Robyn Anderson

I thought we had a deal. I clean the toilets, he washes the car. I’ve been keeping my side of the bargin but let’s just say, if I cleaned his loo once every 6 months…

In truth, I usually don’t care too much but today the weather was nice and I was looking for something to do that wasn’t weeding. I decided I’d wash my car. I waltzed into the garage, reversed the car out onto the paved area and parked up. I then went back into the garage for the bucket of magic solution which is always there. No bucket. No brushes. Ahha. I knew there was a long hose round the side of the house and decided the magic bucket would be there nestled against the hose all ready for a quick start. It took me a full 5 minutes to remember how to open the gate that allowed acess to the side of the house and there was no bucket. There was a hose. That’s when Car Wash himself appeared. ‘What are you doing?’ I informed him of my desire to wash the car. A look I can only describe as mistrust settled on his face before he brightened up. ‘Inside or out?’ I mean, come on! Who in their right mind wants to clean the interior of a car? I have receipts in there I might need. And there’s that free coffee coupon from Raeward last week that I can’t find in my bag. By this time, I didn’t want to clean the outside either but the more he didn’t want me to do it, the more attractive it became. I waited and he opened up the door of the shed. This would be the shed I couldn’t even see despite it being about a meter from my face. The reason I couldn’t see it was because like so many things in manland, I don’t need to see it. He opened the door and loaded me up with the required items to wash the car. I knew he didn’t trust me because he put the required squirt of red stuff into the bucket and took the whole thing with him over to the car, explaining that ‘this bucket gets filled right to the top and this is the brush that you use. This other bucket (I kid you not – two buckets) has different stuff and is for the wheels only.’ He filled that right to the top. It had three brushes. I nodded and thought, wheels? Since when were wheels included in car washing? By that time he was attaching a different hose into a different tap than the one I had in mind and you know, for just a second, I expected hot water to issue forth. It didn’t. He stood there with the running hose and watched me dip the correct brush into the correct bucket and then sprayed water all over the bit of the car I was going to wash. WTF! The car is silver. That dusty road crap is grey/white so how was I supposed to know where it was? No reply apart from a liberal spraying of the whole car and a reminder not to keep the tap running. So I scrubbed the wet car then I rinsed off the soap and when it was dry I went over the bits I could see that I’d missed. To be honest, if he’d not filled the wheel bucket right up to the top, I don’t think I’d have bothered with the wheels but I knew he wanted to do some of the ‘stable’ so it was either wash the wheels or tip some of it out to make him think I’d done them and I couldn’t do that to the plants. So I washed the wheels. I am thinking of writing to the Design Dept at VW. Whose bright idea was it to make everything spokey? No longer can you do a quick ‘she’ll-be-right’. You have to wash down the spoke and around the bottom, up the other side and along the top. Fourteen times. Per wheel. I finished those then wiped off all the drips off the proper car and looked in the wheel bucket and realized the third brush must be for the tyres. I don’t think I should touch the tyres. There was a big flappy bit of rubber hanging off the side of one not so long ago and my suggestion of sticking it down with superglue didn’t meet with the reaction I would have anticipated. I gather tyres are a minefield and the less touched the better. In fact the car looks pretty much the same as it did before I began – perhaps a little glow in a low pitched sun, but definitely not ehough for me to want to repeat the exercise. Next time I’d driving through the machine that I’m reliably informed ruins the paintwork and doesn’t do the wheels properly. So what? I did all that scrubbing and you can still see the marks from where I drove into the hedge.