About cars

There's snow on the ground, and has been all week. This is very unusual for Stuttgart: snow falls often, but is always gone by the next morning. The temperature has been below zero for a week, for the first time in the ten years that I've lived here.

The snow has revealed facts previously unknown about my neighbours, specifically their relationships with their cars.

About a third of the cars on my street are entombed in old snow, their side windows and headlights are thickly covered over. In some cases, I can see freshly fallen snow filling the furrows where kids scooped up handfulls for throwing. These cars have clearly not been driven since the snow began on Sunday evening.

I was walking back from the shops yesterday afternoon, and noticed a faint murmur of music coming from ... where exactly? The street was full of parked cars, but none seemed to be running. Then I noticed that one of the covered-over immobile-since-Sunday cars was in fact occupied. There was a man sitting in the dark, behind snowed-up windscreen and side windows, with the dome light on, reading a newspaper and listening to the radio.

As it happened, I could see this car from my living room windows, so I watched for a while after I got home; and saw him get out of the car, lock it up, and go into an apartment building.

Let me emphasize that the car had not been driven in a week: it was fully covered in snow. So he wasn't reading the paper after driving home from work. He was wearing a blazer and indoor shoes, so he had not climbed into the car after coming home on the subway (which runs above ground in my neighbourhood).

He had left his apartment to go and sit in his car, read the paper there, then went back to his apartment.

Fascinating. A new life style is in the making before my eyes: rent a cheap apartment with too few rooms, and use your car as an auxiliary living space to make up the difference. Cars without wheels or engines would be the logical next step.