An unusual day of driving

Being rather new to ownership of cars built after the turn of the millennium, this symbol entered my life yesterday. Even though I'm pretty sure my parents just ran their cars on the same tyres without touching them for years, tyre pressure - which is measured in the almost beautifully unwieldy unit of pounds per square inch - can vary a lot by the season, and drops significantly during colder weather. And, as I found out when I looked in the manual, our car warns you when a tyre is beginning to become underinflated (though decades of computer evolution have not allowed it to tell you which one).

As we were going to the hardware-type shopping centre anyway, I got a little gauge/repressurizificatenizer thing, which attaches to your car's power outlet, screws on to the tyre valve, has a handy non-adjustable light pointed directly away from both of these fiddly attachments, and produces a horrendous buzzing noise while doing absolutely sod all to the tyre's pressure. The dial did at least allow me to discover that I was at 30ish psi at the front and 25 at the back, though - so I took it to a garage instead and found the air dispenser... thing that I've never even paid attention to in my life before. It took me about three goes, but I eventually got them all up to the pressure that it wanted - after going up a couple of psi above the recommended level, I finally realized that the warning light wouldn't go out until the engine had been on for a couple of minutes.

On the way back from our business in the area, we took a turning on to the main road into our town and I noticed that all the other cars on the road were crawling in a very organized line in the left lane. Thinking that there must be roadworks ahead that I didn't know about, I moved into the lane with them, and it was only then that I realized that I was now in the middle of a long column of cars in a funeral procession. Junctions were being redirected by the police around us, so I felt we were stuck with it - and not really knowing what else to do, I just turned on my hazard lights like all the other cars in the line and proceeded to use our vaguely appropriate colour to blend in, making sure not to smile. Then when we reached the graveyard I just indicated out and sped away, feeling slightly guilty about having accidentally hijacked what must have been a fairly important funeral, even if it saved me a bit of time getting home.

We also narrowly avoided being part of an actual funeral later in the day, because we've just come back from driving fifty miles through a stupidly early October snowstorm. This, on reflection, was a bad decision - we were at a wedding, and when I saw the warning that snow was starting to come in I actually asked the front desk of the hotel if they had any rooms left for the night - but with no rooms available, we decided to brave the journey.

With visibility at a very unsatisfactory level, everyone on the road was in the middle lane, in a long snake just following the lights of the car directly in front of them - then a bus, going far too fast (probably one of the budget lines trying desperately to complete a route before it fell over and/or caught fire) absolutely buried us in its wake, throwing half a ton of snow on to our windscreen which obscured everything before the wipers got through it. After ages just concentrating on the very faint lines on the road, avoiding having to brake and hoping that I would just continue travelling in the direction I was pointing, I've never been more glad to get back on to town roads and the hugely reduced speed that comes with them.

The Honda has served us extremely well so far. Tomorrow we will stay inside.