Campervan dreams...

Blinking heck, January 3rd already! So far this year all I’ve done is go on about what I’m going to do this year and at some point I’ll need to get a grip and do it rather than just talk or think about it. Mind you I have put my new calendar up and pushing that drawing pin into the solid pine back door was quite a struggle. This year’s calendar – a present for MCW – is a selection of VW campervans again. It has been for the last eight years or so and I think that with each flipping over of the passing months I become ever more desperate to own one.

I used to get a calendar of lighthouses every year (I always fancied being a lighthouse keeper and I even researched it as a boy, mainly through watching Blue Peter), but then, alas, one by one they were all automated and another dream was dashed. The campervan on the other hand remains a very real possibility – at least in my head.

I have this fantasy of owning one and then going on a year-long road trip around this magnificent isle of ours. MCW is more than welcome to come along, but the lack of an internal toilet and my ‘horrendous, stupid, bloody snoring’ - which apparently I do on purpose – makes this highly unlikely. Alas! How will I manage all those pubs without her? My aim would be to cover all of the UK (apart from Northern Ireland and those bitty bits in Scotland), visit one pub in a different town each night and get chatting to the local ‘character’. Of course when I say ‘character’ I actually mean ‘loony’. Well, loonies always seem to have the best grasp of reality and some great tales to tell. I once got chatting to a chap in a pub who insisted that he’d once seen a shark coming up through his toilet as he was sitting on it. He even offered to show me the injuries that the shark had caused. NaturaIly I declined his kind offer.

I would of course blog and vlog my experiences and at the end of my travels write a best-selling book that would be turned into a major movie starring Martin Shaw even though he’s not quite as macho as me. I once had a Bodie perm and very fetching it looked on me too, in fact it looked better on me than it did on him, so I think that it could work.

So there you have it. The 2017 calendar is up and I’m determined to buy a campervan this year and start my grand adventure – and if not this year then next, or the year after. All I need is permission from MCW.

Maybe I should apply to become a lighthouse keeper after all.