The Never-Ending Saga
Yes, it's the latest chapter of Bílasaga - The Car Story.
As you will have gathered by now, it has been snowing for a couple of days up here. The general consensus of opinion in the common room is that this is it for the winter now. There was a general shaking of heads, complaining that the winters now arrive much later than they did ten years ago, that this year the final day of the hunting season was completely snow-free when it's supposed to be waist-deep in places, and that we haven't had a decent snowstorm in at least four years.
Even without the metre of snow that we should have had by now if it wasn't for this global warming business, the weather is beginning to hit the traffic. This morning I attempted to get up the hill onto the road and found that although I could quite comfortably reverse, I couldn't make headway in any forward gear. Hmm... I decided that the thing to do was to reverse into the flat shopping centre car park, turn around and pick up speed and momentum in order to get over the hump. Fortunately it's a quiet road and I made it.
I wasn't as lucky when it came to going up the hill to the university car park. We have two car parks, and I thought I'd go into the upper one so that I wouldn't have to go uphill on my way out. This didn't work and I ground to a halt about half-way between the car park and the turning for the lower car park. So I reversed down the hill (avoiding the herd of schoolchildren being marched through the snow to school) and then found that I couldn't actually turn into the side road because I had no purchase on the snow. Drat and double drat! Fortunately a couple of chaps from elsewhere in the building recognised my plight and stopped to give me a push onto the road. They also told me what my problem was - one of my tyres wasn't gripping the snow at all. Indeed, when I looked at the tyres I had noticed that while three were packed with snow the fourth (what had been the spare before I changed the tyre the other week) was still a pristine black.
It seems that the solution is to get a bottle of white spirit and pour it all over the tyres to clean off any gunk from the manufacturing process that hasn't been worn off by day-to-day word. At lunchtime, then, I popped down into town to my local Esso garage and bought a bottle of the stuff and, lo and behold, it worked! OK, it's not a permanent solution, but it's a good temporary measure. I say temporary because of course it's time to change to the winter tyres. There are currently queues at the garage for this very purpose. Unfortunately the tyres I have are from the Saxo and are therefore may well not fit the Carina. I'll have to check the numbers on each tyre type, I suspect. It would be very nice if they were to fit, but I suspect it's about to cost me somewhere around £500 for a set of winter tyres. I may end up walking until the beginning of next month...
As you will have gathered by now, it has been snowing for a couple of days up here. The general consensus of opinion in the common room is that this is it for the winter now. There was a general shaking of heads, complaining that the winters now arrive much later than they did ten years ago, that this year the final day of the hunting season was completely snow-free when it's supposed to be waist-deep in places, and that we haven't had a decent snowstorm in at least four years.
Even without the metre of snow that we should have had by now if it wasn't for this global warming business, the weather is beginning to hit the traffic. This morning I attempted to get up the hill onto the road and found that although I could quite comfortably reverse, I couldn't make headway in any forward gear. Hmm... I decided that the thing to do was to reverse into the flat shopping centre car park, turn around and pick up speed and momentum in order to get over the hump. Fortunately it's a quiet road and I made it.
I wasn't as lucky when it came to going up the hill to the university car park. We have two car parks, and I thought I'd go into the upper one so that I wouldn't have to go uphill on my way out. This didn't work and I ground to a halt about half-way between the car park and the turning for the lower car park. So I reversed down the hill (avoiding the herd of schoolchildren being marched through the snow to school) and then found that I couldn't actually turn into the side road because I had no purchase on the snow. Drat and double drat! Fortunately a couple of chaps from elsewhere in the building recognised my plight and stopped to give me a push onto the road. They also told me what my problem was - one of my tyres wasn't gripping the snow at all. Indeed, when I looked at the tyres I had noticed that while three were packed with snow the fourth (what had been the spare before I changed the tyre the other week) was still a pristine black.
It seems that the solution is to get a bottle of white spirit and pour it all over the tyres to clean off any gunk from the manufacturing process that hasn't been worn off by day-to-day word. At lunchtime, then, I popped down into town to my local Esso garage and bought a bottle of the stuff and, lo and behold, it worked! OK, it's not a permanent solution, but it's a good temporary measure. I say temporary because of course it's time to change to the winter tyres. There are currently queues at the garage for this very purpose. Unfortunately the tyres I have are from the Saxo and are therefore may well not fit the Carina. I'll have to check the numbers on each tyre type, I suspect. It would be very nice if they were to fit, but I suspect it's about to cost me somewhere around £500 for a set of winter tyres. I may end up walking until the beginning of next month...