Life’s little ups and downs

HAVE you ever felt that perhaps life is letting you down?

I got that feeling recently as I loaded the car to go away for a short holiday only to find one tyre was ten pounds down on pressure.

I pumped it back up, checked the tread and, because all seemed well, I thought no more about it and promptly drove 200 miles to our holiday destination.

Fortunately I can be suspicious, so the first full day of our break saw me armed with a foot pump out checking the dodgy tyre which showed a drop in pressure of nearly two pounds.

I couldn’t fathom it because, if it was a puncture, it was a very slow one from a cause I couldn’t spot, so I kept an eye on matters and topped the tyre up occasionally until we got home when I took it straight to a tyre and exhaust centre I use regularly.

They found the problem in seconds and it turned out to be a very small screw which had worked its way through the tyre.

A mechanic then jacked the car up, removed the wheel, extracted the screw, drilled through the damage and inserted a rubber plug to seal the hole before balancing the wheel and bolting it back on my car.

Then we came to the bill… only there wasn’t one. I was just cheerily waved away with a joke that they’d sort me out when I came in for a new exhaust.

So when life does let you down it can also unexpectedly pick you up in the most unlikely of ways.

Do you really know what your children are doing?

DEATH beckons now that the school holidays have started with some parents worryingly slow off the mark to keep an extra watchful eye on their suddenly free little darlings.

A prime of example of the horror waiting to happen was an incident which should chill the blood of every parent or grandparent reading this column.

The deadly game of dare happened at the suburban junction of a hilly minor road with a major road in Weymouth and this is what happened.

First one seven-year-old boy rode his little bicycle at speed down towards the junction before executing a handbrake stop which left a nice smear of rubber on the road.

His friend then did exactly the same but, as is the nature of dares, he finished with a flourish much closer to the junction, almost on the white line divide. Then we come to the third boy.

He daringly beat both his friends but lacked their ability to stop sharply… so he didn’t and his skid comfortably took boy and bike at least two feet into the busy major road.

Sheer luck was with him and, while traffic was close, it wasn’t on top of him and had time to brake as the red-faced youngster hastily returned to safety and his friends’ laughter.

Funerals will always be with us, so put the effort in and watch or talk to youngsters to make sure the next black tie isn’t for your child or grandchild.

A great day out

LAST year a friend and I took ourselves to the embryonic Wyke Beer Festival and we went again this year.

Word seemed to have spread about how good 2009 was because there were many more people there this year and the annual event seems to have established itself quickly.

What I liked – apart from the beer – was the range of other attractions on offer from music to face painting, crafts, cheeses, coffee beans, cakes and even Christmas cards.

Naturally the main course was beer in many forms and it was great fun to sip our way through as many of them as we could, purely in the interests of research of course.

After about six hours the fine edge had gone off our research so we wended our merry way home loaded down with packets and parcels and a rather nice half gallon of perry.

That has long since been researched out of existence, but it was a day of genuine pleasure at a friendly event which attracted everyone from toddlers through children to adults and pensioners, all having fun and not a cross word between them. I’m already looking forward to next year’s event.

. . . And the holidays have barely started!

WEYMOUTH’S rash of roadworks is hard enough to cope with at the best of times without it being made worse by driving of the worst order.

The queue I was in began honking its horns when one motorist decided she wanted to switch lanes… on the King Street roundabout.

Any rational driver would simply have gone round the roundabout using the clear lane in front of her and slotted back into the lane she wanted.

Unfortunately her solution to the problem was to stop dead, indicate left into the totally choked inside lane and then just sit there.

Drivers behind her swiftly caught on to what she was doing and before long a bus driver was leaning on his horn.

Pure farce then followed as the woman actually made things worse by pulling ten yards further forward and jamming herself into the bottleneck entrance to King Street itself in the hope someone would let her in. Worse, another driver followed her to double the problem.

It took some while to straighten the situation out… and the school holidays have barely started!

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