Is your car a handbag on wheels?

Are you one of those people with a messy car? I will confess that I must count myself a member of that renegade tribe, but in my defence I am trying very hard to reform myself. I have resolved that my vehicle will be a model of minimalist motoring, devoid of all extraneous bits and pieces but for the manual, my CDs and my access tag for the office. Yes, it will be a challenge: the sensible Korean hatchback did, after all, end up at that point where I avoided giving people lifts to meetings because strictly speaking there wasn’t any space on the seats for them, and the resemblance to the surface of my desk was, admittedly, a source of some embarrassment. But I remain hopeful.

Oh, who am I kidding? I’ve tried this before and it’s never worked; the second law of thermodynamics always exerts its terrible power and all ends in chaos. The thing is, a car is a kind of handbag on wheels. Granted, unlike a handbag it comes with air conditioning and a tracking device, but the principle is the same: a receptacle that is full of your stuff, including every mint you’ve ever been given with a restaurant bill and which — in that mysterious way of all useless things — have been multiplying under your seat ever since.

Since my current mode of transport is significantly larger than the sensible Korean hatchback, I am able to fit a great deal more into it, and the potential for clutter on a more daunting scale is omnipresent. I’m trying to keep things orderly, which means turfing out discount furniture sale flyers and squashed cans of Coke Zero the moment I get the opportunity, and conducting regular audits of the contents of the side pockets in the doors.

But that’s as far as I’ve managed to take it. You never do know what you might need on the road, after all. So the SUV currently contains a pair of black high heels, a non-wrinkle black jacket, deodorant, sunblock, a hair clip and a scrunchie, coins for car guards, lipgloss, several reusable shopping bags, a hat, bags of clothing for the Kids Haven pickup point, which I haven’t yet got around to dropping off yet, an umbrella, a bag of apples, a hair brush, spare facewash, shower gel and moisturiser, Clicks car cleaning wipes (very useful. Look for the maroon pack.), plasters, a pack of Mr Sneezy tissues, a pair of takkies with socks, a towel, a bottle of water, anti-bacterial wipes picked up at the Nedbank Golf Challenge and a blue striped neck pillow originally purchased from Sydney International Airport.

With the exception of the clothing for donation, all of these things are either useful or potentially useful. It would be foolhardy, therefore, to throw them out; you never know when you’ll be caught in a snowdrift and forced to wait a week to be rescued.

A male friend of mine maintains that women have messy cars because they treat them like handbags, and men, who are used to having nothing but a back pocket, don’t fill their cars with stuff — but the messiest vehicle in which I’ve ever travelled from A to B belonged to a man. It was a double cab driven by my boyfriend at the time, and it contained marginally less garbage than a Pikitup truck. He was an otherwise highly functional, handsomely remunerated consultant who organised the IT systems of huge, complex organisations, but the interior of his vehicle was a disaster, its back seat piled high with gym gear and photographic props, its footwells a terrible conflagration of credit card receipts and cigarette cartons (Dunhill Fine Cut, as I recall). In the back, under the cover, lay what smelled like a dead rat but which turned out to be the remains of a McDonald’s cheeseburger — thus proving that, contrary to urban legend, McDonald’s burgers are made of organic substances capable of decay — and he never removed it in all the time I knew him. For all I know, it is still there, slowly evolving into another carbon-based life form. Richard Dawkins would approve.

Compared to that, I’m Martha Stewart. So yes, I may be one of those people with a messy car, and that will always be my natural state of being. But I am trying hard, and when people at the office need a lift, I’m not too ashamed to take them for a ride.