THERE aren't many mornings when I heartily wish my car had spent the night sleeping comfortably in the garage, but this morning was one of them. Confronted with a totally white car, it's usually silver grey, and being slightly late I first had to wrench the iced-up car door open in order to get the can of de-icer which was lying temptingly in the door compartment. Then, with two finger nails less, I tried to get the top off the stuff. It's a de-icer manufacturers' trick to make their lids so tough that people with already frozen hands can't get them off. I think they weld them on with a special machine. They've probably spent months perfecting the technique of getting such a tight fit that you would need a world champion strongman to remove the lid. Then they all sit back and have a jolly good laugh. Several more nails down, I gave up, and resorted to the old, but not wise, water treatment. This involves finding a suitable container to put just lukewarm water into (not hot because I don't want a nasty cracking sound from the windscreen) and pouring it over the car. The only suitable container I could find was an empty wine bottle (is there any other sort?) so yes, it was me at 7.55am apparently carrying out a ceremonial launching ceremony on my car with a bottle of Spanish Chardonnay. The problem with this treatment is that the water you pour on the windscreen can re-freeze almost immediately, or as I found to my cost one morning, sneakily wait until you're just turning the corner onto the main road and suddenly your vision is totally obscured with a sheet of ice. I foiled this by using the ice scraper, the reluctant windscreen wipers which grumbled icily at me, and a ten-minute blow from what are laughingly called 'de-misters', which only work properly when the car heater has hotted up which is usually somewhere just past St Ive. I left behind a water spill on the drive which immediately froze over like a skating rink, so there may be bad news when I get home. It was halfway through this pantomime, which looks set to continue if the promised even colder snap arrives, that I looked longingly at the garage and thought how nice it would be if I could just pop into a nice toasty car of a morning and drive off without hassle. It's not to be. It's never going to be. Because the garage is crammed full of what we like to think of as life's essentials which won't fit into the house but which other people would call junk. The garage was empty the day we moved in. It wasn't empty the next morning. And neither has it ever been empty since. In fact there's never really been room to park a kiddie car in it, and the only wheeled modes of transport that have ever been edged into it are bicycles and even those had to be up-ended. There are the sort of people who have garages which house their cars and the sort of people who don't. You can tell the people who have got their cars out of their garage on a cold and frosty morning. They drive past you with non-white vehicles and a slightly smug smile on their faces, which leads me to being tempted to write a rude word in the frost on my windows. The previous owner's garage was pristine with everything hung on the walls and plenty of room for a car. I must confess that I've only ever lived in one house with room to get the car in the garage, and that was simply because I lived in it, the house not the garage, for just over a year and it was a very big garage. Even so, when I moved, the car had begun to get closer and closer to the door and needed precise steering to manoeuvre it in and a limbo dance on my part to get out of it. In the coming up to seven years we've been in this house the garage has been cleared on numerous occasions. Sometimes you can even see the floor. But then it fills up again with alarming rapidity. It's like the Bermuda Triangle in reverse, things don't disappear into it, they appear in it from somewhere else. It's the Black Hole of Callington, or rather the tasteful Magnolia hole on the days you can actually see the paintwork. So I don't want to give the impression that nobody tries. They do. My son-in-law tries valiantly to keep up with the Bermuda Triangle effect. He will disappear into the garage one morning and hours later reappear triumphantly, somewhat dustier than before. The only problem is that the garage is now relatively empty, or at least you can see the floor, but the drive and the side of the house isn't. It is now an al fresco garage. And it won't be until the last trip to the dump, the recycling bins, the recyling bags and the call to the council to come and take things away. I blame it on the fact that most of us have too much stuff these days, and on the fact that everything comes packed in boxes, polythene, little bits of polystyrene, big bits of polystyrene shaped to fit whatever is in it, and sometimes hard plastic bits specifically made to fit whatever it is that's been delivered. And on the ability, for some of us, of never wanting to throw anything away in case it 'comes in' one day. Which is doesn't, not unless it's the day after you threw it away. My son-in-law has a theory that if you haven't used something for a few months then you don't really need it. And who says men are from Mars, women are from Venus? He tries this on about all sorts of things. Clothes, shoes, kitchen implements, object d'art. I keep telling him that just because I can't find my favourite lemon zester, probably because someone has put it in the garage and I'm not pointing any fingers but just look where my eyes go, doesn't mean I don't miss it dreadfully. And just because all we women have an awful lot of clothes, and in my case this is an understatement, and we haven't worn some of them for many a year, doesn't mean we don't want them. It may mean we're waiting to lose weight. We could be waiting until they come back into fashion again, which they inevitably and nowadays quite quickly do. Although I have to say here that this hasn't yet included tank tops. It may be we've totally forgotten about them because they're on a hanger under several other layers and when we find them again it's a nice surprise. But it doesn't mean they need throwing out. No man ever believes this, unless it's about his own clothes, because most men have a favourite garment, or more than one, which they hang onto like grim death even if you refuse to go out with them if they're wearing it. My former husband had an Icelandic sweater made of 'oiled' wool and capable of withstanding Icelandic weather, which he bought somewhere when he was on his own, and wouldn't part with it, even though I told him it smelt of whale blubber. When you washed it it went as hard as a board, you could actually stand it up, and it took several weeks to dry. For all I know he's still got it. But I wander off the path as usual. The only answer to the garage problem is to stop calling it a garage and call it a storage unit. And then build a double garage somewhere else. My son is promising a visit in the next week or so, which either means there's a big football match on the television and he wants to watch it with his mates, or that there's a concert in the vicinity which he wants to go to. He never likes to entirely waste a trip with just a mother visit. Not that I'm offended, I just smile when the sudden 'coincidence' of the big match is brought to my attention. I don't mind. There's not an awful lot to do around here, especially when he lives in a city where there is. He grew up in this area, where the most exciting place was, if I remember it's name correctly, the Stonemasons pub which has now changed its name. Parents hated it because it meant that they had to become taxi drivers and drive into deepest countryside in the middle of the night to pick up the wayfarerer. When they got there they would usually find a small crowd of teenagers who had all been promised a lift home and of course they all lived in different directions, and all down narrow lanes. Many was the time my husband would arrive back an hour-and-a-half later having been given a tour of South East Cornwall that he could well do without!
