Now, it wasn’t at all clear what was meant by the word ‘check’. Checking the oil level, radiator and petrol, we thought, was pretty straight forward. Messy, admittedly, but you knew what to do. But we never did find out exactly what to check the lights for. We guessed that you really had to make sure that they all worked but hoped that it would sometimes be OK just to check that none were missing.
The thing that kept me lying awake at night puzzling over was the daily tyre check.
We had discovered from elsewhere in the manual that the enemy was embedded stones. And the problem, of course, was that at any particular time three quarters of the tread of the tyres was either resting on the ground or hidden inside the wheel arches.
So I would imagine myself rolling the car forward exactly a quarter of a wheel circumference, jumping out and rushing around with my penknife flicking out the pebbles. Then I would jump in again and repeat the process. Then I would repeat it again. And then I would repeat it again. Provided, of course, that I had left room to roll the car far enough forward.
To ease this preliminary to each day I tried to imagine more efficient methods, for example getting the car to roll forwards (slowly, mind you) by itself, while I trotted alongside doing my checking and flicking, but they all seemed to have unhappy outcomes.
It was a very worrying problem...