There is a particular species of man (and I am entirely representative of the species) who cannot throw away a dead car battery. Not because he thinks it is still any good, either. He knows perfectly well it is as dead as disco, and he has tested it with the sort of solemn attention normally reserved for a doctor confirming time of death.
He keeps it anyway, because a dead battery is not a dead battery. It is a “spare”. It is “probably recoverable”. It is “worth keeping hold of, just in case”. It is, in short, a small rectangular lie we tell ourselves about our own competence.
The modern world has tried to stop us doing this. It has tried to shame us with sleek lithium jump packs, AA membership apps, and the quiet smugness of people who simply “call someone”. But we are not those people, because we have started cars with less than a volt and a prayer, and we have bump-started things that should not have been bump-started. We have once driven home at night with no headlights, purely by faith and vague memory of the road.
A dead battery is also a talisman. It represents self-reliance, even when it weighs 18 kilos and sits there like a small anvil with terminals, quietly turning the garage into a shrine to stubbornness. Every now and then you glance at it and think, “I really should do something about that,” and then you do something else instead, like reorganise a box of screws you will never use, or spend twenty minutes looking for a 10mm socket that has clearly joined a witness protection programme.
Then there is the glorious delusion of “reconditioning”. This is the part where you attach a charger, watch the needle twitch like a patient on life support, and convince yourself you are basically an electrical engineer. The battery gurgles slightly, and you interpret this as “coming back to life”, not “off-gassing in a manner that suggests I should step away and stop being an idiot”.
After 24 hours you test it again, and it fails. But you do not throw it away, because that would be admitting defeat, so you simply change the story. It is now “holding some charge”, which is like describing a collapsed souffle as “still technically edible”. You even start negotiating with yourself, like a man trying to justify buying another tool. “Well, there might be a time when I need 6 volts rather than 12 (or 3 if it's a 6 volt battery).”
The real reason we keep dead batteries is because we are haunted by one specific scenario. It is always the same: a cold morning, an important appointment, and the car turns over once then gives that awful half-hearted click, like a man who has been asked to lift something heavy and immediately regrets his life choices. At that moment you do not want solutions, you want vindication.
You want to stride into the garage, reach into the shadows, and pull out your emergency battery like a wartime ration tin. You want to connect it with jump leads you bought in 1997 and have never trusted, and you want the engine to fire into life so you can look at your wife and say, calmly, “There we are. Sorted.” That is the dream, and it is a powerful one.
It has never happened, of course. Not once. The dead battery has never saved anyone, and the best it has ever done is provide moral support, like keeping a blunt pen in your pocket because it once wrote a shopping list. Yet we keep them anyway, because the fantasy is worth more than the scrap value.
We line them up like old soldiers. Some are half-hidden behind paint tins, some are under the bench, and some are in a “temporary” pile that has been there since the last Labour government. They are labelled in our minds with vague biographies, like “that one came off the Volvo”, “that one was the GT6 battery”, and “that one is definitely dead but it might take a surface charge”, even though we do not know what a surface charge is. We say it anyway because it sounds like science.
Eventually, we do dispose of them, usually after tripping over one and swearing loudly. At some point you realise you have reached an age where falling over in the garage is no longer funny, it is a potential NHS waiting list. So you take them to the tip, solemnly, as if returning medals, and you drive home feeling faintly virtuous.
Then, two months later, you acquire another one. Not because you need it, but because the point was never the battery. The point is the feeling that if civilisation collapses, you will still be able to start a 1993 Mercedes with a set of jump leads, a battered charger, and sheer bloody-mindedness. In a world full of people who cannot change a wiper blade without a YouTube tutorial, that is not the worst fantasy to have.
I've just thrown one out labelled 'Old Galaxy battery', which became old over a year ago. The replacement battery then quietly became the replacement 'Old Galaxy battery' soon afterwards, mainly because I've inherited two other old batteries and I need the space. I've also got an old jump pack which wouldn't start a pedal car and should go straight in the tip bucket, but I can't bring myself to do it - despite having two perfectly serviceable jump packs a fraction of the size.
No comments:
Post a Comment