Priorities

Since becoming a lady of leisure going part-time at work and taking over child care and miscellaneous household duties, I have been to Halfords twice. (For the non-British among you, Halfords is a big chain store that sells car-type stuff - accessories, spare bulbs, new windscreen wipers, that sort of thing.)

The first time was pretty mundane. A taxi driver nearly ended up in my back seat when I stopped at a junction and he politely informed me that my brake lights were out. I trundled off to Halfords to buy £2 worth of bulbs and £5 worth of a young man to fit them for me. I am rubbish at practical car type issues and don't mind playing dumb when it comes to stuff like that. Worth every penny.

The second time, a day or two later, I went to pick up some very exclusive, not to mention expensive, German car polish. And some special lint-free cloths for applying same. "Ah," I hear you think. "Loth has time on her hands now. She is going to clean and polish the family's dented, bashed and rapidly rusting VW." And what's more she is going to try to maintain the startling level of cleanliness of the second car which she has inherited back from her mother and which Loth's mum has been cleaning to her exacting standards. (In other words, it is cleaner than any part of my house by a factor of at least ten.)

Or perhaps you think "Loth is settling into her childcare/part-time worker/housewife mode and Husband has decided to fulfif his gender stereotype and will be spending Saturday mornings washing and polishing the car whilst chatting to the neighbours about the weather."

But no. Neither of those scenarios bear any resemblance to the truth. For, in case you were wondering, I can confirm that it is in fact very difficult to get any kind of a shine on an inch-thick crust of mud and dried road salt such as that sported by our car. The polish is in fact for Husband's beloved guitars. Apparently, ultra-expensive German car polish is the very dab for sprucing up your headstock. So now you know. Yeah, the girl in Halfords looked at me weirdly too.