The caravans of love….

Today, I mostly spent the day trying to get to Swansea in South Wales. I had an appointment at the monolith that is the DVLA – a horrible vision of Soviet seventies-ness stuffed to the gills with jobsworth civil servants, coffee machines and filling cabinets.

It’s South Wales’ own Lubianka rising out of the miserable dampyness of a soggy June day. Aside from the rain, the spray and the 40 tonners ever-threatening to make me the filling in a trucking butty, a flotilla of crawling caravans towed by boxy Volvos, beige Mercs and driven by Ron and Brenda added to the pile-up potential.

There were bloody hundreds of them. And as it happens, this very day is the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Caravan Club. A hundred years of getting in the way, pissing people off and generally creating traffic jams stretching through several time zones….. It makes you think doesn’t it? So what I want to know is, if a caravan-towing Volvo man in a flat cap, cravat and with a pipe sticking out of his mouth is so bumblingly slow, how come he is always at the front of the queue?