I got a puncture in Italy – and managed to ruin two whole days for 12 people
Getting a puncture in a car always felt like a plot point in a film, a good way to summon chaos, but unlikely to happen in real life. Not if you drive like an undertaker, anyway; surely not if you drive like an undertaker slowing down regularly to admire the view. The whole possibility seemed so remote that even when the car told me it had happened, then swapped languages to tell me again in every tongue of Europe, I still thought: surely some misunderstanding?
Not a misunderstanding, no. I had a flat tyre in a far-off land (well, Italy), an adolescent for company, who was ready with advice but no significant expertise, and no reception. A friendly man came by; he had no reception, either, but gave us a bottle of wine, as if that would help. I was incredibly grateful, naturally, but we already had a bunch of wine – we were driving back from the wine shop. So now I felt like both a puncture-getting fool and the kind of grifter who accepts someone’s wine because they are on the take, rather than because they don’t know enough Italian to say: “No thanks, I’ve already got some.”
More friendly men arrived, one of them Mr Z, who can change a tyre in his sleep, he revealed. All good – yet still events unfolded in disturbing, sundrenched slow-motion, like a Scandinavian film where seemingly trivial but actually appalling things happen, with devastating lessons for the bourgeoisie. As amazed as I was to have a puncture in the first place, nothing is more surprising to me than regular people being able to change something as large as a tyre – no offence to Mr Z – and it being considered roadworthy. But there it was, no more communications in red, a full 12-hour self-reliance success story – until the tyre with the much slower, less attention-seeking puncture went down on the other side.
By the time this situation was even three-quarters resolved, I had dragged everyone – friends, family, mechanics, call centre workers, receptionists – into a world of chaos – I definitely, conservatively, ruined two full days for 12 people. I tell you this for why? Because a lot of people love it when other people’s holidays go wrong. It’s like the dirty sub-genre of the travelogue.
• Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist