More threes

I drove back from my brother's house where I had fed his cat, we stopped in the Costcutter stores for a few things, cat-food, him-food, her-food, (mostly lardy-cake), and I thought I'd take the scenic road home. It is a steeply-plunging road that runs between high earth banks amongst the trees and is barely wide enough for the car, but I love those sorts of lanes. It levelled out at the bottom where it joined another road that ran round the edge of the bowl in the hillside. Halfway along, I saw a woman walking her dog, and moved over to the right to give her room. The wheels found the edge of the tarmac and then dropped off into a deep rut with an alarming thud. I worked the car back out of the mud and checked the steering as we carried on home. It seemed fine.

I went into the dentist's the next lunchtime for my final fitting. I came back out with a crown, and minus a serious amount of money from my bank account, a lot more than I had anticipated. When I started the car and pulled away from the kerb I felt immediately that something was wrong. I nursed it slowly into the railway station and climbed out, to find a flat front right tyre. I tried pumping it up with the little battery-powered pump, but I could guess that it was a puncture and not just the pixies stealing the air in a mischievous mood. It began to rain as I opened the boot and hauled out the spare wheel and the jack.

In addition to the rain, I had oily hands to worry about, and as I squatted to loosen the wheel nuts, I felt a sudden pain in each of my upper legs, just above the knees. I changed the tyre in the rain. A lady who had passed me when I first inspected the sorry tyre came back from the station and asked me if I needed any help. "You could tell me how to clean my trousers," I joked. If I had known her better it might have been worth a quick "Iron my shirt, bitch" as well, but I don't tease on first dates.

I checked the tyre quickly, seeing several points that might be nails, and hoped it would just be a simple puncture, but as I rested it on the ground while I opened the boot, I heard the noise of air escaping into wetness, and found a hole in the inner sidewall. The tyre, which was only a few months old, could not be repaired. It had received too hard a blow when I dropped the car into the rut the previous night.

So, once again, bad luck came in threes; a shocking bill, pulled muscles, and a ruined tyre.

I'm still waiting for something good to happen to make up for it. It usually does, but I've waited until teatime and it still hasn't arrived. Have I upset someone up there?