Bang

Those of you more familiar with Queensbridge Road will be well aware that you can avoid the traffic lights at the bottom by using Dunloe St. Last Saturday I was picking up a Zipcar and I decided to use the Dunloe St Run to save myself the 23 seconds I would have spent waiting for the lights to change.

Bang.


Followed, fractions of a second later, by...

Bang.

The first bang, I think, was me clipping the curb as I turned into Queensbridge Road. The second was the tire blowing.

23 seconds. I had gone from saving 23 seconds into a whole world of delay.

Note. If you are ever changing the wheels on a VW Golf, do not be fooled by the star-shaped holes at the centres of the plastic caps on the wheel nuts. Simply lever these caps off with a screw-driver. There is no screw thread on the caps themselves, so finding a star-shaped fitting will not aid you in removing them but will waste bloody ages of your time.

The AA man came. He was great. He showed me the lever-the-plastic-caps-off-while-ignoring-the-star-shaped-holes trick, and replaced the tire in under a minute. To be honest, I was very proud of myself for getting the car jacked up. I'd never jacked anything up before. Not even my body.

Zipcar were also great and found a replacement car. So we got to spend the night at Whipsnade afterall, and saw the Rhinos.