The car, our second home

http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2013/nov/23/the-car-our-second-home

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Last year we sold the family car. It has been an enormous improvement in our quality of life. No parking tickets, no traffic jams. No children vomiting at 70mph. No tussles with my wife about whether to take the motorway or the scenic route, no rows about whether the windows should be open or closed, the air conditioning on or off, the heater high or low.

And yet I have a sense of loss. After all, a family car is not just a car. It is a whole culture. As one academic paper from an American research company I came across recently states, "The car is a central space for ... families to spend time in … as central as time spent at home. The car (is) much like a living room with large windows on street level or the front yard.

"The car witnesses several of the intimate human behaviours that are also carried out at home such as: eating, fighting with spouses or siblings, singing out loud, talking to ourselves, being entertained, picking our noses, sharing – from trivial to deep – conversations and moments with our loved ones, and even having sex."

Yes, you can do a whole lot in a car that you can do at home. It is indeed a second home for many, although a very small one without a toilet or a back garden. Outside London, where the concentration of space makes it optional, a family car is virtually as important as a home. People, I am told, have two or three of them. There, they even keep them in garages (the idea of having a garage is as remote to me as the possibility of driving a Rolls-Royce).

The car gets more significant the more space there is. As Nicholas Humphrey, who directed the wonderful 1990s television documentary series about the car From A to B: Tales of Modern Motoring, told me, "If you live in the countryside, arrivals and departures are very public. They are not concealed by a parking space. There is a fear of approaching a private driveway in a bad car."

Whatever the practical reality of getting from A to B, a car also represents something to people. It is the most obvious status symbol you can own and, unlike a house interior, it is on public display. It "makes a statement" – though, with the growth of bumper stickers such as "Little Princess on Board" and "I'm Speeding Because I Need a Poo", the statement is often "I'm a Bit of a Tool". (Oh, for the simplicity of the traditional triangular flag sticker, "I've Been To Beautiful Weymouth.")

People invest a great deal of their emotional life in their cars. As the introduction to the accompanying booklet to the documentary series states: "They promise us physical as well as social mobility and furnish us with the most conspicuous form of personal adornment after the clothes we stand up in."

In the case of the family car, the most famous example of this is the Chelsea tractor, the 4x4 that never sees the countryside and may be adorned with spray-on mud.

One can't really escape this status aspect. Our family car was a dented and dirty Ford Focus, bought without thought, but as Nicholas Barker (who wrote the accompanying book) says: "To drive a car which is considerably cheaper and more dilapidated than most people on a similar salary is in itself a form of inverted snobbery. I have the confidence to drive a diminutive VW Polo only because I live in a large house in a fashionable part of London." Ditto.

Ironically, the idea of the car as an advertisement for oneself is far more common now than in my early days of family car travel. It's ironic because the science of aerodynamics has determined that most motors do not look very much different from one another.

Back in the day, if you drove a Ford Anglia (pointy, angular, a little bit flash), a Morris Minor (rounded, friendly, sturdy), an Austin A35 (happy, up for a bit of a lark) or a Hillman Imp (bit sexy, bit fast), you were definitely making a statement. But the statement you were mainly making was that you could afford a car in the first place. It is easy to forget that the assumption of car ownership is only a couple of generations old.

We didn't have a car when I was growing up in the late 50s and early 60s. The first one we owned was an ex-army Jeep that had no ignition key, just an on-off switch. Not surprisingly, it was soon stolen.

Later, we survived on a diet of Morris Minors and Morris Travellers, by which my father swore – literally, as the bastards were always breaking down (their reputation for reliability in my experience was thoroughly undeserved). However, they were cute as hell, with little orange plastic arms that extended from the bodywork to indicate a turn, and in the case of the Traveller, beams of timber holding the whole weird construction together.

It is easy to look back at these now classic motors fondly – and I do – but there was a dark side to them. The heaters were often non-existent or ineffective, which is why the car blanket was a thing in the 60s and 70s. Going on a long night drive to some grim holiday B&B in Scotland was no joke, as the temperature gauge plummeted and the heater gasped its last.

Boredom was the principal enemy, with no in-car entertainment to speak of. The radio, if it worked at all, was crackly and usually tuned to some dull radio station knocking out Mantovani from dawn to dusk. Stopping at a motorway service station was like taking a brief excursion into an eastern European prison catering facility.

The vibrations were so extreme it was hard to read anything. So we stared out of the window – if we were going on holiday, for maybe seven or eight hours (those cars weren't very fast). Or we played car games. Twenty Questions. I-Spy. Licence Plates. Count the telephone poles. Red cars v Blue cars. It was desperate. After about half an hour, we were positively praying for a major pile-up just to relieve the tedium.

Today, the picture has changed utterly. Family cars, although profoundly uninteresting in terms of design, really have become like a front room. They are no longer even cars, but space wagons or people movers. They are warm and well ventilated in the winter, cool and air conditioned in the summer. They always start first time. They don't break down. There are televisions, music systems and DVD players. There are cup holders. The ride is smooth and comfortable. It should be perfect bliss.

And yet it isn't. In solving one set of family car problems, they have created a whole load more. Nicholas Humphrey says: "Cars tends to produce discord as much as pleasure. Family tensions are strangely magnified, marital or sibling or whatever. It's the confinement, the inescapability, the acoustic, upholstered hush, like a radio studio."

That hush may be there when you get into the car, but it does not last. Once, while travelling, my wife was listening to Van Morrison on the car music system, cheerfully singing along at the top of her voice. Louise, my seven year old, was watching a movie on my computer, which had just come to a particularly noisy bit of action. She didn't have any earphones. The earphones were with Eva, 11, who was listening to the soundtrack of Glee at a loud enough level to produce that particularly annoying mixture of hiss and thud. I swear to God, had we not arrived at our destination in short order I would have run amok with a machete, had there been one handy. But, of course, they don't keep them as standard on these new modern cars. So I had to just sit and sulk, loudly. But no one could hear my tuts and sighs. There was too much noise.

My children are normally too anaesthetised by electronic devices to want to play car games, but my wife and I enjoy a game she made up called Coach, which is the simplest game ever devised but rather fun. You just have to be the first person to spot a coach. Every time you do, you get a point. It's great, though extremely dangerous, as the driver is looking out for coaches rather than focusing on the road.

One thing hasn't yet changed on long car journeys. The insistence of young children to know whether we are there yet. I tell them at the beginning, we are not there and we will not be there until the car actually stops without moving off again. This never satisfies them. They still want to know if we are there yet, even if we have only just left home on WHAT I HAVE JUST EXPLAINED is a 300-mile journey.

But I have to admit it – modern family motoring is an improvement on the old days. Anyone who thinks there is a degree of suffering in sitting in a modern car with a full load of humanity should try breaking down at the side of a motorway in the pissing rain before mobile phones were invented.

The most consistent and predictable thing about cars once upon a time is that they broke down or wouldn't start or, more fatally, wouldn't stop. This no longer happens. Cars are sleek, efficient, bland and boring. The only difference between them now is "signifiers" – the even more subtle ways of displaying status, such as the weight of the thud of the doors or the livery of the seats.

Has getting rid of the family car solved the status riddle? Probably not – now I can be accused of being theatrically eco-conscious. Also, we don't do entirely without a car – kind neighbours lend us theirs from time to time.

Yet to rid ourselves of this most visible and expensive of consumer durables has been surprisingly easy, and remarkably pleasant. We travel on buses and trains and bicycles for the most part, and it is altogether safer, more enjoyable and considerably cheaper.

So goodbye for ever, family car. You were fun while you lasted. Except that you weren't. You were a 15-vehicle pile-up with blood on the steering wheel and fire on the Tarmac (yes, the car is by far the most dangerous space you will customarily occupy with your family). You will one day be replaced by the flying car, as promised by the Jetsons, Blade Runner and every sci-fi movie since 1950. But until then, although we aren't going anywhere fast or in style, we get there in the end. That's good enough for me.

Let's talk about it in the car …

<em>Stuart Hannah, a child and adolescent psychotherapist, explains why the car is the perfect place to have difficult conversations:</em>

Cars provide a very particular transitional and temporary form of intimacy, which can help some people to open up and talk about otherwise tricky subjects.

The setting is usually warm and containing – almost womb-like – and the environment feels familiar, all things that are great facilitators for conversation.

The ease with which some people will open up in the car may also relate to the length of the journey – longer trips tend to be more conducive to in-depth chats – and to the length of the relationship.

If you have just argued with your partner or picked someone up from school, the car can be a place of intense and fraught conversations as well as being almost like a confessional. There's a feeling that what you say in the car has a confidentiality about it, a lack of consequences, that it doesn't relate to the outside world.

Look at black-cab drivers and their passengers, and how quickly a conversation can develop.

Although the space and atmosphere may be intimate – perhaps just you and one other person with very little between you – because there is no, or little, eye contact, it can feel less intimate and intense – no eye contact lessens the intimacy of conversations.

In the case of children, they may realise that parents can only give them so much attention – Mum or Dad can't really blow their top if they are driving so if there's a piece of bad news to break or a confession to make, they will only get half a reaction. Conversely, although the parent who's driving may be half-focused on the road, this may also be the time he or she seems most focused on the child and is therefore more receptive to what is being said. Once past a certain age, children are very switched on to what they can get away with and know how to play the game of "family".

These days, too, being in the car together may be one of the few occasions people – adults <em>and</em> children – are not in front of a screen and feel they feel they have the other person's attention. The journey provides an opportunity for passenger and driver, one to one, to be attended to, to be heard, listened to.

There's also a relaxed informality about car journeys, unlike sitting round the table at meal times, for example, with everyone looking at you. Children especially can find eye contact very intense, as if they're being peered at, scrutinised. If you fear being judged or ridiculed, the lack of eye contact in a car conversation can lessen the blow. It's disinhibiting.

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