I’ve been thinking of buying a new car for a while now (my current one has 700,000 km on the clock), but I have a mortgage in Sydney so other thoughts occur.
Recently I stuck new tyres on the car. This is a treat. Normally I put retreads on that cost about $40 each and they are worth everything you pay for them. (Actually slightly more if you include entertainment value). I mean I am not sure if they are even made of rubber. I’m pretty sure they are made of some sort of wood. The handling isn’t much, but they last really well and once you get used to constant four wheel drift on every corner, even at 20km/h, you’re ok. In fact the handling in the rain was so bad that if you pulled out of a parking spot in reverse, you were obliged to honk your horn 5 times, to let others know that you were leaving harbour under power and that your breaking distance had just gone out to 2 km.
So rather than buying a new car, I applied some knowledge of myself to the problem. Every time I put air in the cheap tyres, it feels like I’m driving a new car. I think to myself “This is unreal! How good is this car?! I should do this more often.” So if more air in crap tyres excites me that much, imagine how I could fool myself with good tyres. So last time tyre change came up, I put $140 jobbies on.
And I admit that the change in the vehicle is dramatic. It goes round corners without people staring. It is much quieter and it stops.
Two days after putting the new expensive tyres on the car, I ran over an ibis.
Before the people who get upset by dead bats and lost balloon priests start up…(See Na na na na Bats Man and Flying None in this blog for background) I didn’t go out of my way to do it.
I live in an area that has had an ibis plague. So many that I wonder what the real plural for ibis is. Ibi? They got forced into new areas of NSW by the drought, as well as having their numbers bumped up by a rogue troop that left Taronga Zoo apparently. Suffice it to say, they are on all our bins and they are large, ugly, bald, unkempt bastards and I don’t like them one bit. Larger than a chicken and taller than a 3 year old, they are supposed to be white, but they don’t wash themselves properly and their feet are too big to stand on electrical wires without jinking backwards and forwards like drunk… ibi. Even their droppings are dangerous. It is poison to bats and large enough to dint your car if it lands from a height.
So two days after I put my new tyres on, one falls off a wire in front of my car, starts to fly, doesn’t quite get height, breaks to the left and I think it’s out of my path, breaks back right and goes under my wheels. All of this was done in the crowded main drag of an inner-west suburb. As the front wheel went over it, the car lifted like I was driving over a median strip, and I could see all the people at the crowded bus stop opposite with their hands over their mouths and ears, trying to shut out the crunching sounds.
All I could think was, “I am so upset. I bet I get ibis bones through the wall of my new tyre.” Then when I got to work, I had to clean ibis off the front of my car, that made me sad, then angry, but when I found that the tyre hadn’t gone down, I was happy again.
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