News & Stuff

I did finally pass my driving test. Thankfully. It's not had the chance to make my life easier quite yet, but it has allowed me to do a couple of things I wouldn't have been able to otherwise.

Last weekend I had a competition audition in Bedford with the band. Not a big deal, since Bedford is only an hour or so away. The audition was in the morning, due to start at 9:30. Again, not that much of a problem. Early start, but doable.
However, I'd also arranged to attend a racing sim meeting outside Southampton that afternoon. The date wasn't my choice but had been arranged months in advance. Without the car I'd have had no chance. With the car? Piece of cake. A great first journey, taking in the M1, the M25 and the M3 in one day.

But this being my life, it did have a couple of nice surprises in store.

Woke up Sunday morning, got up and dressed and blearily stepped out of the house to find my nice little car sitting on a flat tyre. And I mean a REALLY flat tyre. Sitting on the rim it was. Not having a jack, that made me twinge a little.
I limped round the corner to a nearby garage to pump it up.
Of course I had to find about the only garage in the country that still charges for air. Charges. For AIR. AIR! Miraculously I find some change in my pocket and pump the tyre up, along with a little extra for the other one that looked like it could use it. No hissing, didn't immediately collapse, so I think fair enough. If I need to keep topping it up then it's not a big deal, but I am getting to at least the audition.

It lasted all the way to Bedford, we did the audition (and got in) and when I got back to the car it was still looking healthy. No signs of a puncture or anything, so I started the 2 hour drive to event 2. I dropped in to service stations at a couple of points down the motorway but the tyre was fine. Great, says I. Got to the event, good fun, didn't win. But then I know I suck at video games these days anyway.

After dinner I went to make a move. I'd told one of the guys about my tyre and I asked if I could borrow his pump to top up before the journey, which he was fine with. Went out to the car, attached the pump to the valve and suddenly we're hearing the hissing sound of Immediate Tyre Death. My little wheel gets flatter and flatter and there's nothing either of us can do to stop it. Fine, we say. Not entirely unexpected, we say. Getting the spare tyre on (which was a learning experience for me as it was) turned out to be a bit more of a pain than I was expecting.
First of all, one of the nuts to remove the wheel didn't match the others and we had to get another guy to bring his tools out as well.
Then they watched as I changed a tyre for the first time in my entire life, laughing at me when I realised I hadn't jacked it up properly and I could lift it because the car was still sitting on it.
Then they laughed as I struggled to pump up the spare tyre, almost dying of a heart attack from too much effort. Good times! Actually that wasn't my fault. There was a leak in the pump so I was losing half of the air that I was pumping and it took a long time to get it to the required pressure.

And this barely a week after I had to take the headlights off to try and discover why it was blowing fuses all over the place. For someone who knows nothing about car upkeep I'm certainly learning a lot in a short space of time!

At least it was all in good humour. It was a good day and I really enjoyed the drive. The open road, the squeak of the windscreen wipers, the rain battering off the car, the oil on my hands, the dirt on my trousers. Maybe not all of that, but I enjoyed it.

I have new tyres ordered that I'm going to have fitted tomorrow afternoon, but there's no point going into that much detail here since it's not a car blog. That said, if these things keep going wrong it may turn into a "ranting-about-car" blog...