A bag of Monster Munch declares the spirit of the age

‘Nice car,’ said my host approvingly, as he saw me off after Sunday lunch last weekend, as the blossom hung heavy on the bough and all the birds of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire chorused in the sunshine.

I opened the door with pride. At this point I should boast that the vehicle in question is not some hybrid, some gleaming marque of prestige. It’s my husband’s R-reg VW Passat. I swept the litter off the seat on to the floor with a fine, careless gesture before taking the wheel and accepting the compliment with a smile. The car’s air conditioning is broken, it has many more miles on the clock than Madonna, and it has a sudden tendency to cut out like Devon Loch in the final furlong of the Grand National — in fact, you couldn’t pay someone to tow it away, but none of this matters. All this makes the old Passat, as Vogue cover lines like to say, ‘right for now’.

So the fact that we don’t have a Prius but a Passat actually counts as a plus because — you must have noticed it too? — everyone is absolutely loving going back to the Good Life we remember when we were children: days when all cars, especially those made here in the UK, were basically crap and broke down over long distances, so at some point, any given journey featured a trudge to a telephone box to summon the local garage, and generally ended with the whole family squashed into the cab of a tow-truck, fighting over the last Rolo, listening to Donny Osmond.

When all holidays were basically rubbish, too, of course. Emma Kennedy, the writer/presenter/whatever, has a hit on her hands with a memoir called The Tent, The Bucket and Me, which is all about growing up in the 1970s, and peeing al fresco, when no one had mobile phones and the Sony Walkman hadn’t been invented yet, when a summer holiday didn’t mean a villa in Tuscany or theme park in Florida — it didn’t mean flying, period.