JOHN MARTIN

In case you plan to send me advice about car air-fresheners, no need.
I reckon I now know more about car air-fresheners than anyone who no longer drives a car needs to know.
I gave up driving more than five years ago for health reasons and I’ve never felt the need to rejoin the growing rat race on wheels.
When I was a kid, most families had one car. One!
Only more affluent families had two cars.
But now every teenage kid also has a car.
Heck, I know one family that has more cars than people.
Lucky one is an off-road vehicle because no room is left in the large driveway. To get to the front door, they have to drive over the garden bed.
This glut means there are many more cars on the road, so the authorities feel compelled to build more roads.
Bigger, faster roads.
Roads that will confuse you with their complexity.
I rewatched the futuristic movie Bladerunner the other day.
Well, it was futuristic when I first watched it in the early 1980s.
Set in the year 2019, it had flying cars.
What happened there?
We never got flying cars in the actual 2019.
All we got were germs that led to a global pandemic
If we had acquired widespread flying cars, there probably wouldn’t be a need to build so many new roads. Did I mention I get easily lost even as a passenger?
I digress.
The reason I know so much about car air-fresheners is I was doing some harmless (or so I thought) research for the novel I am writing.
With holidays and house renovations, I haven’t done much writing this year.
So it was pleasing to dive back into the eighth book in my Windy Mountain series, which was about third-way through.
The trouble was I had forgotten exactly what I had written, so my first job was to re-read my part-manuscript and finesse it as I went.
Early on, my main protagonist catches a taxi.
Most of us know what the inside of a taxi looks like, right?
So I didn’t need to worry about deep description.
But I wanted to give it a point of difference so I decided to add a pine-scented air-freshener into the cab of the cab.
Not being a car driver, I have a knowledge gap there.
From where do the air-fresheners hang? Or are placed? What do they look like?
So I went to the font of all knowledge, google search, to fill me in.
The trouble with this is now my social media feeds are full of ads for car air-fresheners.
AI thinks I’m in that market.
That I’m a stinking car driver.
Smart, eh?
Not really.
I DON’T EVEN DRIVE A CAR.
So no more, please.