Hard work, happy car

Day 9

When I got in from Book Group last night, Steve - who rarely asks me for anything - requested a favour. Would I clean and polish my car today, with his help. The state of it is obviously bothering him, so even though I'd rather stick pins in my eyes, (cleaning cars is rather on par with the ironing in my book), I said yes,of course. He said "we'll do it together, and chat and play music - it will be fun", which is the spiel I always give my children when I'm trying to coerce them, so I knew I was beaten.

In the days before I had nerve damage in my feet and could wear high heels and nice shoes, I had a small collection of them that I looked after beautifully. Like my clothes, (which never had a dragging hem or a loose button,) they were always perfectly polished - any scrapes in the heels filled in, re-heeled the second they needed it, and stored with fitted wedges of tissue paper inside. I suspect men often think about cars the way women think about shoes. For me a car is just a way to travel from A to B without getting your shoes dirty.

Before I had a car (coming to driving very late in life, as I did), I thought I would take proper care of it - the inside would be immaculate, and not an embarrassment to offer someone a lift in and it definitely would not smell. There would be toys for the children and tissues for the adults in proper containers hanging from the backs of the seats. NONE of these things have come to pass. If I want a tissue I ferret under the mound of parking slips in the side pocket, until I find the one I last used to clean the window. I only take it through car wash when I absolutely have to, and I get my son to clean the inside of the windows so I can see out, by offering a small cash reward whenever he has run out of fags, (filthy habit - he deserves whatever he gets). Thank Heavens my self-esteem is not tied up in how well I look after my car, or what other people think when they have to get in it.

All of this, of course, offends my husbands 'car' sensitivities, and baffles him as well. To be frank his is not a huge, great deal better, but I recognise he has a very different love for whatever he is driving than I will ever experience. This is one of those lovely differences between most men and most women, (though obviously not all - I'm not that stupid).

I grew up in the seventies, where women were madly burning their bras to show there was no difference at all between them and men. Thank God they did because otherwise we still wouldn't have equal pay and equal rights. But being equal does not necessarily mean being the same, and I say "Hurrah" for the differences. Two year old girls will form fifteen-word sentences with the correct syntax, while two year old boys will disembowel your video and head-butt the wall. Teenage girls will giggle a lot and over-analyse everything, while teenage boys will grunt, whack each other over the head, and get on with it. We often like shoes and beautiful love-story movies more than men, and they frequently like football and car chases more then we do. Phrases like 'chick flick and 'boy toy' are not a coincidence. Ever was it thus, I suspect, as our genetic conditioning wires women for wide-ranging multi-tasking social skills, and men for highly focused, non-distractable hunting.

So I'm really glad my husband likes cars, and knows about computers and other stuff with plugs on, because then I don't have to. If the price I pay to keep him happy is to clean my car once in a very blue moon, then that's fine with me.

So I'd better go and do it then.