Spanners

I have been clearing out the garage. Again.

The garage was Dad's space and he filled it with things that he thought might come in handy. At some time. And they may well do, but it will be for somebody else. I reached the conclusion a while back that if I have no idea what it is I'm looking at then I'm never going to use it. It's taken a good long while to summon up the motivation to get in there and get on with it, two reasons really

1. It reminds me so much of my Dad, it's the smell mainly - a sort of oily, metally, petrol-ly type smell - clearing out the garage would make it go away.

2. I couldn't be arsed.

What I found when I really got into it was stuff which made me laugh and cry. I found:

• a box full of really old photographs, taken when Dad was a boy and visiting his godmother and her pal in Cambridge. It was odd to see him as a child with his parents who in the photo are younger than I am now.
• an old inflatable dingy and remembered the day we discovered it had a puncture - down at Elie paddling like hell as the dingy slowly folded in half with us sandwiched in the middle.
• 147 spanners and wrenches. Why? Why do men need so many spanners? and don't try and give me the "for the same reason women have so many shoes/handbags" argument. It doesn't wash. Shoes go with outfits. Spanners don't - unless we're talking about a kind of "Jings, I can't use my Stilson Wrench with these overalls - it'll have to be the Mole Wrench or nothing!" kind of deal.
• letters from me and Gill to Dad when he was working away from home - mine was a litany of test scores from school and patronising spelling corrections for him - self-satisfied little twerp that I was.
• The roof rack for the Chrysler. I wrote that car off in 1979 and we haven't had a car the roof rack has fitted since then. Mind you he did love that car. He had to hitch to work for months afterwards. I bought him a Ping golf club to apologise, Gill told him if he kept on teaching me to drive he could end up with a whole set. Maybe he didn't like golf that much really, because I didn't learn to drive until was 24 and I had lessons from Harry Parr, who sang"There was a Wild Colonial Boy!" and smacked my hands with the pointy end of a pool cue if I crossed my hands on the wheel.

Anyway. It's done now; the garage is neat and tidy. Not only can you get a car into it but you can also walk round the car when it's in there. We have dumped or given away 98% of Dad's treasures. We still have an entire toolbox full of things that really actually might be useful, and I still have an oily, metally, petrol-ly something that I sniff every now and again.