Martin Roberts
Our columnist’s musings about touring
NOW LISTEN. I’M all for ‘going green’, but not when it comes to my caravan. Once again, the ravages of winter have left my beloved ‘home from home’ looking like a cross between a petri dish that’s growing penicillin, and a stagnant pond. Crisp, clean lines are now ragged and dirty. The shiny, highly polished, gleaming white exterior is a sad camouflage green. Where does this blasted stuff come from? I mean, I don’t wake up in the morning and find my car looking like a reject from an SAS survival weekend, or the guinea pig hutch so thick with algae, moss, ferns and general forest floor undergrowth that I have to attack it with an industrial jetwasher. And yet, the caravan sucks in every piece of fungal natural history within a three-mile radius. It’s as if it’s acting like a giant mossmagnet, invented by a superhero-film baddie to plunge the world towards Armageddon. And why? What strange and other-worldly characteristics does the material my caravan is made from possess? Does it float? Would it survive re-entry from outer space? Is it impermeable to X-rays? It looks like tinny metal stuff to me, but perhaps it’s some carborundum-blotting-paper-neo-organichyper-metal-alloy that’s new to science. Thinking about it, caravan manufacturers do go on about the ‘special characteristics’ of modern construction materials a little bit too much in their adverts, I reckon. Have they invented something without publishing their findings in, say, the Journal of the Society for Unusual White Materials? And if so, perhaps their rather blinkered goal of trying to create the ultimate caravan body material has backfired, and Nature is now having the last laugh. Perhaps their fiendish endeavours have been scuppered by a biological backlash.
Oh yes, it’s lightweight Oh yes, it’s incredibly strong Oh yes, it’s durable… but Oh no, it’s a perfect habitat for every moss, lichen, slime, bryophyte and pondweed on the planet!
Or maybe I shouldn’t park the caravan under a tree next winter.
Visit Martin’s website www.martinroberts.co.uk for information about him, his books and his property training weekends, and follow his adventures on Twitter @Tvmartinroberts