LADY KILLERS
Giles Catchpole has news of a successful cull
ILLUSTRATION:
OLLY COPPLESTONE
IT MUST HAVE BEEN IN THE MID-1980S –
after the freeze of ’81, but before the Great Storm of ’87 – when I trickled around a roundabout in Norwich and spotted a maiden in distress. Well, she was looking forlornly at a distinctly flat tyre on a Land Rover, at any rate.
So I went around again to offer assistance. I was younger then, of course, and she was lissome and comely and so what could possibly go wrong?
I didn't know at this stage that a Land Rover wheel-jack is the invention of the Devil himself and that changing a tyre is a task of Sisyphean scale being both laborious and futile. My case was exemplary in that I ended up with a blackened thumbnail and severe backstrain and never even got her number. Matters have not improved either. I was involved in changing a wheel on a Discovery a while back; it took three of us over an hour and it damn near killed us.