Taxi

I have had a wearisome day.

Mark’s taxi was due to go for an MOT today, and before it went anywhere near the garage, it needed to be cleaned.

I did not want to do this at all.

I would rather have cleaned the bathroom.

I would rather have visited the dentist, not that we are allowed to visit dentists any more, in case they use their miniature tooth-hoover to suck plague out of our teeth along with blood and spit and bad language.

I would have preferred to spend my day chipping ice from under my toenails whilst fighting off marauding tarantulas. 

It was awful.

Imagine a builder’s van, owned by the sort of insanitary builder you would prefer not to sit next to you on a warm train. Imagine that the builder had spent a couple of weeks sawing up firewood and dead bodies in the back of his van, assisted by some muddy moulting dogs. Then imagine that that same builder had been so revolted by the mess that he had thought he had better just set fire to his van and get another, but first left it for a month or two, to soak in.

It was worse than that.

It was utterly horrible. Every inch of it was thickly covered in sawdust, and moss, and tree bark, and mud, and dog hair. There were bits of old stinging nettle, and zip ties, and oily things. There were unidentifiable electrical bits, and nastily sticky things. The front seats, where Mark had been sitting after he had been cutting up tiles with his water-spraying tile cutter, were also coated in a dried-up layer of thick white ooze.

In amongst all of that were the remains of a couple of months’ worth of unfinished picnics. There was a mouldy sausage underneath the driver’s seat, crumbs in every crevice, and what might have been desiccated melon stuck to the seat belt.

I contemplated setting fire to it and getting another.

Obviously I did not.

Instead I set to, with scrubbing brushes and sweeping brushes and hand brushes and the hoover, and slowly, slowly, swept it out.

It took ages.

After I thought I had swept away everything that might conceivably come away, I washed the inside.

I had to wash the seats as well as the dashboard and the insides of the doors and the floor mats. I even had to wash the seatbelts.

It took me almost all day.

I even gave it a celebratory squirt with our treasured Ambiance De Hotel Disney perfume, although not very much. I did not want to waste it, and thought that really Dettol might have been more appropriate. 

I did not consider trying to clean the outside at home.

The outside of the taxi looked rather as though it had bounded after Roger Poopy and Pepper to join them for their joyful mud wrestle in a puddle this morning, but then chickened out of the plunge into the beck afterwards, which we had obliged them to do for an icy rinse off.

I took it to the garage which has the Jet Wash, and occupied a satisfactory fifteen minutes alternately squirting and scrubbing, after which you could see what shape it was again.

It was starting to go dark by the time I set off. I called in at the supermarket and bought a pizza to feed everybody for dinner, which I thought was the height of idleness, but I had gone off the idea of cooking by then.

I salved my conscience by purchasing some red pepper and mushrooms to slice on the top of it, so that I was a real housewife after all.

The car failed, you will not be surprised to learn, but not because it was dirty. It failed because some rubber cover on the ball joint had cracked, so when Mark came home from work he kept his coat on and started taking the taxi to bits so that he could fix it and I can take it back again in the morning.

He is still doing this now, even though it is late, and dark, as I am writing to you.

That is why I still love him despite the fact that he is possibly the messiest person I have ever met in my entire life.