WHEN my local garage bloke pulls a nail or screw or bit of wire out of the flat tyres he fixes he reckons he just tosses them outside on to the road for recycling. I think he's joking.

Certainly it's occurred to me that a goblin comes around my place at night and scatters such items liberally on the driveway. Just when it seems my various tyres must have collected every metal object hidden in the gravel here we score another three (and everybody knows they come in threes), which means I am due another puncture before this week is out. And that's just on the big vehicles.

In my shed my youngest's bike sits upside down with the intestine hanging out of the front wheel awaiting the purchase of another patch kit, having exhausted two entire kits on 12 punctures. It took nine patches to stem the incontinence of the rear tyre and there are still two observable leaks in the front. Any sensible bloke would have chucked it in and bought new tubes, but having started the job it became a point of honour to beat it. The impressively off-road looking tyres have about as much resistance to the penetration of prickles as a pair of nylon socks.

On the day I attempted these repairs it was to be a lesson in self-reliance for the boy, who was complaining of being bored and without transport. So grabbing him by the scruff of the neck and with a couple of spoons for tyre levers, I embarked on the job to show him how simple it all was. About six patches into the project he wandered off and fair enough, too.

At some stage in the past we paid some scallywag in a bike shop to insert some type of green goo that supposedly sealed up punctures as they happened, and like all good gullible consumers I allowed myself to be rorted by the promise of this high-tech fix to a problem invented way back by Mister Dunlop himself (I think) when he wheeled the first pneumatic tyre out of his shed in Ireland somewhere.

The effect of this stuff, and I feel I speak with some authority here, is to constantly ooze out of the puncture and make it very difficult to have a clean surface to attach the patch to.

There is one consolation to all this. The hilarity of the translation of instructions that come in a patch kit from Thailand. Recommended reading.