Challenging car times

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Perhaps I should have followed the car saint route more doggedly; if a higher being exists, it seems to be trying, bizarrely, to communicate to me via motor vehicles. I don’t know what I’ve done to vex it so, I think it may be the destruction I wrought on cars I learnt to drive in and the ‘expressive’ language that accompanied such outings. Whatever it is, we have another sodding puncture and it’s not sodding funny.
We seek the advice of various ‘experts’ that helpfully don’t agree on anything but then that’s what I think experts are meant to do. Someone suggests rims, someone else a need for good quality tyres. We opt for the tyre route first and make for Providence, a mecca for car enthusiasts (though enthusiastic is not exactly how I’d describe myself, try desperate).

We’re looking for 13inch, 185/17′s or something, presumably a popular tyre as everyone seems to be sold out. It looks like we might have to order China’s finest ‘Goodride’ (suggesting its everything but that) but I realise that the window we’re looking in is not of the tyre shop that is closed but of the tyre shop right next to it (nothing like friendly competition…)

We walk in and are informed that they have the right size tyres and not only that; they’re Bridgestone and affordable. I never thought that there would come a moment in my life that I would be this happy about a brand of tyres. It almost made me weep - you see these tyres have a lot riding on them (pun completely intended), they will solve all our wheel problems, of course.

We leave the shop happy bunnies and the very next day we get our brand new tyres fitted. We even manage to convince ourselves that we can tell the difference:
The other one: ‘wow it feels different don’t you think’
Me: ‘Weird, it does, it’s like sooo much smoother’
Both of us: ‘these tyres are amazing’.
If my friends missed me before, I doubt they will now.

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