Some Tyred Old Jokes

   Looking at the nice tyres on our latest transport cast my mind back to some of my earlier cars, back indeed to a tatty Austin A30 which was, I think my third four-wheeled transport. In those halcyon days the dreaded MOT had not been introduced and one ran a vehicle until it ceased to run and then scrapped it. a friend ran a Vauxhall Velox with a chassis so rusty that it broke in two one day, going over the level crossing in Military Road! The same care-free attitude applied to tyres  They were replaced by paupers like myself, not when they went bald but when the carcase started to show through the rubber.... And yet I can`t remember the accident rate being any higher than today.
    I was bowling merrily along in the region of Abergavenny when a loud bang from the rear of the car made me leap almost from my seat. Hoping I had just run over a stone, I slowed down carefully but as the speed came off the car sank down at the back, a puncture. In fact, it was worse than that, the tyre had burst. As you can imagine, this was not my first experience of this, and I soon had the little car jacked up, changed the tyre and we proceeded on our way to Portsmouth, or rather to Gosport, my home at the time.

    The cheapest shop for tyres locally was a little one-man shop in a side-street between the High St and Forton road  I replaced the tyre and while the proprietor was fitting it, I admired his display of `killer tyres` in a rack outside, all bald and worn. I was a bit peeved when he came out with my old tyre, removed the least bad of the display and substituted mine....

   Mind you, this chap was a real joker. He told me he had whiled away his hours of waiting for a customer by a series of practical jokes. His most successful was to braze a coin, say a sixpenny piece onto a broad-headed nail with his welding torch. He would then hammer this embellished nail into the asphalt pavement outside the shop and wait for the fun to start. A passer-by would spot the coin, glance round and make a furtive grab, only to find the sixpence firmly stuck. Some would leave it, others would break their nails on it. One chap was down on his knees working away with his pen-knife to free the coin! The tyre-seller was amazed at the lengths to which folk would go to possess this small coin. It didn`t stop him roaring with laughter at their antics! A variant of this was an old leather wallet firmly nailed to the ground. It is an indicator of the style of his wit, when I say that he had filled it with dog-turds...
    Happy days.. Bye for now, going to make a cuppa