Our weekly column from London Colney's Brett Ellis.

Caravans have always been seen as a gauge of affluence for the middle-aged desperado. With carafashion of chinos, flip flops, white socks, a Cat’s Protection League T-shirt and bifocals, the caravanistas clog up the motorway slow lanes with their Lunars, Buccaneers and Vanmasters.

Having holidayed in my youth four-up in a two-berth box on wheels, the choice is now eclectic with static, touring, teardrop, pop up, folding and Airstreams, all vying for the desperado dollar.

I write this having just arrived home after a week in a static caravan in East Sussex. Suffering a hardy dose of writer’s block, I have beside me a piece of paper listing the positives and negatives of caravanning.

Thus far the negatives outweigh the positives 10-1, yet still I am busying myself with planning a return visit as I now have the bug, but thankfully not the fashion sense.

Perennially cold, they are constructed with balsa wood type material, the cookers never work, there is little by way of security, they are cramped, smell of dogs and rock relentlessly should you as much as sit up in the tiny, hastily constructed, badly sprung bed.

Everything is miniature, even the showers, which do not allow the desperado any purchase when attempting to lather up at 7am after being woken by the family from hell in the next door Eddis, who sound like they are in the bedroom with you.

I am aware that as an end user of the static, I get off lightly. In Ireland some years ago we stayed in a house that was beyond the middle of the sticks in mid-winter. To my horror, I realised that the only heating was a peat burner in the front room. In effect this meant that I, hungover, as seems to be the case when in Ireland, had to get out of bed at 6am, go outside in my down jacket whilst waving cheerily to the bare-chested locals, load the cast iron bucket up and then attempt over the next two hours to elicit some warmth from the prehistoric heat source, so I did.

Touring caravans are similar. You even have to remove your companions' human waste, which, unpleasant as it sounds, has now been packaged up as ‘sanitary solutions waste management’. Electric comes from a hook up and you run the risk of being towed off in the middle of night by local joyriders attempting to roll it as you cling on for dear life whilst protecting the mantelpiece mock Chinese porcelain figures from fatal injury.

As for the positives: well, the kids like them, and for some unknown reason so do I. Completely impractical and cumbersome, they can yet be a thing of beauty and wonderment. So much so, that I often find myself in the middle of the night searching on eBay for a bargain ‘pre-loved’ four-berth Swift Senator. Thus far my search has been unsuccessful, coupled with the damning fact that I measured my drive opening and could only fit in a one-berth Abbey Vogue at a push.

Having resigned myself to the fact that I will remain an internet-only admirer of these travelling titans, I have only one option left. Now what was the website address of the Cats Protection League T-shirt shop?