An air-cooled, it had stopped dead after the first 10mins of their ownership, but was easily put right. His was the last of about eight on the island which I'd "hit" with a Club80-90 flyer.

He told me there are three good VW garages on the island, which might mean that T3 owners feel they have little need for outside technical, etc. help.

Oh, Pooh! For reasons I can't properly explain, the photograph (left) reminds me of a Rupert Bear story -

Rupert and The T3? 

Rupert Loses his Scarf?

Rupert and the Gypsies? 

Or was it Biggles Flies Undone?

The sad thing is we may never know. 

Seasoned adventurers, well, we felt like that with a coming-back-to-England feeling, we rolled off at Southampton and drove to the New Forest Information Centre at Lyndhurst. We snatched some free pamphlets and set off again. With extraordinary incompetence, ignoring the sun, the compass(!) and common sense we soon found ourselves back on the outskirts of Southampton.

The New Forest really is fabulous and it filled me with a much heightened sense of "holiday", (though simply being in woodland - which isn't jammed with foreign conifers - can do this to me. It gets quite close to a religious feeling at times, I think).

An hour or so later we'd booked onto a centrally-located, fine and spacious Forest Enterprise campsite.

Five minutes after that, shamefaced and crest-fallen, I returned to reception to explain that I'd forgotten to bring my gas-powered hair straighteners and that we'd have to leave and find a site with electric hook-up. 

The staff were charming (I'd tried to be too), and within another 30mins we'd topped up the fee and were on another F.E. site. It had been an airfield in WWII, but don't mention the war!

Well, it's funny you should mention the war..... German vehicles 'n' all that. 

A chap wandered over and pointed out, (we hadn't realised!), that we'd joined a cluster of VWs, a T4 minibus and caravan, a Passat and caravan and a T4 hightop camper. They were all owned by members of the VWOCC, and here's a link to their neat, useful and I feel it must be said, immensely dull web site.

At least two of the three couples had owned T3s. The camper man, he and I chatted a lot. He talked about living in "stinky London" and he'd been a time triallist "before I got married and didn't have enough time". (Huh, that old excuse!). He showed me, and fortunately Jo saw too, how very much smaller inside is the T4 than the T3.

About 8pm Jo and I wandered off into the "forest", much of which is heath. 

Following wildlife paths and looking for deer slots we strolled in the warm evening sun and were halfway around our randomly looping route when, in a dingley dell, we were much surprised by a rushing, rattling, clattering noise. It soon developed into a fast trotting string of at least forty nervous "wild" ponies, including amongst them some very young foals and a few very stout females. They skittered past within a few feet of us and out onto the open heath.

Has it occurred to you what we'd forgotten to do that day? With digital watches it's not so bad, but after crossing back over that time zone on the Solent, it was a fair old job winding the dashboard clock forward 50 years.

zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

Next morning we were off to find some deer at a place where "you're almost guaranteed" to see them. Well, we'd been looking for them ever since we entered The New Forest, but, hey, I knew we weren't going to see any because they're at their most active at dawn and dusk. (Thanks for that, Nature Boy). Those are the same times when, especially on holiday, Jo and I are generally inactive. 

And in the midday sun deer hide in the shade. 

But, anyway, you've got to give it a try, haven't you? 

You have. 

Course you have.

There's one!!!!!

A fallow deer! 

Behind the deer fence. 

Right next to the main road. 

In a sunlit open patch in the woodland. 

At 11am-ish. 

Hey, it's easy, this deer spotting game.

There are about 1500 deer and about 3000 ponies in the New Forest. Horses are sold once a year and deer are "culled". Culled = killed. Killing some of the deer is considered necessary because of the damage they can cause to young trees and to agricultural crops.

But I have a plan! (A plan so cunning that were you to stick a tail on it you could call it a reputedly vicious little woodland creature, or a weasel). 

Here it is:

1. Stop growing crops which are intended to feed animals. (Why? Well, none of us need to eat animals and 100kg of plant protein produces only 9kg of beef protein or 31kg of milk protein.).

2. Plant loads of trees where the unnecessary crops were being grown. Why? 

Well, then we'd have loads of biomass for heating (instead of using finite fuel sources which produce GHGs), large areas for recreation, increased employment (farming employs so very few), and much more habitat for deer, etc.

Hmmm, I'm sorry, I didn't mean to mislead anyone, but I do now realise that this is not a cunning plan at all - it's a simple plan. The best ones nearly always are.

The problem with forests is time.

• People might last for 70 to 100 years.

• Governments operate on 4-year cycles.

• Businesses operate on annual profit and loss statements.

• Forests operate on timetables from 200 to 2000 years and beyond. Forests are timeless.

And space.

"Timber managers" see forests as hectares, "stands of timber". They see only snapshots in the life and landscape of a forest. Stands of trees within a forest are a "sustained yield of timber."

People isolate and compartmentalize that which is joined in a web.

Forests are a network of

• water,

• air,

• sunlight and

• soil.

They are

• fungi,

• bacteria and

• insects;

• valleys,

• watersheds,

• thousands of square miles.

They are landscapes.

They are dynamic and they last beyond human comprehension. And they thrive on uncertainty.