Look at a modern ad for a van. It’ll typically be zooming along a perfectly paved, hi-tech flyover with not another vehicle in sight - that won’t be anywhere in this country then. It’ll be averaging exactly 47.9 mpg (or whatever nonsense that equates to in miles per litre…).

   Miles between services, top speed, anti-corrosion warranty measured out in millenia, price (with and without VAT), and it’s carrying capacity will all be proudly displayed, down to the last cubic gnat’s air biscuit. Numbers, numbers, numbers.

   Call me simple. OK. But there was a better way. In 1978, you didn’t need to whip out the calculator, or prepare yourself for a bout of number blindness. Fiat simply showed you how much they thought would go in to a whizzy 900T.

   Fair enough, it would all have to be loaded into the single side door - unless you were prepared to hump it all through the rear hatch over the engine. And yes, the van would be rusty by the time the dealer had fitted the number plates. And yes, within twenty miles the cooling system would have sludged up, blighting the poor thing with reliability problems for the rest of its short life before the rust finally ate it. And yes, the electrics would never work properly. If at all.

   But let’s face it, if I was Mr Cheese the grocer, I’d like to look at the advert and see that I could own a workhorse with more than a hint of Latin chic, into which I could fit fit three unfeasibly large sacks of onions, carrots and cabbages and still have room for a box of pineapples. And likewise, if I was Chalky White the painter, I could fit every last bit of hi-tech formica, faux pine louvre doors and enough Anaglypta and Polycell products to complete my next, new fangled, fitted kitchen project. And get my strangely short ladder in as well.

   Were we being led by the nose in the days before the Advertising Standards Agency started getting all picky? No. Because it was the mythical days when we still trusted our own judgement, and twee as it seems now, we actually used our common sense.

   Is Marjorie Magnolia really going to get half a garden centre plus a couple of marbelised concrete statuettes of the Fallen Madonna With The Big Boobies in the back of spacially compromised Italian buzz box? No. But then as now, it makes a good picture.

   The vans were cool and the brochures allowed people to dream. Even if, as in this case, it was just about how much gear you could shove in the back. Bedford Rascal cramming anyone?