Punts
By Victoria Evans
Our cars are unique to all of us. With fabric furnishings that develop like photographic negatives to our daily rituals, and metal frames which envelop us much like the quaffed intricate shell to a snail – encasing our daily voyages. Creeping, chugging and chuckling to our whims of adventure and routine. Each distinct in character, status, credit score, colour, smell and creed.
We have daily flashes of overzealous Land Rovers, buzzes from underwhelming smart cars and deep mumbles of hatchbacks holding precious cargo. Each on a quest with their unique rider, pushing varying degrees of flare and ferocity onto the overbeaten tarmac.
My compadre is a 2007 Black Fiat Punto Dynamic Sport (christened ‘punts’ for short) – who to be honest can be a real dick head.
To begin with, she likes to play a game with the steering wheel, to make it feel like I am actually guiding four retired elephants, this may ease if I speak nicely to her and calmly turn her engine off and on again. Her boot and back doors have remained sealed like a tomb for eight months now, housing long lost and to be quite honest unknown treasure. Her battery has given up seven times and her gear box once snapped clean off when I was turning on a busy hill.
Three kind strangers had to roll us back up.
She is quite the trickster.
Though I adore her.
Together we’ve charged down winding country lanes at speed to forgotten friends and formed new bonds on exquisite adventures. She plays my favourite songs and allows the breeze to whip my hair back and forth - when it’s needed – and when that song comes on shuffle. She’s shown me sights I would have otherwise never seen and created holidays out of bank holiday weekends. How could you be mad at a friend like that.
Never has the entwinement of our bodies felt so apparent than one day when I had trundled up the hill after work, and jumped into ‘punts’ to get out of the damp drizzle. There was a strange unfamiliar sour faggy aroma, slightly baffled I placed my bag in the back. There was a strange pile of food wrappers that had formed in the foot well...? Had someone very timidly trashed my car...? A pretty uncreative but powerful prank perhaps, a callous and confusing joke maybe...? As I went to start the engine - I gasped - I realised… this was not my car. I was suddenly frozen, as though I had just accidentally tucked myself deeply into someone elses bed without their knowledge. I looked up, and a metre in front, to my right, there in fact lay ‘punts’. I started to quietly but very hastily retract myself from the foreign vehicle. Oh how me and ‘punts’ laughed.
The roads are quieter now during ‘lock down’ and adventures with punts are not advised. Friends can’t be reached right now and bank holidays are for exploring things you can make with all-purpose flour. And to be honest the world needs less cars, the air is cleaner, the daily sounds are more heavily doused with sexy bird song and less choked by petrol exhausts. Never has the luxury of punts been so apparent. I’m sure we shall venture again but for now I will think of her fondly whilst parked up, and vow to prioritise adventures and ease up on her daily grind, for her, for me and for the strengthening crescendo of bird song and the cleaner and cleaner breeze.