Buy all your VW California Accessories at the Club Shop Visit Shop

I can see why we will never have Aires in the UK

Getting back to the OP... we do have Aires in this country and they are on the increase.

On the subject of travellers, it has been a problem going back hundreds of years, not a recent phenomenon. When I was growing up on the bombed out streets of London encampments were everywhere, so was the rubbish and filth, and the problem goes even further back, at the end of the nineteenth century Irish travellers produced my Grandfather :shocked

Please can we steer clear of politics, other than oblique references, it's not what this forum is about.
David Essex the singer is the son of an Irish traveler.
 
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-lancashire-44313866
They took over a brewery near me recently, mega trashed the place and then walked away scot free. Still no arrests, it's a joke.
Thwaites, I saw that on NW tonight. The police didn’t want to get involved, tried to block the road off then went letting them all in. No arrests either. Shocking.
Non ferrous scrap is at an all time high so they are mad for it :punch
 
Aires will never be approved here while disgusting behaviour like the situation at Black Rock Sands near Portmadog exits.
Overnight parking is currently allowed on the beach but the locals are now rightly up in arms over motorhome and campervan owners emptying toilets in the dunes and clogging up the public loos. People also regularly seen having a poo in the dunes.
No doubt a minority but as with everything else it ruins it for everyone else.
I think the best we can hope for is something like Britstops although in our experience they aren't all that great.
We find lots of pubs/restaurants will let you stay in their car parks if you spend a few Bob and ask nicely.
Re public loos, these seem to be disappearing fast. Our local council, which is a tourist area in the Peak District, has announced closures due to "vandalism and government cuts". No wonder people are sneaking off into the bushes.
BTW, not all "travellers" are bad people.
 
I never understand the term "traveller". In my day, a child growing up, it was Gypsy or pikey. Today it is still pikey. I am a traveller. I would be. I have both Pikey and Bedu only two generations away in my genetic history.

However I love the word traveller. my main source of retirement income are from the books I wrote for those wishing to follow the migrations of peoples from generations earlier. I wandered the globe writing and when finished bought a Cali so I could continue wandering but without the dread of flying anywhere.

Sadly there are those in life who will always take advantage of a tolerance extended too far and destroy what others cherish in creating. Within the community recognised by the word "traveller" there are those brought up in the tradition of taking advantage of what others give. But it is not only confined to them.

Today I walked my dogs through a country park in the North west of England and saw a beautiful, natural habitat despoiled by the filth and detritus of British people who seem sometimes wanting to keep pounding their breasts telling the world how superior we are but then fail in that most basic of animal commodities of keeping our own nest clean.
 
Last edited:
A couple of years ago we went to a wedding. There were limited rooms and the hotel was more than happy for us to camp in the car park overnight!
Very handy for decorating the happy couples car too!
 
Amazing you're still alive and kicking GJ, given how both those groups have been stigmatised and marginalised in recent history (and still:
https://thewire.in/world/how-international-law-can-help-stop-the-demolition-of-a-palestinian-village)

Well, this particular topic, the Sykes-Picot, the Balfour declaration, are a particular interest of mine and would be regardless of my heritage. My Grandmother's family, partly educated by the French, fled to France during the Civil Wars of 1922 onwards. My Grandmother then moved to England to be housekeeper, to a pit deputy and lay preacher, and later married his Brother, a widower with seven children, Her Sisters, left in France, were later murdered by the third Reich.

Such is life but A rich heritage for an historian... probably why I became one :D
 
Last edited by a moderator:
Amazing you're still alive and kicking GJ, given how both those groups have been stigmatised and marginalised in recent history (and still:
https://thewire.in/world/how-international-law-can-help-stop-the-demolition-of-a-palestinian-village)

Well, this particular topic, the Sykes-Picot, the Balfour declaration, are a particular interest of mine and would be regardless of my heritage. My Grandmother's family, partly educated by the French, fled to France during the Civil Wars of 1922 onwards. My Grandmother then moved to England to be housekeeper, to a pit deputy and lay preacher, and later married his Brother, a widower with seven children, Her Sisters, left in France, were later murdered by the third Reich.

Such is life but A rich heritage for an historian... probably why I became one :D
Seriously, GJ, when can we expect your life and family history and memoirs? I, for one, would stump up for a copy!!!
 
Last edited by a moderator:
Well, this particular topic, the Sykes-Picot, the Balfour declaration, are a particular interest of mine and would be regardless of my heritage. My Grandmother's family, partly educated by the French, fled to France during the Civil Wars of 1922 onwards. My Grandmother then moved to England to be housekeeper, to a pit deputy and lay preacher, and later married his Brother, a widower with seven children, Her Sisters, left in France, were later murdered by the third Reich.

"Anyone wanting a quiet life has done badly to be born in the twentieth century" said (I think) Trotsky.
 
Seriously, GJ, when can we expect your life and family history and memoirs? I, for one, would stump up for a copy!!!

One bit is already published I am afraid :D However it details an aspect of my life history that has nothing to do with California's, although it does cover a fairly nomadic lifestyle.
 
In developing countries, this shift to plastics has happened really quickly and to some extent represents the early stages of wealth. But there hasn't been the time to change attitudes and behaviour, or the money to put in public solid waste disposal systems.

We don't have those excuses in UK/Europe though, or in Morocco really for that matter.

We don't appear to have any logic either - your post put me in mind of something a friend posted elsewhere.....

Humanity in a nutshell, the @NatGeo magazine about ocean plastic pollution comes wrapped in a plastic bag inside another plastic bag.

Nat Geog.jpg
 
Humanity in a nutshell, the @NatGeo magazine about ocean plastic pollution comes wrapped in a plastic bag inside another plastic bag.

:headbang :headbang :headbang
 
Pretty taken aback by the tone of some of the comments on this thread, some of which seem to get close to being illegal. Please tell me not representative of Cali owners... this forum should not be for a dose of angry Daily Mail paranoia.

The general issue of the way we treat things in the UK is a valid issue, but have you ever looked out if your window at the verges near a motorway junction, or the average state of public toilets in the UK, or the general state of our beach resorts? All traveller mess? Generalising mess left from a few incidents to a whole group is surely just prejudice. The admins should consider removing some of these posts PDQ.
 
Reality is that too many dump rubbish without a care. It is a symptom of lack of respect and the inconsiderate actions of a minority from all sections of society. As campervan users we should set an example by parking with consideration and leaving no trace. Then we may halt further restrictions on available possible free sites.
 
Pretty taken aback by the tone of some of the comments on this thread, some of which seem to get close to being illegal. Please tell me not representative of Cali owners... this forum should not be for a dose of angry Daily Mail paranoia.

I agree that derogatory generalisations/slurs based on ethnicity should have no place on the forum.

I can only assume a lot of people don't recall or just aren't aware that gypsies were singled out for extermination by the Nazis. Yet in a village in Sussex some years back they torched the effigy of a gypsy caravan, with the 'family' inside, while chanting "burn them". Incitement to racial hatred is an imprisonable offence, and rightly IMO. Yet no-one was charged with that offence in Sussex, because the police couldn't identify the precise culprits and obviously you can't simply condemn a whole community (some irony there, perhaps?).

Incitement to newspaper-reader hatred however can be done freely, which seems a bit unfair... :Grin Je Suis un Mail-reader. :D
 
Pretty taken aback by the tone of some of the comments on this thread, some of which seem to get close to being illegal. Please tell me not representative of Cali owners... this forum should not be for a dose of angry Daily Mail paranoia.

The general issue of the way we treat things in the UK is a valid issue, but have you ever looked out if your window at the verges near a motorway junction, or the average state of public toilets in the UK, or the general state of our beach resorts? All traveller mess? Generalising mess left from a few incidents to a whole group is surely just prejudice. The admins should consider removing some of these posts PDQ.

If you object to a post then you can use the report button. Only a few posts point the finger fully at the travelling community and one of those posts points to an incident itself condemned by the chair person of the travelling community. The majority of posts make the points that you make, look around and it is hard to point the finger at any particular sector of society but instead at a general malaise.
 
Moped robbers running amok, fly tipping endemic, pensioners beaten half to death in their beds, if your burgled you’ll get a photocopied letter about victim support. After 60 years I’m seriously thinking of moving overseas, Austria, Slovenia maybe, anywhere with law & order!
I usually go to Morocco but came back to England when Ramadan started. I know it’s ok for non muslims to eat and drink but I use local not tourist venues.
So now I’m in Sicily. It’s pretty clean and crime doesn’t seem to be a problem. I speak Italian tolerably so I have discussed it with the locals. I’d consider moving here but compared to Morocco it’s expensive.
 
Politics ignored, they were falling but not any longer sadly.

Some types of crime are indeed falling but many (such as violent crime) are rising these days.

The latest police figures for the 12 months to September (2017) from 44 forces show:

  • 68,968 robbery offences, up 29%
  • 138,045 sex offences, up 23%
  • 37,443 knife crime offences, up 21%
  • 1,291,405 violent crime offences, up 20%

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-42815768
I agree. Let us not forget that a lot of lower level crime is going un-reported and/or simply not being recorded in the stats. Our lodger (as was) has been assaulted verbally in the street twice now and asked to leave the UK and return to his country. He did not report this the second time as he was told nothing could be done..
 
Last edited:
Back
Top