There’s a moment, just as you lower yourself into the driver’s seat, when your car makes a noise. It’s a faint, weary sort of sound, somewhere between a creak and a resigned exhale. You might mistake it for the compression of the seat cushions or the gentle settling of old springs, but I have come to believe that this is, in fact, your car sighing.
I know this sounds unlikely. Ridiculous, even.
Cars, we are told, are inanimate objects. Machines. Tools. Not prone to moods, emotions, or the slow, creeping sense that they’ve had quite enough of your nonsense. And yet, I can’t shake the feeling that my car is quietly judging me.
A Life of Disappointment
Think about what your car endures. It was built for the open road, for adventure, for freedom. Its ancestors raced through deserts, climbed snowy mountains, and blitzed along the autobahn. It was born in a factory, all shiny paint and sharp angles, with the promise of high-speed thrills and thrilling road trips.
Instead, it spends its days ferrying you back and forth to the same five places within a ten-mile radius. It sits in rush-hour traffic, creeping forward inch by inch, its once-proud engine now nothing more than a mildly disgruntled participant in your endless commute.
It has been forced to endure your questionable choice in radio stations, the faint but persistent smell of last week’s drive-thru burger, and the slow accumulation of coffee cups in the footwell. It has carried you, uncomplaining, through fast food drive-thrus, across speed bumps you should have slowed down for, and over kerbs you swore you “definitely didn’t hit.”
And every time you haul yourself into the driver’s seat, it lets out that small, exasperated sigh, as if to say:
“Really? This again?”
The Resentful Memory of Potholes
I suspect cars have long memories. They remember the potholes you swerved to avoid but clipped anyway. They recall the winter mornings when you sat shivering while the windscreen took an age to defrost, all the while muttering darkly about “bloody car heaters.” They can still feel the indignity of that one time you spilled a full cup of coffee into the gear stick housing, only to mop it up half-heartedly with a crumpled receipt from a petrol station.
They never forget the indignity of a missed gear change, the disgrace of a failed hill start, the sheer betrayal of a forgotten handbrake. They suffer in silence while you try to parallel park, wincing internally as you misjudge the distance to the kerb for the eighth time, sending their tyres scraping across concrete like a chef’s knife against a glass chopping board.
The Emotional Rollercoaster of the MOT
And then, of course, there’s the annual humiliation of the MOT. Stripped of their dignity and prodded by a man in overalls who pronounces the word “caliper” with grim satisfaction, your car suffers the automotive equivalent of a midlife crisis every twelve months.
You stand in the corner, pretending to be fascinated by a shelf of pine-scented air fresheners, while your car is poked, prodded, and judged for its every failing. It is weighed, measured, and found wanting. Its exhaust is tutted over. Its brake pads are shaken at like a naughty child’s report card.
No wonder it sighs when you climb back in, shamefaced and clutching a receipt longer than a roll of Andrex.
Drive Kindly, You Are Being Judged
So next time you settle into your driver’s seat and hear that faint, deflating sigh, remember: your car has endured a lot. It has suffered your clumsy steering, your reckless speed bumps, and your optimistic assumptions about fuel economy.
It has put up with endless traffic jams, impatient beeping at red lights, and your half-hearted attempts at changing the oil only after it starts making noises like a boiling kettle.
So perhaps, just once, consider giving it a break. Change the air freshener. Hoover the crumbs out of the cup holder. Ease gently into that parking space instead of taking it like a medieval battering ram.
Because if cars do have souls, and I’m increasingly convinced that they do, then they are tired, long-suffering souls indeed.
And one day, when you least expect it, they just might decide they’ve had enough.
Dwight Warner is the quintessential oddball Brit, with a weirdly American-sounding name, who has a knack for turning the mundane into the extraordinary. Hailing originally from London, now living in the sleepy depths of Lincolnshire but claiming an allegiance to the absurd, Dwight has perfected the art of finding the surreal in real life. Whether it’s a spirited rant about the philosophical implications of queueing or a deep dive into why tea tastes better in a mug older than you, his blogs blur the line between the abstract and the everyday.
With an irreverent wit and a penchant for tangents that somehow come full circle, Dwight Warner doesn’t just write; he performs on the page. His humour is both sharp and delightfully nonsensical, like Monty Python met your nosiest neighbour and they decided to co-write a diary.
Known for being gregarious, Dwight is the life of any (real or metaphorical) party, whether he’s deconstructing the existential crisis of mismatched socks or sharing his inexplicable theories about why pigeons are secretly running the economy.
A larger-than-life personality with a laugh as loud as his opinions, Dwight Warner invites readers to step into a world where everything’s slightly askew—and that’s exactly how he likes it.
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