The Soggy Tyre

The gas-guzzler – my much-beloved Audi – has a slow puncture. I know this, but DH hasn’t quite realised it yet. I think he thinks it was a one-off that the tyre pressure sank over the last couple of weeks from 35psi to 13psi.

What ind of crazy woman would bump this beauty into the kerb? Hmm?

‘The tyre looks a bit flat,’ I’d said.

He’d pumped it up and handed it back to me.

‘There you go,’ he said. ‘It’s fine now.’

I suspected not.

‘Didn’t you get the tyre replaced?’ I asked.

‘No,’ he said. ‘Why? It doesn’t seem to have a puncture. Tyres lose pressure from time to time. It’s probably nothing.’

Further probing from me revealed that, with no evidence of a puncture per se, if the tyre sinks again, it could be caused by the rim being a little bent out of shape. How on earth would that happen? *Blushes*

‘If the pressure gets that low again,’ said DH, ‘you must fill it up at once, otherwise the tyre could come off the wheel.’  Given that most of my driving is spent bombing up and down a 12-lane highway at high speed with a car full of children, this is a potential disaster.

So today I was at the petrol station again, blasting air into my tyre. The tyre had looked a little, umm, squidgy, and, while I didn’t see what pressure it was at when I started pumping, let’s just say it took some time to reach 35psi (you would think that men in this country had seen a blonde get out of a car and pump up the tyres in 40˚C before, but apparently not – I almost got a round of applause and a bunch of roses at the end of it).

‘Darling, I think you need to take the wheel in to the tyre place to get checked,’ I told DH tonight. ‘It keeps losing air.’

‘Shouldn’t be necessary,’ he said. ‘Unless someone’s bashed the tyre into the kerb and dented the alloy?’

Crumbs, I thought. Who would be so careless?

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