Punctures

Last Thursday evening when I was riding my bike around in the dark looking for something to do (I didn’t find anything, incidentally), I discovered that my back tire was a little soft. It still had enough air in to allow me to pedal and it didn’t completely deflate so I figured that in the months that I’ve owned the bike, air had just naturally escaped leaving the inner tube a little saggy. Upon returning home, I chained the bike up and forgot about the soft tire, telling myself I’d deal with it at some unfixed time in the future when I could be arsed looking for my bike pump. 

Come Monday morning, the tire was completely flat and so it was deduced that I had indeed, contrary to earlier opinion, managed to get myself a puncture. I whipped out the repair kit on Monday evening after work and proceeded to set about patching my inner tube. What followed was the most drawn-out and labourious puncture repair saga I think I have ever endured. 

First, upon removing the inner tube and pumping it up to find the hole, I was amazed to discover that there wasn’t one. I was doing all of this in the dimly-lit car park outside the block where I’m living so I didn’t have a bowl of water with which to locate any tell-tale air bubbles escaping from the tube – I was just holding the thing up to my ear to see if I could hear air escaping. There didn’t appear to be anything wrong with the tube so I happily resigned that maybe the air had escaped through the valve, and just started putting it back into the tire ready for the wheel to be reattached to the bike. Reattaching the wheel turned out to be a task in itself seeing as the rest of the bike was still chained to a fence post (all in the name of convenience, you understand. In practice, it turned out to be anything but convenient), but I eventually got it on, tightened the quick-release nuts and then started to re-inflate. As soon as I plunged the pump handle down I heard hissing. I tried to tell myself it wasn’t coming from the wheel, but it blatantly was, so incredulously I once again removed the wheel, once again at great difficulty due to the bike being chained to a fence. I really do seem to enjoy making things more difficult than they need to be. 

Anyway, upon removing the inner tube from the tire, I pumped it up again and this time managed to find where the air was escaping from – a tiny pinprick of a hole on the outer side of the tube opposite the valve. I sanded the area, applied the rubber solution and stuck a patch on. I waited about 10 minutes in that cold, dark car park and then went about reinserting the tube into the tire and going through the hole rigmarole of reattaching the wheel (while the bike was still attached to the fence). I began to pump. Hissing. Again. Un-fucking-believable. So yet again I went through the whole process of taking the wheel off, removing the tube looking and listening for air escaping. It was coming from the same place I’d just stuck the patch...how was that possible? The patch was still there, bonded to the tube with rubber solution, yet the air was still pissing out. I figured that maybe I hadn’t stuck the patch down with enough glue, so with great difficulty I ripped the patch off and set about sticking another, bigger patch onto the area. After another 5 minutes of fumbling around in the half-light, cursing like Mutley and resisting the urge to throw the fucking wheel over a nearby shed, I got the wheel on. I went to make a quick phone call and came back, giving the glue time to cure and then I carefully started to pump the tire up. One pump, two pumps...no hissing. So far so good. Three pumps, four pumps...HISSING! AAARGH! At that point I just gave up and left the damned thing to rot. And there it would have stayed until it were naught but a few rusty sprigs of metal, if I hadn’t had to rely on it to get me to work and back. 

I could use the Goose to commute daily if I so wished but that would be plain lazy, and the combination of continuously atrocious weather and the poor condition of most of the local roads (not to mention the ridiculous number of traffic lights) make riding around this town a pretty treacherous and arduous task. My quest to repair the existing inner tube had resulted in failure so I admitted defeat (ungraciously, you understand) and resigned to just buying a new one. That’s where the story becomes slightly more surreal – I went to four different places during my lunch hour yesterday to get an inner tube. None of them sold the right one for my bike. I would have expected this if I owned a penny farthing or some other arcane or unusual artefact from the history of cycling...but I don’t. It’s just a cheapo hybrid with standard wheels, yet none of the stores that I visited had the right size of inner tube. 

The last place I went to before I gave up did have some that were almost the right size and the salesman assured me that it would fit my wheel, so I bought it...but not before also having to also buy a puncture repair kit too because they wouldn’t take card payments of under £5 (that shit winds me up too...but that’s another post). So I left with my new inner tube and my new repair kit, happy in the knowledge that the next time I popped that fucking wheel off my bike, it would be going back on with a leak-free tube installed. So last night I went for it. I got the wheel off, ripped out the old tube, tried to insert the new one...and realised that the valve tube was too wide for the hole in the wheel rim. I stifled an anguished cry of anger and pain - the new tube had a Schrader valve instead of the one where you have to unscrew the little top bit and press it down, meaning the shaft was wider...and meaning that I couldn’t use the tube. 

Determined, I took the old tube back up to the flat and inspected it. I dug deep into my reserves of logical, methodical calmness. I removed the old patch from the day before. I filled the sink, pumped up the tube and then plunged it into the water, and lo -two columns of bubbles rose it’s the battle-scarred surface. Two. One on either side – that’s why the hole hadn’t been sealed; whatever had caused the puncture had pierced both sides of the tube and I’d been ignorantly trying to patch only one. That little mystery solved, I fixed two patches and waited for them to dry. Once dry, I pumped the tube up a second time and checked it in the water again, only to find yet another hole on the other side, adjacent to the two I’d just covered! Upon patching this one too, the tube stayed solid. Jubilantly, triumphantly, I put the tube back into the tire and wrestled the wheel back onto the bike (it was still chained to the fence) and then took it out for a little ride just to test the integrity of the repair. It held – by God it held! 

So I decided to have a ride down to the fairly well-lit docks area of Gloucester to take some night shots with my new camera. I chained the bike up and went off to snap away...and on returning to the bike discovered that some retarded member of the indigenous mono-brain celled population (also the kind of individual I like to refer to as a cunt) had stolen my lights.

**Update**

While I was looking for an inner tube yesterday lunchtime, I tweeted about how disgusted I was at not being able to find what I was looking for:

"Reasons I hate Gloucester number 27 - even the most ubiquitous of items are impossible to get hold of. Example: a bicycle inner tube!"

I don't know how or why, but the local newspaper (The Citizen) seems to have dredged it from the depths of obscurity with some kind of search algorithm that recognises the word 'Gloucester' and printed the thing on the letters page of today's edition:

Fame/Infamy await. I'm guessing there'll be pitchforks and flaming torches waiting for me when I get home tonight. Excellent.