How did you get into it? “I got into it because I like the old Beetles and campervans, and yes, wanting to me different certainly does appeal to me. Why follow a trend when we can set trends? And we are setting trends. Look around at some of the eurocars nowadays and there are trends, which we started, that are starting to flow into their scene.”

    How does a rat car start then? “A lot of people just start doing random bits to their car and then they decide to do particular modification, which they think ‘that looks good, I might flow with that as a theme’. Yes, there are lots of odds ’n’ sods cars but they do look good. We’ve got Bozo, OAP, Rice-rod, Off-roaders, Fifties Space Rats on more modern cars – so there all sorts of random themes... Everything is done on a budget and as cheaply as possible.”

    Cue DIY painted white-wall tyres, drastic dumping of suspension, deliberately cultivating rust, painting with rollers, mismatched door mirrors, eccentric ornaments, overloaded roof-racks, Banksy images, stick-on rubber hands and of course, lashings and lashings of stickers... Anything goes. It’s so fantastically democratic that it really is like being plunged into a bath of ice water after years of sweltering under the Fast ’n’ Furious regime.

    Clearly we weren’t the only ones stunned by their stand – the befuddled expression on some passers’-by faces already told us that – but rat-look.com later went on to win the best stand of the Retro Show at Santa Pod.

    Could the next big thing be this low-budget, zero-bitching, anti-snob, egalitarian movement focused on enjoyment? You’d be a foolhardy individual to bet against it.