Having lived a 'homeless' life in the UK for a time as a new traveller, as my husband had also lived this way before he met me (and loved in an old mobile library when I met him) I always like reading, and watching, stories of people on the road, squatting, or otherwise living in alternative homes. I have quite the stories about it. Van life became trendy and marketable yet people still look down their noses at people forced to live in caravans in encampments around cities in the UK like Bristol. I was holding down a professional job but wouldn't tell anyone we lived in a truck squatting an old bit of disused council land because the stigma was real. Some 'sites' as we called them were full of drugs and booze, some less so. All kinds of people, some people born into the new traveller life, some students, nurses, gardeners, labourers, because rent was expensive and site life gave them instant community. When you live that way community can be the best thing, so that living in a house is suddenly very, very lonely, and the wonder of running water as opposed to 25 l water containers filled up round the back of a church is quite something. A lot of people were forced off sites with various laws - they made it harder and harder to live this life which the government had begun to try to eradicate since they first started as new age travellers in the 1980s. No wonder the new travellers used to mock 'van lifers' who youtubed glamourous conversions when they used to pick up an ancient Bedford and make furniture from materials found in a skip without 20,000 followers to validate them. From counterculture to consumer culture I suppose. Anyway I'm rambling. Too much to condense here. I think I never wanted to watch Nomadland as I felt it would have been too contrived for me and as you say emotionally manipulating. It's always something I was going to get around to.

I order from Amazon all the time and don't think much about the people who pack those boxes.

I think this is more and more automated these days - robots packing in huge factories. Jamie saw Jeff Bezos yacht (or one of?) in real life the other day moored in Qld and it made me want to cancel my Amazon membership. Now there's a disconnect - how the workers earn barely enough to pay rent and Bezos has so many, many bazillions.

I will watch this one day.

I always thought if something happened to Jamie and I lost the house I could happily live in a van. I'd want a brand new Mercedes Sprinter though and not the decrepit things we used to live in. One with a shower and a diesel heater thanks very much. Still, yes, it would be lonely. But you can be lonely in four walls too.

I'm not sure if you can find this anywhere

UNDER COVER - Feature Documentary https://share.google/ZYTCIAruaP7kLmxMC

About homelessness and Australian women. It's a great doco. Homeless women here are far more likely to live in a van - it's safer.

This was our lorry

We had a red Chesterfield sofa and a wood burner.