Receipts and Route planners

In honour of a forthcoming family wedding a couple of weeks ago, I gave my car it's annual clearout. Armed with plastic bags for rubbish I began in the boot and worked my way forward. It soon became clear that I must have forgotten to conduct the 2012 visitation.

Squirrelled away in pockets, car doors and under seats I found: clumps of mud from football and cricket pitches alike, five plastic bottles, some with water, some without; a bag's worth of used tissues, biros in black, red, blue; pencils, some with lead in them; three books - one of them kept by me at the front of the car in case of getting stuck in a jam or waiting for a late coach back from a match, I hate having nothing to read - two rancid sticks of lipsalve; about £4.20 in loose change; sweet and chocolate wrappers; three socks - none matching - one t-shirt; a dozen or so used parking meter tickets; one £2 win scratchcard which I know for a fact has been there since we've had the car; a ski-lift pass, (haven't been for three years); plastic bags in case the dogs get taken unawares on walks; dog biscuits; a glasses-cord, (same ski trip); one pair of secateurs; one mascara, no longer useable; one hundred and one receipts and route planners that plotted my life over recent years.

The latter were the only things that caused me to stop for they told a tale. For some years I have driven the length and breadth of the country with our eldest for sports training and local, regional and national competitions. Each piece of paper (I refuse to get a tom-tom, I do not need someone to tell me that I've just missed a turn and I should take the next right when they don't even have eyes on the road), reminded me of competitions in obscure welsh towns, hard-to-find midlands industrial estates or better known northern cities; of hockey matches in fancifully named west country locations and of hours upon hours spent supporting and encouraging, cheering and cheering up, becoming an amateur expert on the niceties of the javelin throw, high-jump run-up or baton passing in the 4 x 100 metres (could tell the GB team a thing or two); of matches in horizontal rain that turned to sleet, or shouting anxiously as a hockey ball flew too close to the offspring's face. Years of 'phone calls home talking my other children through the niceties of preparing a meal, of knowing the best place to buy fuel when lost in the Brecon Beacons, of pulling into service stations for the obligatory energy giving chocolate and of wondering how much longer the car would hold up.

I stuffed my maps to stadiums and sports clubs into the bag with a sigh - but at least the car might last until the new year!