By Emma Dodd
After comedian Susan Calman took to the open road in her campervan affectionately known as ‘Helen Mirren’ for a new Channel 5 programme, it got us thinking about the topic of naming leisure vehicles.
Viewers of Susan Calman’s Grand Day Out discovered the presenter had given her campervan the moniker for the simple reason that the dame is her favourite person.
Giving your caravan, motorhome or campervan a name is not that unusual and there’s been all sorts of wonderful ways to decide on fitting aliases over the years.
One year, at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, a storytelling show was performed to a small audience inside a campervan, which had been named ‘Jauney’ due to its bright yellow paint job.
Other leisure vehicles named for their distinctive colours have included ‘Daisy’, with its yellow and white finish, and the ‘Big Green Bus’ for obvious reasons.
And there’s also ‘Bleu’, which roams around Europe, giving its owners a glimpse of vanlife from inside its shiny blue walls.
Number plates can be a great way to come up with a quirky name for a motorhome, with just the need to fill in a couple of blanks and you’ve got a name that sticks.
Names based on the particular model of a caravan can be quite fun too, with an Adria Adora Isonzo named ‘Adora the Explorer’ and a Hymer Nova dubbed ‘Champagne Supernova’ in reference to the 90s hit.
We’ve lost count of the number of ‘Eddie the Eldis’ vans we’ve seen, which are surely cousins of ‘Elvis the Eldis’.
Slightly old-fashioned names, including Mavis, Rita and Sybil are popular, with vans being referred to as if they’re just another member of the family, which in many ways they are.
It could be argued that the best caravan names come out of family stories, like ‘Nannavan’, which stuck after Linzy Hannigan’s grandson was so excited after seeing her new purchase he ran out of the house shouting an amalgamation of the words ‘Nanna’ and ‘van’.
The jury’s still out on pun names for caravans like ‘Stalker’, because a touring van follows the family car all the time, but like dad jokes, there’s a certain amount of affection behind the groan.
