Recently, I performed the required yearly cleansing ritual on my car, in order that it may be presented without blemish upon the day of reckoning.

The following is a list of things I found inside its rusty innards whilst completing the rite:

• 31 parking tickets (the legal kind, where you pay beforehand)
• A piece of paper upon which Roger and Jacquey Newton’s address was written, alongside a helpful diagram
• An open packet of Lidl salami
• One mystery gospel tape, with a track list containing ‘How I Love Jesus’, ‘His Eye is on the Sparrow’ and ‘Old Time Religion’
• 3 mostly empty water bottles
• A tiny, bright green staple remover
• 8 pence in change
• 2 euro cents
• Half a pack of Haribo Starmix
• 2 pairs of sunglasses, each missing an arm
• A ‘fragile’ sign with my old address on it
• 3 very old and brown banana skins
• An invoice for my last MOT
• 6 pens
• A set of guitar strings missing a b-string
• The chords to Crown Him with Many Crowns
• 4 bottles of Beck’s beer that had been rolling around the floor of the car for a month. Be very wary if I offer you a beer for a while
• A Showcase Percussion parking permit (Does this count as another parking ticket? I’m gonna say no)
• 3 plasters, which were stuck to…
• The remains of the Lion bar on my dashboard
• 2 empty cartons of Ace Vitamin drink
• 1 full carton of Ace Vitamin drink
• A hairbrush (Not mine. Any takers?)
• 2 washers
• An open packet of Lidl cheese
• The empty wrapper of a Ginster’s Turkey, Bacon and Cranberry pasty, which turned out to be disappointingly mediocre
• 2 flyers to Spiers and Boden’s farewell tour
• A whole lion bar, that has evidently melted and reformed more times than it would care to recollect
• 3 clothes hangers
• A green luggage bag
• The accidental strippergram hat bequeathed to me by Miss Joanna Fox
• 1 reversible tie. So, in effect it’s like 2 ties really
• Half of a Lidl seeded wholegrain roll
• A guitar stand
• 2 biscuits tins full of sandwiches that had been there for roughly 2 months
• The stuff that was growing on the sandwiches in the tins that had been there for roughly 2 months
• An ASDA trainee badge

There is perhaps an argument that this should happen more than once a year.

Perhaps.