A Dozen Mouldy Bags For Life: A Tour Through Your Filthy Car-Boot
WELCOME to this exclusive event: a bespoke, guided tour through the disgraceful skip that is the boot of your shitty hatchback.
A dozen mouldy bags for life
Even though you’ve been getting all your shopping delivered since the pandemic, you still keep enough reusable bags in your car to carry the entire stock of your local Tesco Express.
Deep down though, you know you will never use these shopping bags again as some milk leaked in one, and you never cleaned it, and now all of them have a sour ol’ bang. Still though, you’d be mad to throw them away, some of them date back to the introduction of the plastic bag levy – they’re practically antiques.
Bits of Christmas tree:
With hindsight, you can look back at your decision to transport a Christmas tree in the boot of your Ford Fiesta as one of the worst decisions you ever made – first through third marriages included. Until your car is written off and melted down to make fidget-spinners or something, it will forever be full of crusty old needles. You could have a dozen Henry the Hoovers suck themselves to death trying to clean them from your boot to no avail.
Sacks of glass bottles
Whenever you turn a corner, the thundering rattle of glass from the back of your car reminds you of the fact that you haven’t gone to the bottle bank in about four years. And did you wash them all out before chucking them in your boot? Absolutely fucking not. Well, thanks to your ineptitude, the carpet back there reeks of a vinegary mix of old Carlsberg and wine, meaning that, during summer, you have to drive with the windows down.
An old microwave
You told yourself, and your partner, that you’d bring it to the tip months ago. That absolutely hasn’t happened, even though you’re too embarrassed to admit it to them. Still, at least you’ve managed to hide it all this time using some of those grotty bags for life (see first point).
Rusty tyre-iron
The one useful thing that’s actually in your boot, buried under all the other shit is – in your hands – completely fecking pointless. If you actually did get a puncture, there’s not a chance in hell you’d know where to start with changing a tyre.
And if you were somewhere without phone signal to call the AA, you may as well just accept that you’re doomed; lay down on the road, and wait to be eaten by badgers.
Takeaway wrappers:
Unless you frequently sit down to eat Supermac’s in your boot, there is no earthly reason for there to be so many burger wrappers knocking about the floor. Figuring out how they all ended up back there is genuinely mysterious, and is like something out of the X-Files – albeit from the shitter, later seasons.
Long abandoned gym gear
Your woefully ambitious New Year’s resolution to ‘get fit’ may have collapsed mere days into January, but that doesn’t mean you aren’t still haunted by the sight of your grubby gym bag every time you pop the boot. The pong off those stale, sweat-drenched shorts sitting in that damp, unopened bag would make a pig gag. At this stage, you’re worried that if you do unzip that fetid hold-all you’d unleash a new pandemic.
In short: you’ve basically driving around in a motorised, artisanal landfill.