Suburban

I never wanted to be bourgeois, particularly; but then I had no real yen in the other direction either. By default you end up in a situation that rankles, occasionally. It's better than living like a student, of course, but there are things about the suburban life that just kill me. Sundays are the worst. It's not because it is traditional that you wash your car or mow the lawn on a Sunday; it's because you've been putting it off and the weekend is nearly over.

I hate those two things: mowing the lawn and washing the car. I've tried doing it the other way around, but the paintwork got scratched. With the Passat, I've determined that it is a Bad Thing to use a car wash, because the brushes do scratch the paint. So I have only ever washed it manually, which means I have only washed it, approximately, 4 or 5 times in around a year. Plus I had it valeted at work around three times. And in France once I applied a jet wash.

Mowing the lawn is the one aspect of gardening that falls to me. Up to me, I'd concrete it over, or let it grow into a jungle (aka a site of special scientific interest). It's not so much the actual mowing, but the cable. The cable, no matter how careful you are, always manages to get tangled up with itself, and it is this I hate more than anything. That advert on at the moment, with the mower that tidies its cable away, brings tears to my eyes.