Today, I finally cleaned my car. When I say finally, I mean I had never got round to washing it since last winter. The almost non-stop rain was starting to rinse some of the winter's filth off it, but it got a lavish fresh coating when I had to be towed out of the mud at the Tendring Show, and it does get pretty dusty living in the middle of a lettuce farm. What finally made me admit that I was going to have to clean it, however, was when I had to put a clean towel over the front passenger seat before the Systems Administrator could sit in it to go to the At Home, and another over the back seats so that we could lay our tidy coats down on them.
I don't like cleaning the car. You might have guessed that. I could give Rowan Pelling a run for her money in the procrastination stakes when it comes to automobile valeting. I don't scrimp on the mechanicals, and it goes to be serviced by a proper Skoda garage at the prescribed intervals, and has its little service book stamped, and everything. I just don't like cleaning it. There are so many better ways for a sentient adult to spend an hour of their lives than vacuuming cat hair and fragments of leaves and compost off the inside of a Skoda. The Skoda garage at Little Clacton is excellent, and I can warmly recommend them, but they don't keep their service fees down to the level that they do by chucking in free valeting when the car goes for its 40,000 mile check-up and oil change.
My car leads a hard life. By putting towels over the back seats I can fit up to ten bags of weed-infested garden waste in it to go to the dump, and frequently do, or ten 30 litre bags of loose bag-your-own mushroom compost. It had plants in the boot, all over the back seat and in the rear foot well to go to my last garden lecture, plus a large yellow berried viburnum in the front passenger foot well. That did get slightly in the way of the handbrake at times. I probably really ought to drive a small van, except that there are occasions when I want to carry more than one passenger, and I'm not very good at reversing, so need all the windows I can get to see where I'm going when I'm going backwards.
A ridiculous amount of cat fur collects on the seats, given that the cats very rarely go in the car. It comes off my clothes, of course. I don't understand why car manufacturers cover their seats, and the insides of their cars, in a mixture of fabrics all of which seem designed to attract and retain cat hair. I jab at each one furiously with the vacuum nozzle, holding it over them, scraping it against the fabric to try and loosen the hairs, and they remain stuck, one end waving in the flow of air while the other stays obstinately embedded in the car seat, or door lining. The carpets are just as bad. As I try to vacuum up the grass seeds I can see them digging themselves into the upholstery. Actually, they have evolved to do that as a method of distributing themselves, whereas the cat has no evolutionary advantage that I can think off in sending samples of its fur to populate a distant place. Our vacuum cleaner doesn't have a thin nozzle for doing down the sides of the seats, or if it did we've lost it, so even when I'd vacuumed up as much dirt as possible I could still see lines of fluff, dust and seeds in all the narrow crevasses that I couldn't reach. I managed to scrape some out with my finger, and gave up.
Then I turned my attentions to washing the car, and discovered that we'd run out of car shampoo. I wasn't going to stop, having started, so decided that Ecover washing up liquid would have to do. I had a vague feeling that there was some reason why you weren't supposed to use domestic detergent, but on the basis that Ecover is supposed to be kind to your septic tank, and barely has any active ingredients in it at all, I didn't think that it was going to rot the bodywork, or at least not as much as a year's worth of salt and road dirt already were. I washed the car, and rinsed it with the hosepipe, and as it dried began to suspect that the reason why you don't wash cars using washing up liquid is that it streaks. Never mind. I found some glass cleaner and cleaned the inside of the windscreen, which was very smeared since I rub the condensation of it on cold mornings starting up, so that I can see. The Systems Administrator will not me do that in the other vehicles, and screams faintly if I put my hands anywhere near the inside of the windscreen, but they are not so damp as my car. What with all the compost and the plants it does get rather moist inside, poor thing, and sometimes on sunny and windy days I leave the tailgate open so that it can air. Of course the cats then climb inside, so in alleviating one problem I exacerbate another.
I even remembered that the windscreen wash had run dry the last time I used it, and topped that up with a solution of Halford's finest. Then I put some clean kitchen roll in the pocket of the driver's door for the next time I need to wipe the inside of the windscreen.
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