The van was gorgeous.
An old renovated Vauxhall minivan, sitting in the corner of the Square. It arrived on my 3rd day and left the day after I did, and almost every day of the month of August, I would get to the Square, pick up my flyers and go and say hello to the lady in the Crème Brulee van.
I never knew her name – I discovered very quickly that when you work in close proximity to people for a short time, names aren’t really as important in the brief snatches of conversation you grab. So it was that I met the bar staff, the vendor staff, the people manning the box office, and never caught any of their names. But for all her anonymity, I think we became friends. The daily interaction of ‘hi how’s the day going’s and ‘who are you flyering for today’s was a comforting constant throughout the month, as was my habit of grabbing a bag of satsumas and handing one to my Crèma Caravan companion.
She had a few people helping her, did the Crème Brulee Van Lady. Again, I didn’t get the names but again there was a sense of camaraderie, of being ‘in it together’ that pervaded through the people in the Square. Perhaps I got the better advantage of that – on a few different occasions I’d wander up to the beautiful old van bedecked with lights and wooden fixtures and be handed a crème brulee which didn’t quite measure up to the standard – rejected stock, delicious nonetheless. On another occasion, the pop-up ice-cream stall (run by the Crema Caravan) would hand me a broken cone with ice cream wrapped around it. The reward for being friendly, I’ve discovered, is often delicious and tasty.
And so we chatted and gossiped and laughed our way through August. I realised that standing beside the Crème Brulee Van would mean more people looked my way (for a good week I thought they were looking appreciatively at me, then I realised it was just at the good-looking van at my side) and in turn I could give her a break from making and burning, selling and vending which inundated her Fringe.
It was a very beautiful van.