“And that’s why we can’t have nice things.”
The voice of my girlfriend’s next-door neighbour was rueful. Boy oh boy, wasn’t he right.
You see, the three of us were staring at my Skoda Yeti, or more accurately, the space on top of my Yeti where my Textbox Lite 2.0 used to reside. A roof tent I'd bought with my own hard-earned.
At 5pm on a busy road on Hounslow, two oily toerags had decided that my roof tent would be much better off in their grimy hands than mine, so had parked up their Ford Transit, opened the rear doors, walked up to the car and set about removing the tent, complete with my roof bars, using nothing but brute force and crowbars.
However, Steve, to whom I will be eternally grateful, happened to look out of his living room window and saw the miscreants hard at theft. Without a thought for his own safety, he ran out of his house bellowing: “Oi…!”. I’ll let you guess how the rest of the sentence went. Suffice to say there weren’t a lot of long words in it.
Have you ever seen videos on social media, in which a couple will sit their dog down, then run in opposite directions to see which one the dog will follow? Well that’s what the two ‘fans of camping’ did. Meanwhile, the Tentbox, now unsecured, slid down the side of the car and landed in the road.
Steve wisely decided to retrieve the tent rather than engage in a foot race, then gave me the bad news.
Surveying the roof tent damage
As you can see, bad it certainly was. The fact they’d used crowbars to lever the roof top tent and roofbars off my Yeti’s roof rails means that the metalwork around each area was badly dented and scratched. And the right-hand-side rear door was dented and scratched where the tent had slid down the side of the car. As was the rear panel and wheelarch.
It was a depressing sight, and if I’m honest, I half expected my insurance company to write off the car, but thankfully it hasn’t, and the Yeti will shortly be restored to its full grey glory.
Mountney generosity
The crime also presented me with another problem. Tracey and I were due to be heading off on a trip around the North Coast 500 with the Tentbox as our accommodation, but the mounts for the Summit roof bars were knackered, although the actual bars themselves seemed wholly intact.
I got in touch with Mountney Ltd, which makes the bars, and asked if I could buy replacement mounts, but unfortunately this was impossible because (quite reasonably) the company couldn’t guarantee the integrity of the bars following the assault.
However, Mountney then said it has released a set of upgraded Summit SURT-930 bars specifically for roof tents, and would send me a set free of charge. Who said goodwill is dead?
That incredibly generous gesture averted a summer-holiday disaster, and went a whole way to restoring my faith in humanity following a deeply upsetting experience. Service like this truly deserves to be shouted from the, ahem, rooftops.
Another side effect
But of course the irritation hasn’t stopped with the prevention of the theft.
The problem is that the Tentbox really has to live on the roof of the car, because getting it on and off is not the work of a moment – it’s a heavy thing. But I now can’t park the Yeti and roof tent at Tracey’s because she doesn't have off-road parking and the thieving pond life will see it and just await a quieter time to have another go. So, I’ve had to purchase another, cheap, car.
More on that in the next exciting instalment…
