.

While we’re at it, forget representing West Bromwich at table tennis – just like Timothy Spall’s character in Auf Wiedersehn Pet – and beating a kid from Gloucester 21-1, 21-0. And forget being asked to judge the competition to find The Best Sausage in Shropshire: true story – it was the pork wot won it.

On Tuesday, a far greater accolade came my way. In exchange for a bank transfer of I’m-not-telling-you-how-many-thousand, I became a member of an almost mythical club. A semi-retired man from Stoke-on-Trent handed me the keys to a shiny white Transit and, lo, I became White Van Man.

Cue trumpets. Cue fanfare. Cue cds playing Dire Straits and Jessica by the Allman Brothers Band.

Regular readers might reasonably ask the following question: Why does a bloke who spends a sedentary life stuck behind a computer writing about food, interviewing actors and singers and who spends his spare time playing computer games buy a Transit Van? And they’d have a point. It’s a question that others have asked by saying: “What are you going to do with that?”

I answer: “Move stuff around.”

They ask: “What stuff.”

I say: “You know, boxes and things.”

But I digress. Romeo didn’t need a reason when he fell in love with Juliet. And I don’t need a reason to become White Van Man. Hell, who needs logic when you’ve got internal racking, a brilliant roof rack and an LED light to illuminate the boxes. Transits are bloke stuff of the nth degree. And I am in Club Bloke.

A while back, I decided to renovate a knackered old house in Oldbury, though Lord knows why. I think I’d been watching too much Sarah Beeny (remember her?) and had been persuaded that my fortune lay in fixing dry board to crumbling walls and slapping magnolia emulsion on top. It didn’t, though I didn’t know that at the time.

For two long, hard months, I scraped and grunted, bodged and ground, lifted and squeezed. By the time I’d finished, I was £12,000 lighter and the house still looked awful. Though it was arguably the best workout of my life and and I shifted a stone and was as toned as Rio Ferdinand by the end of it.

I learned two important lessons. Firstly, I am not Sarah Beeny and my fortune does not lie in renovating knackered old houses in Oldbury. When I put the house on the market, I received an asking price £2,000 higher than the cost of buying and doing the place up, which isn’t going to get me a pied a terre in Kensington.

The second lesson was that people treat you differently if they think you’re a builder. Each lunchtime, I’d be chatted up by the ladies at Sainsbury’s who’d imagine me to be accessible, friendly and a good laugh. A week later, walking into the same shop in trousers and a shirt, I’d be ignored, as though I were the invisible man; another faceless office worker of no interest.

Owning a Transit has a similar effect. Drivers’ of expensive Mercedes Benz slow at islands and let me pass. I have become a King of the Road, a man’s man, a knight in shining ultra high-strength boron steel.

Other road users probably know the Transit’s unique history; that it’s been in production for 50 years and if all of the world’s Transits were lined-up end-to-end they would encircle the globe. They are well aware that Transits are so versatile that one was once used by two baby elephants to hitch a ride in London’s Regent’s Park Zoo. And they know that Transit production was moved from Southampton to Turkey around 2015 – presumably to make it easier for drivers to buy a kebab.

The guy who sits next to me drives around in a Rolls Royce at weekends. A passionate lover of vintage cars, he takes his pride and joy for a spin around the back streets of Telford when Saturday comes. People turn their heads and marvel at his 1970-somthing classic.

They imagine him to be a man of taste, a gent who owns eyebrow clippers and smoking jackets, knows that port and starboard are nautical and aeronautical terms for left and right, respectively, and, most importantly of all, who has a well-thumbed copy of Debretts’ Guide for the Modern Gentleman on the toilet shelf. They’ll look at me and imagine they can flag me down if their U-bend is blocked.