The Wayne Memorial Letters

Wayne is the only man I will ever truly love. He was my first car, and he was beautiful.

It wasn’t just his three different paint colours and cow-spotted furry roof that made me fall head over heels for him. This was a car whose headlights would suddenly fail at midnight on the highway, whose passenger door would swing open unprompted when you turned a corner, whose handbrake would fail while parked in the driveway so that he rolled down into the street, whose bonnet would fly up while driving, completely obscuring your vision. This was a car who wanted to make your life interesting. Even people I’d never met knew his name. 

I was devastated when he finally went to the great car-yard in the sky, and at our old house I had a memorial wall in his honour: but here, the problem of the Blu-tac prohibition again reared its ugly head. Luckily, I had cardboard letters of his name in the boot of my car, where they’d been sitting soaking up petrol fumes for the past year and a half.

I decorated collage-style with different memories and souvenirs – it had to be messy and haphazard, or it wouldn’t be Wayne. (Really, leaving them to be crushed by oil containers in the boot wasn’t enough battering. I should have set them alight, put out the fire by soaking them in the bathtub then buried them in the backyard for six months.)

When Lyndon and I went to stay with a friend for the holidays, her son presented me with a card upon our arrival that contained his dire predictions regarding whether we were likely to ever make it home again.

His sister was equally cheerful. 

Dear Rach - I did not draw Wayne on the front of this card because I knew he would have spoilt it for you.

His predictions thankfully did not come to pass - this, however, did. 

The rest of the Y was also decorated with various recollections of mechanical failures and a photo of the corresponding part. (I could have decorated an entire alphabet with this.)

 Even the tops got some love. 

Others were taken from emails I'd sent years ago. 

Many of the memories are happy ones, but many of them also make me want to clutch my wallet to my chest protectively.

The now-teenage author of the Lyndon-pushing-Wayne card was recently talking to his mother about whether money could buy happiness, and pointed out that owning a Ferrari would make you fairly cheerful. “Do you think any car could make Rach happier than Wayne did?” she countered.

He was silent.

Photo Ladder

Just after we moved in, our real estate agent mentioned that under no circumstances could we use Blu-tac to hang posters, because she can’t stand the damage it does to the walls. We laughed, and when we realised she wasn’t joking, we laughed even harder. These are the pristine walls she wanted to protect:

But since I value the return of my bond more than I value my Lion King poster, I went looking for alternatives, and found a tutorial on making a photo ladder that the internet has since eaten and now refuses to regurgitate. I no longer even remember the name of the blog, but her tutorial went something like this:

1.       Cut ladder to size and paint. (It should have mentioned ‘Do not paint the same colour as the walls, even if that’s the only paint you own’, but it did not.)

2.       Paint rungs with fabric Mod Podge and wrap with material, making sure the join is at the back of the rung.

3.       Shoo away the pet cat sleeping between the rungs while the glue dries. (In our house, it’s more likely to be ‘shoo away the ants, the mice, the possum that lives in the roof or the stray dog that came inside to chase the possum.)

4.       Tie frames to the rungs with string. (‘Get some artistic photos’ would also have been good advice at this point, rather than hanging a photo of the obese guy from The Inside.) I had to add small sticky hooks to the back of the bottom of the frames so I had something to tie the string around: if you tie them only at the top then they hang lazily backwards like the black frame is doing.

Also, when you’re carrying the ladder inside, it’s a good idea to try not to bash a dent in the ceiling, or it kind of defeats the whole purpose of the exercise.