My lack of knowledge about and interest in motorcars is not so much legendary as notorious in our house. I do not know one type of car from another – I differentiate only in terms of colour – and I have no wish to learn more about them. I see cars, purely and simply, as a vehicle to get me from one place to the next. When someone points out to me a particular type of car, a small part of me dies. I could not care less.
A lack of knowledge about what goes under the bonnet can be quite embarrassing. Today, my partner, who does know far more than I do (it is not possible to know less) found her car would not start. She took her jump leads out and instructed me to drive up to the front of her car.
“Where’s the battery in your car?” she asked.
I looked at this vast cavern filled with pipes, tubes and things filled with liquids.
“The what?”
That did it, I’m afraid.
“You don’t know where the battery is in your own car?”
I shook my head. “Is it under that thing?” I pointed. And so it was.
Anyway, she (not me) worked out how to remove that “thing”, attached the jump lead things and commanded me to start my engine. “What a hero I am!” I thought, as her own car sprung into action, although quite how I am still not sure.
I once had a lift from a friend who owned a soft top BMW (I think). The car was his pride and joy and for the life of me I couldn’t understand why. I seemed to be almost sitting on the road itself, it was so low to the ground, and when he turned the CD player on you could barely hear it. (This was no bad thing since his music of choice was Katie Melua!) And the reason you could barely hear it was the same reason as to why you could barely hold a conversation: the soft top. The noise from the traffic was horrendous. Could he not afford a car with a proper roof? (I was later told that soft top cars can cost even more than proper cars. I cannot understand that for the life of me.)
And I’ve been in the odd sports car (far too cramped) and 4×4 (no, I don’t know what that means) and they didn’t impress me much, as Shania Twain might put it. I just want a bog standard, reasonably-sized car that doesn’t conk out all the time and needs little attention.
I am, at least, capable of filling my current car with diesel and I have an idea where you put the screen wash, which I replace religiously every time it runs out. Apart from that, I’m lost, and I’m happy to keep it that way.
