John Walsh: Tales of the City

I'm selling my car this week, the Chrysler Cruiser that's been my companion through sun, rain, snow and speed cameras over the last five years. It's heart-wrenching to go through the door pockets, poke under the seats and plunge into the Augean detritus of the boot, pulling out all the rubbish accumulated over the years. Did I say rubbish? Or it is scores of balled-up mementoes that together form a mosaic of life lived, if not in the fast lane, at least in transit?

Here is the Order of Service for my friend Jane's second wedding, and another for my friend Carol's funeral. Here's a shard of glass from the evening a passer-by near Waterloo station shattered the back window to reach my briefcase and make off with his priceless haul of three novels, one radio broadcast, the Evening Standard, one banana, a tube of Strepsils and my address book. Here's some Piz Buin sunblock from a forgotten holiday, presumably involving the sun and a destination somewhere in England, ludicrous though it seems.

In the back door-pocket, I found a plastic mirror with four suckers on the back; my daughters used to attach it to their window and apply make-up on long journeys; only one daughter at first, then the second when she hit double figures. I found it under a bran-tub of Pay-and-Display stickers from car parks in Wales, Cheltenham, Brighton, Hay-on-Wye - as evocative, in their way, as souvenir pennants on designer luggage, though not as beautiful.

With them came a dozen release documents from car pounds; how they evoke the heady experience of emerging from the Bad Sex Awards into St James's Square, four Novembers ago, to find that the car had been towed away.

Discarded CDs were all over the car, some - disgracefully - without their boxes, but all carrying a heavy freight of memory. Here's one I introduced to the children with the words: 'This is a band from the Seventies of whom you may not have heard, my darlings, but you will love them to the point of idolatry. The track is 'Black Dog' and the band's Led Zeppelin..." A golden moment, like introducing them to Marx Brothers films, or trifle, or Venice.

Here's The Who's greatest hits, and the memory of playing torrential air-drums while idling at the lights. Here's a CD by Enya, the gloopy Celtic chanteuse; she may be a little fey and feathery, but she's absolute balm to the soul when you're stuck in a six-mile tailback on the M4. In the glove compartment, under boxes of Anadin and Imodium - blimey, now that was a hangover - is a forgotten tape of Meat Loaf and Bonnie Tyler that I found abandoned in a guest house in Harrogate; I took it with me and I remember how 'Total Eclipse of the Heart' was playing as the car crested a hill in the dusk and made its way down towards a perfect Yorkshire village, with the lights coming and smoke rising from the chimneys.

In the boot, hidden beneath a drift of newspapers, sweet wrappers and collapsed Sainsbury's cardboard wine-carriers, I found an X-ray. It was of my son's (amazingly slender) wrist, taken in 2004. I have absolutely no recollection of how it got there. I have, however, total recall of the dent on the back nearside wing, the result of an ill-advised reversal into a bollard outside a pub in Hatton Garden, when I was trying to escape from a belligerent footpad who claimed I had Looked At Him Funny.

The graze on the front bumper comes from the final (hairpin) bend at the exit from the NCP in Chinatown, which I was leaving one night in 2003 with a charming continuity announcer from the BBC. Heaven knows what she said, in her divinely husky voice, but it caused me to hit the wall. I seem to remember her turning down my offer of a lift home, and taking a taxi instead.

Don't get me started about the poignancy of the Christmas tree needles I had to sweep out of the boot, the miniatures of Famous Grouse stashed in the secret compartment (in case the car was becalmed in Highland snowdrifts one winter; not likely, but you never know) or the remains of the speed-crazed arachnid that lived for months in the wing mirror.

Your car is a small simulacrum of your house, and its debris is a microcosm of your life. And the only time you realise how much living has been done in the embrace of its blue bodywork is when you're about to wave it goodbye.

Our sense of reality has been badly rocked, has it not, by the revelations that TV producers routinely doctor footage and tell porky pies. First, the Queen/Annie Leibovitz debacle. Next, we learn that Newsnight monkeyed around with a film about Gordon Brown that implied, wrongly, that the filmmaker was searched by police after being shopped by a Treasury official. Now we learn that a scene on The F Word, showing Gordon Ramsay returning from an undersea hunting trip with three bass in his hands and the words 'Not bad for first time out' on his lips, was also faked.

It makes you wonder how many classic confrontations in the past were simply staged for the cameras. Did Michael Howard on Newsnight really evade a question asked by Jeremy Paxman 14 times, or did the producers use outtakes from an earlier interview? Were all John Prescott's pronouncements on the news shamelessly mangled by wily editors? The crocodiles with which Steve Irwin had such alarming sport - were they all captured, drugged and de-fanged by someone else first? Were the Moon landings in 1967 'regrettably' just a studio-bound approximation of real events?