The roads are hell

It was, of course, dark and raining. Middle of nowhere. We were on our way out to dinner and it looked like any number of the thousand puddles we’d already splashed through. But it wasn’t. There was a bang, a jolt and an immediate and severe vibration through the wheel. You didn’t need to be Einstein, nor even a motoring journalist to figure out what had gone wrong. For the second time in 24 hours, a brand new Continental SportContact 5 had come to grief on a patch of tarmac that simply didn’t exist any more.

I was lucky that night. Lucky there were four of us in the car, one on the jack, one on the wheels, one on the (iPhone) torch and one to flag down the occasional car approaching the blind corner around which we were parked. Lucky, most of all, that our 2017 Golf had a space saver spare tyre in the boot. You don’t see those so much these days. So all that happened is I arrived later, damper, poorer and considerably more cheesed off than would have otherwise been the case.

But imagine if there’d been no spare but just a bottle of gunk in the boot, and I or someone else had been alone in the car. Given the size of the hole in the sidewall you’d be better off using it as hair gel. There is no mobile reception in that part of the world. What if I’d been on a motorcycle? A friend who knows about such things assures me I’d no longer have been on a motorcycle but under it, over it or in a hedge.