Don’t you love a Camper? Whisper it, but I do. I think it must be in the genes. My family has got more previous than the Krays when it comes to Campers, particularly those made by Volkswagen and especially during its long collaboration with Westfalia, the German camper-conversion specialists.
Three generations of my clan have owned the darn things and far from turning on, tuning in and dropping out as Timothy Leary put it, camper vans turn you into something altogether different: cleanliness obsessive-compulsive, camper anorak or permanent grease monkey. I’ve seen the deleterious effects of VW Campers from up close, such as my father, who used to have the cupboards in his camper crammed with tins: fruit salad, Heinz baked beans, tomato soup and Fray Bentos steak pies. True, he had a rationing-depleted World War Two childhood, but you’d not get through the contents of his van after even decades of deprivation, and God alone knows what that extra weight did to the handling…
‘The day I buy one of these horrible things, you are welcome to shoot me,’ I once said to my daughter as we sat in the cheerfully clashing chintz splendour of my brother’s Mark III VW Type 2.
