Carless Whispers – In which Keris thinks about cars.
In case you’re new around here, the lovely Keris Stainton writes a (sporadic) column for us, called Carless Whispers – describing life as she unwillingly swapped two cars for NO cars. If you want to catch up, you might want to go back to the beginning… start at the bottom and scroll up…)
We’ve been on holiday. Yes, we’re still carless, but we didn’t use public transport – that would be impossible. Yeah, okay, not impossible, but hugely inconvenient. Actually getting to the destination would be fine, but days out? Not so much fun. So we hired a car (from *cough* here http://www.intack.co.uk/ *cough*).
David went to pick it up and as soon as I saw it I said, “Two doors?”
“Oh crap,” he said. “I didn’t even notice.”
“You mean you noticed, but you didn’t like to say?” I said, because I’ve known him for 17 years. But, no, he claims he really didn’t notice.
I thought about sending him back with a flea in his ear, but I decided that if we managed fine with the Fiat 500, we’d manage fine with this. And we did.
Harry and Joe were delighted to have a car again. Joe greets every car we get – whether a hire car or a review car – with an enthusiastic “New car!” (he still shouts “new car!” at every white Fiat 500 he sees) whereas Harry, while happy enough with any car, is still pining for the Skoda Yeti. (I am a bit myself, I must admit. I have no idea what our financial situation will be next year – when we absolutely HAVE to buy a car – but I’m really hoping we’ll be able to stretch to a Yeti.)
The thing about hiring a car for a week and taking it on holiday is that by the time we got back it was like a dustbin on wheels. Honestly, I’ve never seen anything like it, not in such a short amount of time.
Yes, we started off limiting what the boys could have to eat/drink in the car, but we soon gave up on that in favour of Keeping Them Quiet, so even though we told them to be careful, there was spilled drink, apple cores, banana skins, melted ice creams, chips, mud, sand… it was not pretty.
But it made me think again about how much our old car – my Daewoo – was almost like a portable home. Books and DVDs in the door pockets, pram and wellies and kites in the boot, Halo James in the cassette deck (What? It was the only place I could play it).
That little bit of house-on-wheels is one of the things I miss the most.
—
Keris Stainton
