We were driving home from town, the three of us, when my wife remarked that the tyre was low. She has an eye for these things, as she has an ear for a sneeze, and she is nearly always right, which is one of the quieter trials of being married to her.

We pulled into the service station. I got out with the bearing of a man who means to be useful, fetched the air hose, and fitted it to the tyre; and after a moment’s study it became apparent that the air was leaving the tyre very slightly faster than I was managing to put it in. There was, in short, a hole.

This is the kind of problem I can diagnose to perfection and, as it would turn out, do absolutely nothing else about. I told my wife and daughter to stay comfortable where they sat. It would be the work of a moment, I said. I would simply change the tyre. I believe I may even have smiled as I said it.

I will grant my earlier self this much: the opening went beautifully. I fetched the spare, the jack, and the tyre iron from the boot and laid them out with method. I loosened the wheel-nuts. I raised the car upon the jack. I took the wheel-nuts off altogether, set them where I would not lose them, and reached up to lift the wheel free.

The wheel did not come free. I do not mean that it was stiff. I mean that it had, at some point in its long acquaintance with the car, resolved to become a part of it. I pulled at it. I pushed at it. I struck it with the flat of my hand, and then with the tyre iron. I lay down on the ground beneath the raised car — which I have since been informed is precisely the thing one must never do — and I kicked it, with both feet, repeatedly, to no result but my own. I got up, and climbed onto the tyre, and jumped on it with the whole of my weight, in the hope that what my arms could not manage the rest of me might; I achieved a jolt to both knees and the passing interest of a motorist, and nothing else.

I walked across to the shop and bought a hammer. It weighed eight pounds; I remember the figure because I chose it for exactly that. The wheel was unmoved, in both senses. I struck it a great many times, in the failing light — a middle-aged man in his good coat, administering a sustained beating to a stationary automobile before an audience I had entirely invented.

From inside the car, meanwhile, came word that my labours were not wholly without effect: the rocking I was setting up, my wife reported, was making the two of them seasick. My daughter confirmed the diagnosis, and proposed, with great gravity, that I might have better fortune if I were to ask the wheel politely — a thing she said in a particular tone, pitched for me alone, so that I laughed, which improved no one’s stomach in the least. After the better part of two hours, I had produced exactly one measurable result in the world, and it was nausea, and it was in the two people I love best.

There was nothing for it. We telephoned for help; and in time a young man came. He was perhaps five-and-twenty, unhurried in the manner of a person who has been called out to far worse on far colder nights, and he took in the whole arrangement — the raised car, the scattered tools, the good coat, the enormous hammer — with the mild, unsurprised attention of a man reading a weather report. Then he set to. He pulled, and pushed, and studied the thing, and could not move it a hair more than I had. But where I had spent two hours at war with the wheel, he merely stopped, wiped his hands, and said that we did not, in fact, need to take it off at all. He would plug the hole where it sat.

This had not occurred to me. By then I had consulted the owner’s manual, largely upside down and by the light of the open door; and it had not occurred to the manual either. In two hours I had considered a great many things — leverage, percussion, prayer, eight pounds of hammer. The young man filled the hole. It took him rather less time than it has taken me to write the sentence describing it.

We drove home on the tyre I had spent the evening trying to remove. The spare went back into the boot untouched, and is in there yet. The eight-pound hammer rode home on the back seat, between my wife and my daughter, no one having thought of anywhere better to put it. After a mile or two my daughter asked whether we were going to keep the hammer. I said I expected we would. And my wife, who had been quiet for some time, remarked to the windscreen that the tyre had looked low to her from the start.