Recently, I became aware that there are a lot of creators who claim to live outside the 9to5 rat race and travel in vans to different locations. Their vlogs will invariably take viewers along for the ride and frequently the vloggers will share their innermost thoughts.
Their vans are their homes - sometimes customised by the vloggers themselves. You might say that these van people are like modern day solitary drifters with cameras and wifi and a few of them have drones as well.
The concept is quite attractive to those of us who live in houses with foundations. Maybe we will occasionally fantasise about getting away from it all to experience the freedom of the road so the van vlogs appeal to that kind of yearning.
Ashley Azzurro is from the southern suburbs of Manchester and she has a blue Ford Transit van. She also has a young sheepdog called Apollo. There's a kind of innocence about her output as she seeks pleasant, often secretive country locations to share with her audience. She is into wild swimming and the simple life.
Give the confusion, apprehension and bitterness that many people experience in the so-called "real world", Ashley's Vanlife is an oasis of niceness and rural simplicity where the only things that ever seem to go wrong are her old blue van's moving parts.
Of course, it might all be illusory. There could be someone else with her on her adventures and maybe she goes home to get a shower and a proper feed. She comes across as a sociable human so how does she survive solitude without her friends?
Mmm... Perhaps I should not have introduced that slight note of cynicism. It would possibly be better to take the channel at face value. If you are interested, here is one of Ashley's most recent videos. It is typical of the genre...
Vloggers kept me cheerful during lockdown. Pubs and cafes were shut.
ReplyDeleteI watched them on wet windy afternoons, and before sleep in those silent nights.
EVA ZU BECK. She's everywhere. Her boyfriend left her in a tent in a snowy forest.
GIRL TRUCK ROUTINE. This nameless trucker drives through the night in winter.
BOOKS AND THINGS. Katie Lumsden, a cheerful novelist published by Penguin.
SHAELIN WRITES. Shaelin Bishop, a Canadian who's doing her Ph.D.
LUIS_MARIANNE. An Austrian academic completing her Master's thesis.
KURO TADORII. A Dutch woman who speaks about personality types.
QUINN'S IDEAS. Terrifying SF as exemplified by Dan Simmons author of Hyperion.
CONTACT REDACTED. What Do Grays in the Final 60 Seconds Before Returning
Abductees to Earth.
These videos remind me of watching Quartermass on TV as a small child.
My father said, *Not just Martians, but the ghosts of Martians !*
YouTube introduced a new generation to Roswell, the cosmic myth of our time.
Doctor Steven Greer, a trauma surgeon, is a famous YouTube Ufologist.
Kingsley Amis, an atheist, said Science Fiction was the nearest thing he had to
religion. A myth for the godless.
Booktubers have a fatal tendency to gush or gripe.
DeleteThey go from *I really, really loved this* to *I hated all the characters*.
Reviewing a novel calls for careful language & craft.
If the tone is too academic you lose your audience.
Too much of a performance and you lose yourself.
GLUTENBERGBIBLE is a vloger's vlog.
This vlogger thinks as she speaks and laughs as she critiques.
SATAN SUMMER READING.
MADRID IN BOOKS, BOOKS IN MADRID.
I am sure Ashley being an attractive young women drags in an older retired gentlemen audience. She does seem cool and genuine.
ReplyDeleteI am not interested enough to sit through 20 minutes, after sleeping poorly last night and half asleep now in the middle of my afternoon. I'll watch tomorrow.
ReplyDeleteYou tube is a fascinating insight into so many stories. If I was the girl's mother I'd be terrified of her lone walks in the countryside. But then that is stupid she is living life they way she wants. Just it all gets a bit boring and time consuming. But.... a way to make a living.
ReplyDeleteMy brother and I would watch Quatermass behind the back of the sofa, absolutely terrified.
I’m with River, not watching the video.
ReplyDeleteI recently read the novel Yesteryear, which is about a “trad wife” influencer. What she portrays on the screen is all fake.
I don't know. Vlogs never captured my attention.
ReplyDeleteThe "Van Life" vlogs seldom work for me, and sooner or later they tend to discover that being homeless is really hard. During COVID I was entranced by the British Narrow Boat vlogs, a hand full of them are and still are brilliant content producers that know how to tell a good story. A couple of them have left the boats or stopped vlogging. A YouTube channel with a million subscribers and 40-50,000 views a day, can generate more than enough income to live on. There is are a couple of life in France vlogs that I watch all the time.
ReplyDeleteI already waste too much time watching random strangers do fascinating things online.
ReplyDelete(Heavy sarcasm on the word "fascinating.") It's all so addicting. And I think a great deal of this content is so heavily edited and is so far from being the casual off-the-cuff stuff we're supposed to believe it is that it makes me feel a bit angry. Does that make sense? It seems that so many of these people are always going on about simplicity and getting out into nature and so on and so forth and meanwhile, they MUST be spending hours of their one and precious lives daily creating these films.
But Ashley is right to do this while she's still so young and cute. If she were sixty-four and dumpy I doubt she'd have the audience she does.
I used to fantasize about living in a motor home (caravan) when I was a kid, but I still haven't watched any of these van-life promoters. I just don't have the time! I'm too busy with Coronation Street!
ReplyDelete