The great unwashed

Picture the scene: we are in a supermarket in Finland, attempting to buy nappies for baby Xanthe. We don't know which size because it is at least four months since she was weighed. The solution: place her on the fruit and vegetable scales. She sits there grinning and going Dadadada, and prodding a picture of a red pepper. Nobody here speaks above a whisper, so the hushed calm of the Finnish shoppers is ruffled by three-year-old Tallulah gurgling with laughter.

"Which sort of fruit is she?" We agree she is a banana. Tallulah then demands to get in, too.

Before we left England, some friends - all mothers - were aghast at us abandoning the baby support network of health visitors, with their monthly rituals of weighing and skill-testing.

"Eighteen months! Aren't you brave!" was a common remark, the subtext being: Aren't you foolish. This meant nothing to me. We are in Europe, for God's sake, not darkest Africa. They have doctors here, too, and we have a mobile phone for emergencies.

I did take the precaution of going on a first aid course. Since I am liable to keel over at the very mention of... blood, having to sit through a video of a cook who has amputated her finger with a meat cleaver was enough to require the most skilled resuscitation techniques.

Richard did ask me if I was emotionally prepared for the day when we crash the vehicle and are robbed, while the children are gravely ill and it is raining. The answer was "No". So far, touch wood, the worst we have had to face is sliding into a ditch (a lorry hauled us out), and a bee sting.

There was also anxietythat Tallulah will miss a year of school. So we educate her ourselves.

Most of this seems to be happening in churches. There is nothing she likes better than a good graveyard, where she looks at the dates to see if someone was a "young un" when they died. In Turku Cathedral, she spent 20 minutes gazing at murals of the Life of Christ. She wanted every detail of the story (which I was hard pressed to remember) and then explanations of esoteric concepts like heaven and resurrection.

"Come on darling, let's go and have lunch," I urged. Time to grind more vegetables for Xanthe through the baby mouli.

"No. I want to stay looking at the statue of Jesus on the cross. I like looking at the blood." Richard fell asleep in a pew, and Xanthe sat on the floor patting a tomb stone, while Tallulah gazed on. I thought: she's like a medieval child, deprived of visual stimuli - no television, no videos, only a limited number of books - no wonder church seems a treat. She was particularly fascinated by the Last Supper, her face tortured with anxiety for poor Jesus. I tried to explain about the bread and the wine. "But Helena," she wailed at last, on the brink of tears, "he hasn't got any butter."

We live on the fringes of society. Our daily existence - getting from A to B, finding diesel, water, and gas, making up and dismantling the beds, routine child care, quite apart from seeing and experiencing the countries we are visiting - is all-engrossing. We have abandoned newspapers and radio, our English life seems remote and unimportant. We live completely inside our own adventure. We don't know the days of the week; we barely know the time of day, especially here in Northern Scandinavia where midnight looks like 8pm in England. We have no outside responsibilities - we are free to do what we like when we like. If Xanthe keeps us up at night, no matter: we have no jobs to go to, so we can sleep the next day.

We are beginning to look (and probably smell) like New Age Travellers. Our hair is unbrushed, our shoes dogged with mud. There is little excuse for this. At a gypsy festival in the Camargue, I was impressed by how much time the gypsy women spent scrubbing clothes and dusting every inch of their caravans, although this was their holiday. They had even brought along what I took to be chests of drawers, and later realised were cleverly camouflaged water heaters. But washing clothes in our van is a drag. In the rain, we have nowhere to dry things, except over the tiny bit of warm air that escapes from the fridge. So what if clothes are crusty with gunk? That's what fingernails are for: scraping it off.

As for our bodies, one gets used to not washing. In our shower, I spend most of my time fending off the clammy embrace of the shower curtain; then, having got all soaped up, the water runs out. Better not to bother.

Since we live outside the system, it doesn't matter if our hair is tangled. We won't bump into anyone we know, because we don't know anyone. We don't belong here, or anywhere. We observe people, but just as we watch birds unobserved in our van-cum-hide, so we feel that no-one can see us. So what if we make a noise in the supermarket? We don't care because we are nobodies - we are invisible