(Not) at the car wash

This is going to be another tenuous one so I'll present the usual excuses of having to write 365 of them this year, etc etc, and move on....

Last night I cleaned my car with my own hands for the first time in years - thanks to the supermarket ban.

It's not like I'm afraid of getting my hands dirty. No siree. I present the evidence of the horse bath time a month ago as proof of that. I can roll up my sleeves and get the hose pipe out with the best of them. But I'm also a busy girl so I just don't see the point of messing about washing the car when for less than a fiver I can get someone else to do it for me.

Or rather, SOMETHING else. Namely the car wash at Tesco.

But since January that's been out of bounds. And yes, that does mean the car hasn't been washed yet this year. If I'm really honest, it's probably been quite a bit longer than that. Grey (sorry - "gunmetal" - to go all Top Gear for a second) cars are wonderfully self-cleaning.

Or so I thought. But after apologising profusely for the state of my car when I gave a lift to a colleague the other night (and this was at 10pm - so dark) I decided enough was enough.

To paint a little mental picture, the front bumper had become a graveyard of splattered flies thanks to the daily motorway commute, the roof was covered in cat paw prints and bird shit (no feathers or blood though so presumably those two creatures were going about their business separately), there was a liberal smattering of hay and straw through the whole interior, dubious tea stains on the front passenger seat from where I routinely spill my morning cuppa, a Kitkat melted to one of the mats and two filthy horse rugs ripening and maturing like smelly cheese in the boot.

Not good.

I also realised that I'd lost most of my car washing equipment over the years. I managed to find some car shampoo under the sink, but had to make do with a tiny washing up scourer as a sponge. And oh how the neighbours must have laughed at my efforts to make the hose pipe and hoover cable reach out onto the road.

It turns out that washing a car is less fun than washing a horse. The car didn't close its eyes in appreciation of my efforts, or pull cute faces when I sponged its nose. 

In spite of that though I dutifully scrubbed, rinsed and polished, hoovered out the boot and seats, wiped all the dust and general crap from the dashboard, sponged the tea stains off the passenger seat, prised the Kitkat off the mat, and discovered a rotting banana under the driver's seat. Which may have accounted for some of the smell. Along with the horse rugs.

Job well done, I momentarily considered eating the remains of the Kitkat, before giving myself a stern talking to ("Come on now Jade, even you can't stoop so low for chocolate") and heading indoors.

That's that job done for at least another year then.