Carmageddon

It's been a frustrating week at Hedges Towers. BH's car is playing up again. It is an Italian car, and so was built for the wide open Italian roads, where the sun shines down, and the breeze gently blows and it bowls along at speed, with Volare by Dean Martin on the sound system. What it gets instead is rain, snow, slush and potholes you could go caving in.

The car expresses its dissatisfaction by continually going wrong, and informing us in no uncertain terms of how it is feeling. Every time we set off, a series of alerts come up on the dashboard: Rear left sidelight not working, we are informed. Motor control system failure, we are told. Front headlight not working. And so on and so on. And that's on top of the Possible ice on the road and other potential weather hazards that it feels it has to warn us about. Why it can't just come straight out with it and say: I hate this sodding country, I do not know, but its discontent is costing us enough to keep a small African township in food for a year.

The other way the car lets us know it is unhappy is via the parking sensor. Every time BH backs it into a parking space, or up the drive, a small squat evil Italian Mama clad in black waves her gnarled finger and shouts: No.. No..NONONONO! Or at least that's what it sounds like. My friend E has a similar problem. Her car is one of those people carriers (she has 3 kids and a dog) and it has parking sensors on all sides. It is like being attacked by a trio of smurf castrati.

A further problem with E's car is the colour: it is metallic silver, like practically every car on the road nowadays, which means whenever we go out, we almost always lose it in some multi-storey car park. The time we have wasted going from floor to floor, suddenly locating it, but then realizing at the last minute that it is not hers. We have even resorted to walking up and down pressing the key fob in the vain hope that it will beep and let us know where it is hiding - because honestly, that is what it feels like at times. The conspiracy of cars. I'm sure it exists.

Annie Rose

My car on the other hand, is French and so it couldn't give a damn. You kerb it, or park it askew, or scrape it along something, it just shrugs and goes tant pis. It also has this habit of taking on other cars, especially   'baby on board' landcruisermobiles driven (badly) by the blonde yummy mummies who live in my town. These behemoths are completely unsuitable for the narrowish streets and my 2CV hates them. Whenever we get into a confrontation on a bridge or up a hill, it simply refuses to go into reverse. Just waits, sneering with Gallic insouciance, until the other car is forced to back down. Nothing I can do, honest.

We are thinking of putting my car up as a candidate in the next local elections, on the basis that it has no political affiliations, it knows no developers, you can't bribe it and it does no deliberate harm to anybody. After all, if Caligula could make his horse a consul, I don't see why my car couldn't be a councillor.
Do you?