Week 240- singing, shushing and driving with the windows open...

We have no car stereo.

Well, that's not strictly true, we do but it hasn't worked for the best part of a year.

It wasn't like it was the best car stereo before it died.

The radio cut out every two minutes, which made listening to anything that involved speaking virtually impossible, and the tape player chewed up tapes like the Cookie Monster so long car journeys were spent untangling them with a pencil.

But none the less, there was some form of entertainment.

The car came back from the garage last year and the stereo had packed in. 

It was three weeks before either of us noticed by which point we were too embarrassed to go back and say thanks for fixing whatever it was that was initially wrong but you've also bust this in the meantime.

Oh the pitfalls of The Great British Embarrassment.

Since then we have now driven an estimated 7000 miles in relative silence.

Or had to talk.

Or, worse, sing.

Our two year old son has taken to shushing us before we've even finished the first line of 'Baa Baa Black Sheep.'

And our four year old daughter feigns sleep to avoid having to interact with any of us at all.

So. In a nutshell, car journeys are long, boring and involve at least three major arguments thanks to the lack of stereo.

Until we found a new game.

Every time we opened the front two electric windows, all four of us scream at the top of our lungs like Brodie in Point Break.

This is a relatively short-lived game, but the children wait with huge anticipation for us to open them.

'AGAIN, AGAIN, JUST ONE MORE TIME!' are the cries from the back seat.

So we open the windows one more time and everyone goes mental like Madonna has just taken to the stage.

Long car journeys, nailed, Ben and I thought.

We just feed the kids Mini Cheddars and occasionally open the windows 'for a treat.'

Until we were driving back from visiting some friends for the weekend.

It had been a relatively heavy weekend and the vats of red wine and uncharacteristically late nights were taking their toll as we sat in silence and made our way to the motorway.

Ben opened his window to have a better view of the motorway traffic we were joining, and suddenly, two children started screaming at the top of their high pitched voices.

It was the shock more than anything else, like when you brush past a car and set the alarm off by mistake.

The rule of the game had been, you can only scream when the window is open and stop when it's shut.

But they had taken it literally.

They screamed every fricking time we opened a window.

Even a fraction.

So the choice was, sit in a roasting hot airless car as we all slowly cook in our own hangovers.

Or get a refreshing breeze, which is accompanying by blood curdling screams.

Long car journeys have just got massively longer.

So I'm hanging out for a scratch card win in the next few months to buy a new stereo.

Because the alternative of screaming our way around a sweaty driving holiday in France over the summer holidays makes me want to shoot myself in my own face.

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