The Law of Garage Entropy

There’s a peculiar rhythm to my garage – a kind of organised anarchy that seems to pulse with its own gravitational field. Half of it is now a shrine to my Triumph GT6’s past life – the 2-litre straight-six, gearbox, and enough parts to rebuild two cars and half a Spitfire. 

They sit there, not quite relics, not quite rubbish, but in that purgatorial state reserved for things too valuable to throw away yet too irrelevant to be of any actual use. I tell myself they must be kept, just in case I ever decide to return the car to its original form. Of course, this will never happen, but it’s comforting to preserve the illusion that I could.

 

Meanwhile, the rest of the workshop has evolved into a kind of archaeological dig – layers of past rearrangements marking the epochs of my ambition. There was the Plumbing Age, when everything vaguely pipe-shaped was together in one box. Then came the Welding Renaissance, followed by the brief and disastrous Period of Rational Organisation, which lasted all of 48 hours before entropy reclaimed the land.

This, I’ve realised, is the Law of Garage Entropy: any attempt to impose order on a working garage will, within seven days, result in greater confusion than existed before. It’s immutable. Like gravity, or the way 10mm sockets spontaneously migrate to another dimension.

Every time I rearrange things – usually to make more space for the new compressor, or that irresistible set of ratcheting spanners I definitely didn’t need – I break the map inside my head. Tools vanish into newly designated drawers that make perfect sense on the day of the reshuffle and absolutely none a week later. I end up hunting for a 10mm socket with the intensity of a man searching for meaning in life. And the worst part? When I finally find it, it’s not where I left it – it’s where I thought I’d moved it, which is somehow worse.

I’ve now reached the stage where I own more tools than most people do – a sort of private B&Q annex run by an absent-minded quartermaster. There are duplicates of almost everything, because the easiest way to find a missing tool is to buy another. Somewhere in the depths of a drawer, I probably have enough 13mm spanners to start a small ironmongery. I counted 31 screwdrivers. Thirty one. You’d think I was running a monastery for lost Philips heads.

The solution, I tell myself, is better organisation. Shelves labelled. Drawers categorised. Photos taken. I even drew a map once – a neat diagram showing where everything lived. The trouble is, the moment I commit to a new layout, I acquire something that doesn’t fit. Then it’s back to square one, moving everything around again, which means the map becomes as trustworthy as a weather forecast from Michael Fish.

So the cycle continues – rearrange, forget, search, curse, repeat. The garage looks immaculate for a week, then slowly reverts to its natural state of creative disarray. But I’ve come to suspect this isn’t failure at all – it’s the natural order of things. A static, tidy workshop is a dead one. Chaos, in its noisy, cluttered way, is a sign of life.

Besides, if I ever do finally find a perfect place for everything, it’ll only mean one thing – I’ve stopped building. And that would be far worse than not being able to find the bloody 10mm socket again.