MMM’s Social History Correspondent has discovered the cause of all the world’s ills: the curse of the campervan
As most of you will have gathered by now, the origin of this monthly nonsense lies in the mid 1960s and when the mind responsible, or maybe not so responsible, went through its formative teenage years. That sometimes-troubled time of life doesn’t usually form our core character, but it opens up a brief window in the growing intellect to accept or reject new concepts. Almost as if the brain turns to blotting paper for a few years.
In our case, in the early 1960s, we thought we were on the brink of a new world. A better one, and it’s plain to see why after the horrors of the preceding 40 years.
We grew our hair very long, wore our skirts very short, loved everything purple, talked of daft stuff like peace and love, weren’t ‘proud’ of the British Empire and drifted through our early years in a youthful haze of hope in our hearts. We went on marches to protest about war, starvation, the environment (oh yes, we all knew where it was heading, even then) or anything else to keep us away from the workplace. According to our elders, that was. And we vowed to build that better world when our time came.
Somewhat obviously it didn’t happen. The summer of 1967 is long gone, the flowers of peace, love and hope have all died, and many of us young, exotically attired hippies went off to become besuited accountants, bankers, solicitors, judges and politicians. Alas, they just slipped quietly and seamlessly into the existing establishment and institutions, and were swallowed up by the system.
But that lingering haze of hope and fairness continued to waft around in the thoughts of some of those ‘children of the revolution’. The ones who didn’t walk that institutional path to wealth and final salary pensions. The ones who can still hear John Lennon and ‘Imagine’ quietly echoing through their souls.
Well they, the ones who kept on dreaming, who couldn’t unsee what they thought they’d seen, but never did anything, are the ones to blame for our current pickle. They, the young folk with the vision, the ones with the hope and inspiration to create change, sloped off somewhere never to be seen or heard of again.
I think I now know where they all went.
And yes, I think I’m pleading guilty to being one of them. In our still purple-tinted house we call it the curse of the campervan.
Why? Well, during those fateful days of the 60s we’d got a taste for camping in
