THE daughter of some friends of ours is living with a New Age traveller. True to type, he's very angry, opinionated - and also exceedingly rich.

These children of fair Albion live in a caravan deep in some woods owned by his fabulously wealthy parents. They wash in a nearby stream as nature intended, sit around the campfire, gather herbs and wait for starry nights when the Plough or the Bear decide to show themselves.

It sounds wonderful - I'm almost tempted. However, it is actually good old-fashioned filthy lucre that keeps these two Aquarians on their cosmic gravy-train. You know, money - that vulgar stuff we lesser souls chase most of our waking and working lives.

Except, in their case, it is provided on tap, thanks to the labours of previous generations. It's the BMD - bank of mum and dad.

I don't really have a problem with people like this, even if the whole thing is just one great preposterous pose. They help to embroider the great tapestry of life.

However, it is the ease with which their arguments can so easily be demolished that really bothers me. For example, let's speculate on the likely outcome if 60 million fellow Britons suddenly left their centrally-heated houses and joined them in the woods.

The nation's entire stock of trees would be chopped down within days to provide firewood. There would also be an ecological catastrophe as millions of tons of effluent ended up in the river systems. So it really isn't feasible. Perhaps such lifestyles are better left to a new kind of aristocracy that is actually not that much different from that which went before.

Nevertheless, the idea of living in a hedge is still a recurring daydream of mine - it would have a strange, liberating quality not completely unattractive.