19 Sep 06
'Play beach ball! Shave your legs! Lope over walls! Tease people! ... Five years ago, I was a four-stone apology/Today, I am two separate gorillas'
Thus - for those of you old enough to remember - sang the late, great (and undeniably mad-as-a-balloon) Vivian Stanshall of Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band fame.
He was, in fact, singing about the dubious merits of body-building at the time. But he might equally have been describing the strange, king-of-the-road mental transformation that overcomes many a car driver climbing behind the wheel of a 4x4. Why else, after all, would you sacrifice the invariably superior interior ergonomics and driving dynamics of, say, a mid-sized estate car for that smidgen of extra height and road presence afforded by today's soft-roader?
Such thoughts crossed my mind as - ironically, given that we have run the RAV4 for six months now, and this will be its last hoorah on these pages - I finally plunged off-road in the Toyota for the first time...
My family have been getting soggy for a couple of weeks in Cornwall every summer for longer than The Mousetrap has occupied a London theatre. One of the great diversions from the rain has always been crabbing, whereby a fresh mackerel head is weighted with a stone, tied to a length of string and lobbed off a quay-side. This will bring every crab in the Fal estuary clattering over for elevenses within minutes. The trick, then, is to return the tit-bit to the surface carefully enough to persuade the crabs to relinquish their grip on the bottom rather than the bait, and then shake them free into a large bucket rapidly filling with a frothing indignation of jostling carapaces.
