These are the voyages of the Slogship Enterprose….

In a brief sailing last week – nothing more than a trip round the bay, really – Donald the Motorhome went out for various trials, and has settled at a temporary home very close to Slogger’s Roost, on account of this being the only way to get a half-decent internet signal.

There are in fact both trials and tribulations with Donald, but one learns from all of them. Most camping, one realises after a bit, is about being tighter than a fish’s arse.

For example, desperation to be within the safe confines of un site campingcar is not that necessary: trial and error have taught me that my Merc can exist for at least four days without recharging the batteries for electricity….and most municipal facilities offer fresh water free.

But when one is signed into a site, of course, tap all the water and electricity you can get off them while you’re there. Thus, don’t cook on gas: buy a cheap electric multi-purpose grill and use that. And shop at the local hypermarche before getting to the site, not at the site shop – which is usually incredibly expensive. Take all your hot showers in the communal facilities, not by using the motorhome’s gas to heat up your own water. And as you have a hose for water filling, lay it out in the full sunlight of your pitch when there are no hot showers available – et voila! Hot shower courtesy of our nearest star.

Just as with the Apollo Moon missions, there are serious side-effect learnings that turn out to be incredibly constructive to life beyond the capsule.

One soon grasps, for instance, that failure to be on a 180 degree flat surface is a bad idea, ensuring as it does that pans, showers and water systems will overflow. This led me in turn to look around Sloggers’ Roost for the best flat place for a hard-standing, sheltered home during winter for Donald…and this turned out to be right next to my old barn. So I asked Ray the electrician how easy it would be to get electricity to the barn, and he said “Aucun probleme M’sieur, un morceau de gateau” except he said it English because he’s from Yorkshire.

Well, one thing led to another; and it dawned on me that – with a proper electricity supply to it – the barn could easily (at zero cost) be knocked into shape as a multifunctional storage area and workshop…and Donald could be easily topped up with voltage – as a sixth overflow bedroom as and when required.

This is one of the many ways in which we’ve gone wrong since the Moon missions. We have lost the voyager gene that always winds up leading to genuine social improvement – as opposed to simply more and more fiat paper worth less and less. Some of those who demonstrated against Apollo (and in favour of Asian aid) in 1969 are now using NASA technology to insist, via the markets, that ROI must be as near as damnit immediate…thanks to poorly-paid Asian workers.

There are so many wrongs in that process, they do not have a hope in Hell of ever making a right. Give things free to the poor, and they become expectantly dependent. Give them poorly paid jobs, and they become relatively placid – but without the rights we in the West take for granted. And because of that, we in the West lose the rights we took for granted in order to compete with them.

There is obviously another, better way based on the local generation of genuine wealth through communal entrepreneurs whose wages and prices relate to those nearby…not the calculations of an accountant somewhere in Surrey or White Plains.

But absolutely none of that better way is to do with global neoliberalist monetary claptrap. The better way is risky adventure, not cash-cow monopolism.

Earlier at The Slog: One Farage doth not a summer earthquake make