I had quite a shitty day yesterday; on the way up to Crewe I got another puncture, this happens a lot because the car does loads of miles and also spends a lot of it's time driving on construction sites (railway ones mostly) and there are always nails and crap to get stuck in the tyres. So, I'm pretty damn good at changing wheels although not quite up to F1 speed.
So the first problem was that the tyre went flat really quickly, I do like a bit of warning if possible but this can't be helped. Second problem is that I had just gone round a bend on a fast dual carriage way and it was raining, I'm not about to stop the car in a dangerous position and change the tyre, especially as there was an exit a bit further up.
I managed to hobble along to a safe place, the tyre had suffered a pretty huge failure and it was interfering with the traction control but I managed to get there without causing any damage. I had a look at the tyre and the tread part had separated from the other bit for about two thirds of the way round. It was an expensive tyre too.
The thing that started to make it a bad day is that I loosened four of the wheel nuts, but I couldn't find the locking nut key to do the last one... I looked everywhere but I just couldn't find it. I was about to give up and call the AA when I remembered that the pouch that holds the tools has a little pocket to keep it safe, it was in there.
And now the biggest bad thing: The car has quite nice alloy wheels (as seen
here) and has an alloy spare wheel too, I know this because I've had to use it loads of times... guess what... someone has stolen it and replaced it with a crappy steel one! Now, in the scheme of things it's no big deal as I still had a spare but I was pissed off that someone had taken it and even more pissed off that I hadn't noticed at the time.
The car has only ever been to two places where this could have happened: The place it gets serviced at in Kidlington and the local tyre place in Bicester, one of those places is staffed by a bunch of thieving bastards.