Watch: #Vanlife for old men!

Not all surfers living in vans are pretty things blogging for cash.

The images of #Vanlife that ripple across our little telephone screens ignite an insatiable fire, equal parts lust, travel, freedom.

Do you remember when The New Yorker wrote about all these pretty surfers laying around undressed in camper vans, doors open to reveal startlingly beautiful vistas?

Like this?

The reality of #vanlife, of life, is vastly different.

If, at a certain point, and age, you’re living in a van, it’s not because you blog for cash and have a gorgeous thing to share it with.

It ain’t #van life. It’s living in a van. No hashtags.

The job disappears. You get divorced. Maybe you make a bad decision, get in fight, a lover’s spat turns into a court case, and you spend a year or so in the can.

All the money goes. It ain’t easy to cover rent. So you figure you’ll spend a few weeks in your car until the storm passes and life rights itself.

But it doesn’t.

And then you start to like the freedom that only hitting the bottom can bring. Work when necessary, as little as possible if we’re going to be honest, and days spent swept up by the ocean, not by the office cube.

Like Bob, here, who lives in the most rudimentary of vans and calls the Avalon beachfront carpark home.

I wouldn’t call this film an inspiring call to arms, more a terrifying example of what happens if you don’t get your shit together while you’re young.

And, yet, as a document of a man trying to get by in life as best he can, handed lemons, makes the metaphorical lemonade stand, it really is quite beautiful.