Guilty Secrets - and how to lessen them

Well mine is my car. Its getting used far too often atm (when I added up the bills for November we used nearly £100 worth of petrol...) when rain, stock shifting/collection, and getting to activities 50 miles away in Cambridge come into the equation. Its far too greedy for me to keep it really, esepcially as for journeys of less than 10 miles the engine never gets up to the most efficient running temp., but living in 'land of the car' Milton Keynes means that often the only way is to use it :-(

Although we could stay home :-)

Because we all spend too much time in it, it becomes rather like a mobile handbag. (I refuse to accept that I'm not the only person doing this, along with having a bag anyway that also ends up far too full of 'stuff'.) Stuff leaves the house to join us for journeys, and then never makes it back inside the house. Drinks and things from this place or that get brought out to the car so that we can 'get going'. And the car becomes the 'family' litter bin (very very red face).

So here, for now, is part of the solution to that....

1) Don't allow a build up of apple cores, drinks bottles/cartons, magazines/leaflets/newspapers - so carry a fold up bin, one of those plastic carriers that are still at the back of the draw since you bought nice cloth ones, or similar and make the children cart out all the rubbish etc at the end of each and every journey.

2) Download music, audio books, podcasts and whatever else to an iPod (hey, there is an Apple store here and its our income, shootme for prefering the 'brand' lol) or similar item, and get either an iTrip and/or plugin cradle/device to play out through the existing car speakers. No more piles of CDs ending up scratched/lost/under the seats (well in theory anyway)

3) Nasty smells during a journey... this is where the take-away can be useful! A good strong cup of expresso can absorb a lot of the odurs, and is still good to drink afterwards (although you may need to add a little more hot water to get it back to drinking temperature). Apparently this also works for old 'smoke' but aint no one *ever* going to trying that out in *my* vehicle!!

4) Back of seat storage bags for children - so all the drinks bottles/snacks, games, toys, other journey 'essentials' can go in the pockets and not end up on the floor.... We got some from Lidl about 4 years ago and they are still going OK (although I did have to restitch the bottom pocket on one after a small child decided to use it to wedge their feet in mid journey about 6 months into them being there). Lots of companies sell these now, so I'm not going to suggest anywhere in particular.

5) If you have a boot worth mentioning, then getting storage boxes/bags to keep blankets or whatever in is definately sensible. You can pack your shopping in as well to stop it shifting around. But important note - do not use anything that you cant' fasten down somehow, especially if stiff and if empty. Because should you get rear-ended anything empty will take flight and often full as well. And they go a long way. And your children are likely to be what is hit first.