More Than Just a Camper Van.

Among all the modern cars in the supermarket car park today, one almighty anachronism blazed its singular presence from the sea of mediocrity. It was an old VW camper van, coloured a particularly lurid shade of yellow. I took a detour and went to have a look at it.

Everything on it looked original, from the chrome bumpers and hub caps to the furniture, the gear lever and the horizontal handbrake. And yet it was all in such good condition, if not quite pristine. This old lady from a bygone era looked aged but surprisingly unworn. What caught my eye most were the hub caps. They were simple things in those days. Now they’re fancy, racy, sexy, and we call them wheel trims.

I looked at the registration plate, and it told me that the vehicle had been registered some time between August ’69 and July ’70. But I’d also seen that it was left-hand drive, and so it must have been imported. That meant it must have been older than the UK registration, and could well have been on the road in 1967, the Summer of Love. It was probably the much-loved steed of a group of genuine hippies. It might even have been at Woodstock.

At that point a mild sense of awe set in, because I realised that this wasn’t just another veteran vehicle. This was a shrine to a sadly abandoned dream that the world just wasn’t capable of embracing.