Okay so I know I’m living in the wrong county for this, but I’ve come to the conclusion recently that I really don’t like potholes.
I’m not sure why it has taken me so long to come to this conclusion, maybe it’s been in the back of my mind for some time now, but it finally hit me last week.
That was of course after I’d hit one of the damn things. Of course the pothole in question had filled itself with water and in the dark had cleverly disguised itself as a part of the road.
And that meant that I didn’t see it until I had absolutely walloped it causing a spray of muddy water to fly over the windscreen and of course nearly shaking every bone in my body.
Thankfully that was as bad as it got this time, but it reminded me of a previous encounter with a pothole (I know this is a daily experience for anybody who drives) when not only did I hit the darn thing, I got the puncture that often comes as part of the deal.
Now I’m not the most mechanically minded person in the world, but I can change a tyre. I guess when you live in a county with as many potholes as we have it is almost part of everyday motoring.
The thing is I still hate doing it.
And it’s not even the unloosening of nuts that somebody has put on with a pneumatic gun obviously thinking that nobody will ever have to take this off again, that bothers me. It’s not even the footering with a tiny jack.
It’s more the fact that for me, changing a tyre usually means an operation as large as moving house.
You see my philosophy is that if there is a large boot in a car, it is valuable storage space that shouldn’t really be wasted.
So it’s usual to find that the boot of my car is filled with footballs, training cones and bibs, football boots and wet suits and well all sorts of junk that would just take me too much effort and bother to move in and out of the car every time I need it in a week.
Leaving them all in the boot does have its drawbacks, like the fact that the inside of my car does now smell like an old sock, but even that is still better than how it used to smell when I bought it, since the previous owner had smoked and had left behind that nasty reek for me to try to deal with.
The down side of storing all the junk in the car is however that in a situation where you might have to change a tyre, it can take ten minutes before you get all the junk out and get what you need.
I was thinking about that the last time I had the misfortune to have to change a tyre as I tried to shove over the footballs and stuff on the back seat (that’s useful storage space too) to make room for the stuff from the boot and I wondered is it why so many of the guys I know now seem to have a spare tyre conveniently stored under their t-shirt.
I also began to think about all the road works we get in this county at this time of the year every year. In fact I began to wonder if there might be a market for a calendar for the council officials dealing with road works that shows there are actually months in the year other than October-December.
In fact I began to wonder where they are for the rest of the year and have come to the conclusion that for the first nine months of the year perhaps these guys are busy not fixing roads or filling potholes, but instead are away off somewhere making Christmas decorations and other Christmassy junk.
Think about it folks. As soon as it gets to that time of the year when the Christmas stuff starts to appear, you are almost guaranteed that the big road works will start.
So when they say Christmas is getting earlier every year all of a sudden I’ve begun to wonder if this would be such a bad thing?
My thinking was that if all the big works got done earlier in the year, perhaps we wouldn’t have quite as many potholes as we do at this time of the year.
But in the meantime, in the hope that I might spare some poor motorist from the possibility of a puncture, I rang the council to let them know about that whopping pothole I’d hit.
In fairness they said they had been told about it by other motorists too and it was now a top priority.
“We’ve sent out four men with shovels...and they’re all looking into it...”
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