Fourteen Cars and a Driveway That Could Not Cope
At its peak there were fourteen cars parked outside the house. Not a collection. More an accumulation, the kind that happens when several people who cannot resist a cheap car happen to live at the same address.
Swainston was a flat, a workshop and a permanent open invitation. We came from India, Iran and Japan, and most of us were somewhere in the middle of a PhD, which is a period of your life defined by work that never visibly finishes. A thesis chapter can absorb a month and look identical afterwards. A seized bolt takes an afternoon and then it is out, and it stays out, and you can point at it.
That is really why the garage mattered. It was the one place where effort turned into a result you could see the same day.
The evenings ran long. Somebody would be under a car, somebody else would be holding a light at the wrong angle, and there would be an argument about the correct order of operations that everyone enjoyed too much to settle. It smelled of motor oil and whatever had been cooked earlier. Tools went missing constantly and always turned up in the last car anyone had touched.
We left more or less together, and scattered: Singapore, the USA, Japan, New Zealand.
Nearly every vehicle in this garage passed through that driveway at some point, which means most of these stories are really about that house.
We thought we were fixing cars. We were mostly building the friendships that made the rest of it survivable.
