Moving in more ways than one

In the middle of last year my daughter and her partner managed to buy a house in Bristol.

My wife and I did not pay for this house, we did not give them the deposit, if for no other reason that we are in no position to do such a thing. I say this because, for some obscure reason, some less well-informed individuals assume because you’ve been on the telly for 40 years you are worth a few mill.

I’m just popping that fantasy, although we are not poverty stricken there’s no way we could have chucked £100k at them. But I suppose we did help in one quite major way.

The lease had run out on their rented house and essentially, they had nowhere to live. So they moved in with us until they completed the deal on their new house.

This meant they could save a load of money (by not paying rent) and get their affairs sorted before the big move.

It has been delightful having them stay with us. My daughter’s bloke is an engineer so there are a lot of things around the house that needed fixing, and he fixed them. My daughter is terrifyingly organised, don’t know where she got that from, and helped us have a massive clear out last year.

Finally, in last week, they got the keys to their new house.

As you may be able to guess my daughter and her man had stored a lot of their stuff at our house, and they had a lot more stuff in a storage locker in Bristol.

So, I helped them move this weekend by arranging to do a little review of the Citroën e-Dispatch, an electric van. Big thanks to the folks at Stellantis for arranging this so quickly and easily.

The Citroën e-Dispatch is a panel van with a 75 kWh usable battery, a real world range of around 180 miles, it can charge at 100 kiloWatts and has a payload capacity of 1,000 kilograms.

My daughter was convinced the van wouldn’t be big enough for their comically massive mattress. For once, and this is rare as regards my daughter’s common sense and innate intelligence, I was right. Woot!

We managed to cram everything else they had on top of the mattress and into the back of their car. Of course I didn’t take pictures of the full van, you have to take it on trust. It was stuffed to the very brim.

The battery was at 95% when I left our house, I drove to my daughter’s house Bristol which is exactly 58.2 miles away. The battery was at 68% when I arrived there about an hour and a half later.

All good so far, I will say this though. The Citroën e-Dispatch is very stripped down as regards cameras, spatial awareness support and having no idea what is behind you. No reversing camera, very limited sensors and it’s a wide, chunky vehicle especially in the narrow Victorian streets of Bristol where parked cars are lining both sides of the road. I’m not saying all Citroën e-Dispatch vans are like that, I’m sure there are versions with a bit of camera support, but not the one I drove.

In Bristol I did find a space large enough to park near their house, but after 3 attempts I got out, gave the keys to my son who was helping his sister, and he parked it in one swift move.

Dammit.

We then unloaded the van and I had a look around their new home for the first time. It’s delightful, I’m so proud of both of them for saving up a deposit, finding a house they liked, making an offer, pushing through the relentless hassle of the legal shenanigans, the monster cost of the stamp duty, of all the things that make buying a home so stupidly difficult as well as obscenely expensive.

But the brutal truth is, for the time being at least, their mortgage repayments are less than the rent they were paying last year.

The massive mattress was hauled up the stairs, I would have helped but they had a mate come around who joyfully helped shove the monster up the narrow staircase.

I’m old, I drove the van, but I did carry a lot of boxes and bags. Back to the topic, the Citroën e-Dispatch. Yes, then we drove to the storage place and got another full van load of stuff.

This picture was taken when we had shoved the first trolley load into the back. Once again it was stuffed full when we had finished and I didn’t take a picture. Sue me.

After driving back to their new house and unloading everything, I parked the van in one swift movement, oh yeah baby. I’m still rocking the parking skills.

When the last bag, chair, box and rolled up rug was brought in, we all sat around on boxes and chairs in their kitchen and had the first cup of tea my daughter and her bloke had made in their new house.

An hour later I left and wished them well in their new home I visited my son in his house, then drove back home in an empty van, with an empty heart. It’s a tough old emotional journey isn’t it. Having kids.

Look, I’ll get back to the van in a moment.

But having two amazing small people in your life you love so much you think your heart will burst is an absolute blessing. And time, and events, and strains and heartache, and they leave, and they have their own lives, and occasionally you get to see a bit of their lives and you feel so grateful that they are settled and happy. That they have a wide circle of friends and support from their peers.

I am so grateful for all that. They don’t need their annoying old dad anymore, unless they need something moving and I can blag an electric van.

So all in all, although I know my wife and I will miss them, it has been a huge joy to have my son and his amazing partner live with us when they were between houses a couple of years back, and now my daughter and her amazing partner live here between houses, my goodness we have been lucky.

And the van, sorry, yes, the Citroën e-Dispatch. It’s great. It’s big, it can carry loads of stuff, it’s very quiet and very easy to drive. It’s very comfortable, warm and has extremely adequate range.

On the way home, when I still had 38% battery capacity and range estimated at 82 miles, I stopped for a comfort break. I was 21 miles from home, obviously the van would easily have made the journey without charging but I couldn’t. I’d had a big mug of chai tea, I needed a short break.

I stopped at the unusually posh for motorway rest areal, Gloucester services. They sell expensive locally sourced produce, no Starbucks, no KFC, no McDonalds and pleasantly situated toilets that mean you don’t have to walk through the entire building and past every garish outlet to get to them.

They also have 8 Tesla 250 kW (open to all) superchargers and 15 Evolt 150 kW chargers in the car park. I used an Evolt charger and the van did take 87 kiloWatts so it does charge reasonably fast, not quite 100 kW but close enough.

I now realise I should have taken more pictures, anyway, I had a comfort break, bought an unreasonably expensive pie to placate my broken heart and drove home.

I can already hear people who drive vans for a living immediately say that electric vans are not ‘there yet.’ They are wrong. It would take a tiny adjustment for 95% of all commercial vans to be electric, contrary to their claims, the people who drive them do not cover 500 miles a day, ever. If they claim they do I need to see independent 3rd party proof. I don’t believe them.

The difference between driving this simple, easy to use, quiet, cheap to run, cheap to maintain electric Citroën e-Dispatch, and any make of diesel rattle box is unimaginable.

It is simply SO MUCH better.