The title lists the 3 main culprits working against you in the battle to keep your car looking great.  Listed with the main culprit first, your lovely offspring closely following and Garfield & Co a distant third.

Dogs. We love them and have a large one ourselves.  However, unless you have a Defender to lug them around in you are on to a hiding to nothing with these car-wreckers.  Here’s what they do:

• They drool into fabric seats as they hang their heads over them from the load bay compartment.
• Leather tastes nice (very similar to a rawhide treat) and we look after several cars where Mutley has nibbled the back of headrests etc.
• In the battle for favouritism vs your offspring they will partially chew through rear seatbelts – think about that carefully and you’ll realise how devious Fido is.
• Greasy heads foul head-linings.
• A quick shake and you have slobber, dirty rainwater and nose mucous everywhere.
• And then you have the smell, say no more.

As we have already said we love dogs and recognise that they are a part of your transportation equation and, therefore, need to use your car.  With this in mind the best advice we can give you is to equip your car with a vehicle specific dog guard, a vehicle specific hard plastic load bay liner (the deeper the better) and have us regularly valet the car for you.  Or get a Defender as a second car.

Children. On their own, a child in a car is fine.  But equip them with sweets or pens and you have a different proposition on your hands.

Sweets first.  The imagination of a child knows no bounds.  We have found sweets in the obvious places such as down the sides of seats, mashed into the undersides of armrests and cleverly inserted into rear vent grills.  Less obvious places (to us, not the children) are seatbelt plug-ins, seatbelt retractors and more recently empty Isofix sockets where, over what must have been a long period of time, many types of sweet, a small ball, a tiny car and an eraser had been lovingly inserted.  It took us an age to get most of the objects out, although one dissolved sweet remains as a challenge for another day.

The problem with sweets is that they melt and when they melt they are very difficult to remove, especially in confined spaces.  They also dye carpets, leather and fabrics.  Often these dyes cannot be removed.  We can assure you that a BMW 5 series with beige leather seats and touches of Smarties here and there is not a great resale proposition.

Now pens (and crayons).  Great for marking seats and dropping onto carpets.  Most marks do not come out.  Enough said.  Pens are also good for digging into any soft trim within range.

You’ve been warned!  You probably know what the solutions are as well.

Cats. A cat sitting on the bonnet of your car is cute.  The scratches they leave behind are not.  Typical cat scratches are long and deep and consist of three or four scratches radiating away from a single point – presumably the result of a sliding Tiddles spreading his claws out for greater traction in his quest to stop sliding off.

We have no magic answers to this problem, just be aware.  Oh, by the way, shoo-ing is ok but please don’t throw stones; you might dent your car!

One dog + one parcel shelf + five minutes free time = this.