THE OTHER WEEK I WAS TALKING TO A friend-of-a-friend about Ernest Hemingway. Bull fighting, Key West, iceberg theory, all that sort of thing. At some point I casually dropped into conversation that, ahem, I was a writer too. ‘Oh yea?’ this person replied, sceptically. ‘So what do you write about?’ Well, I said, I have a column in a car magazine so, you know, anything to do with cars really. ‘Like, windscreen wipers and stuff?’ they asked. No, no, you couldn’t write a whole column about windscreen wipers, I smiled. Or could you…?
I like windscreen wipers. You can’t deny they’re useful. I know how they work or, in the case of rain-sensing wipers, how they don’t. But let’s not get bogged down in the evils of the rain-ignoring system…
