A garage soon becomes a crud depository
JOE BENNETT
Last updated 07:49 17/04/2013

OPINION: Much have I travelled in the realms of crud, and many cruddy states and kingdoms seen, but never have I seen such epic heaps of crud as yesterday, when I cleaned out my garage.

Oh, why do we bother with garages? Car factories don't. They stand their bright new cars out in the rain.

But we're so soft we build a little kennel for our fifth-hand Nissan Stonko to keep the diddums warm. It makes no sense.

I have a monstrous garage. When men first see it they're struck dumb. They stare about them in a wild surmise, the only sound a thud as jaw hits floor, and then the steady drip of their saliva. They're paralysed by lust for what I've got, the garage of their dreams, a refuge for testosterone, the space that masculinity was born to occupy.

When I first saw it, may the Lord forgive me, I thought much the same. But now I know.

Deriving from the French, garage means place of parking. But it's not cars we park in garages, so much as crud. For all our dreams of making it a workshop, a garage soon becomes a crud depository.

The reason's obvious. By instinct we are hunter-gatherers who like to keep the stuff we hunt and gather. It acts as an insurance policy against a world that wants to freeze us, strip us bare and starve us. It goes, therefore, against the evolutionary grain to throw stuff out.

And if you've got a garage twice the size of Vanuatu you don't need to. Well, I have had enough of storing crud. I plan to annexe half the space to build a library. A book-lined sanctuary, a place to shelter from the fizzing world of electronic sound and fury signifying nothing. With walls and floor and shelves of oiled and polished wood, a reading light with wide green shade, a rack for wine, an ashtray and a chair so easy that it goes to sleep on its own.

There of an evening I will sit and read and sip and read, entombed by all the several thousand books that I've got scattered round the house. I've dreamed of such a room for years. And now I'm going to have it. But first I had to clear the space of crud.

I hired a skip. And into it went everything. An imitation leather suitcase with a luggage tag from 1993. Inside the case a wad of shirts I can't imagine ever having worn. A pile of prints of rural scenes, a two-ton television, the manual for a car I crashed in Taupo, a clutch of bent and rusty waratahs, a globe that had been stabbed through Madagascar, a sleeping bag I had to carry to the skip with outstretched arms, my face all wrinkled like a pug's, an exercycle bought on doctor's orders last July to rehabilitate a knee. I knew I'd never use it. I used it once. (The knee, and thanks for asking, has rehabilitated nicely.

The garage walls are lined with cupboards, each one of which was crammed. In one I found a box marked Xmas Decorations. I haven't decorated Xmas since I was 12. For here's another truth of monstrous garages: Other people stash their crud in them. "Just for a month or two," they say, "while we move house," but back they never come. I don't know whose the decorations were, nor do I care. If they were yours, they're at the landfill now. Try going there in December and looking for the twinkly bits.

I used a stepladder to reach the topmost cupboards. As I was lugging down a box of books a rat leapt out of it. It landed briefly on my sleeve. I reacted calmly.

Once I'd picked the ladder up and checked myself for bruises, I looked around and was impressed by just how far and wide the books had scattered. (The rat had shredded and then nested in a book by Henry James. How good to know it had a use.)

It took till dusk to fill the skip, to biff the grisly residue of the years. But it was done and it felt good. And after tea the builder came to talk about design. He thinks the library should have an elevated floor so you step up to it.

"And perhaps," the builder said, "a second step might be a good idea."

"Why's that?" I asked.

"Because," he said, "you then could use the space beneath the floor for storage."

"One step will be enough," I said, with what I thought was most commendable restraint.

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