VW camper of delight

Like every normal adult male, the Lego catalogue drops through my door on a regular basis. A slim but gratifyingly glossy publication, it tends to shy away from listing the 99p minifigs and other pocket money sets widely available in the toy shops of the shires and focus more on limited edition monstrosities designed to appeal to dads who think their child could benefit from a Death Star large enough to pose a real crushing hazard to their toddler. These toys are only available in the community of Online, near I believe the settlement of Internet and connected with what I understand is termed a superhighway. Essentially the peak of mankind's technical achievements mean that you can get plastic brick kits that cost two hundred and fifty quid delivered to your door.

Sitting comfortably I flicked through the pages. It was the usual stuff designed to appeal to the adult Lego enthusiast, that is, anyone who is of an age lucky enough to count 'slave Liea' rather than Jar Jar Binks as a formative experience, and then...what's this? A VW camper van, in Lego. For only eighty quid!

http://shop.lego.com/en-GB/Volkswagen-T1-Camper-Van-10220

There is something slightly queasy about the ultimate symbol of anti-establishment freedom (most VW campers come ready spray painted with the CND symbol on the side, a Greenpeace sticker instead of a tax disc and a handy storage compartment to hide your weed) costing eighty quit in Lego form. Surely anyone with eighty quid is better of buying, as Malcolm Tucker put it 'a goat the whole village can fuck', rather than a Lego kit that, once assembled, is at best going to sit there gathering dust (and writing as the owner of a Lego X Wing, I write with authority...and yes, of course I love it, it's a Lego X Wing, when the house is empty I recreate the Death Star trench run in my hallway) and at worst is going to be a constant nagging reminder that you don't own a real one.

Men dream of owning a real VW camper van. It's the ultimate symbol of freedom and of picking up hippy girls and having uninhibited sex with them. Maybe though, the joy of the open road is best experienced as a journey of imagination. On the open road of the mind there are no speed cameras and no BMWs, there are loads of places to pull over and enjoy the view, there are still Little Chefs and there are still happy hippy hitch hikers.

Still want one though.

The answer to climate change...take a flight to somewhere warm?

I’m confused about climate change. I thought that we were all supposed to be concerned about global warming. Global warming was, apparently, going to result in the UK being like the Mediterranean. On the one hand, I like the idea of doing f**k all work in the afternoons and tapas, on the other hand it might mean that our cars get smaller and women get hairier.

Looking out of the window on this August evening, I don’t see many olive groves sprouting. Indeed it’s pretty hard to see anything, what with the wind lashing the rain against the window like that.

Now, this is not global warming, but climate change. Climate change results in severe weather events like rain in summer. Frankly, anyone who’s had experience of the British summer might consider that rain in August is situation normal and the only emissions we should be worried about are people talking out of their arse about climate change.

So hand-knitted home-made hats off to the climate change protesters at Heathrow who have set up camp to try and raise awareness about the dangers of air travel. Well done them for tying up police time and public money with quite the most pointless bloody protest since I staged a sit-in for extra ribena at play-school.

‘Deluded’ is the word that springs to mind. Looking at these tossers on the news I was a little shocked to see that what I had assumed to be a cagouled troll was in fact a person, who was spouting off about air travel being bad and who was ‘demanding to be heard’.

Okay. 1. Stand as an MP. 2. Get elected. 3. Vote against air travel. 4. Get enough of your mates to do the same and end the problem. Or…spend the weekend in a damp camp pooing lentil curry into a latrine you’ve had to dig yourself, getting pissed on home-brewed scrumpy and wearing a sweater you’ve never washed with detergent in order to save the environment.

The truth is that the best we can do is manage air travel and that nobody is interested in direct action tossers. The last big protests, marches through London and so on to do with airports were when airport expansion was being mooted. Lots of middle-class people saw the threat of large reductions in the value of their properties and the possibility of tyre-marks on their roof if the pilot came in for a low-landing and they rebelled. Result - no new runway.

You want to see people truly exercised about air-travel? Ask anyone who lives on a flightpath or who has ever had a cube of blue-ice the size of a fridge land like a meteorite in their greenhouse (tip – get rid of it before it melts!).

And if you want to be taken seriously, get a shave a suit and a job.

A professional protestor in uniform – you know love, you’d be quite pretty if you washed your hair, used some make-up, dropped a stone and wore a nice dress. How on earth does she think she’s going to attract a bloke like that?