Flocki gets his winter shoes - A "tyresome" project.

Yesterday, I joined the queue of hopefuls at the tyre shop/service station near my parents'. As I store my tyres in their garage and usually seize bank holiday weekends like this one for a mini break down South, I always end up changing my tyres when half of KLU also has time. Equipped with book (the brilliant and highly recommendable A Complicated Kindness which I finished yesterday, having deliberately read it "slowly") and iPod I spent almost 2 hrs there, every 15 minutes or so advancing the equivalent of one car length.

The bi-annual tyre-changing is a ritual as well as conversation starter in Austria. A lot of consideration about the most opportune moment (Will it snow next week or won't it?) accompanies the whole opperation and in March and April and October and November respectively car-owners have an additional small talk topic - "I really must have my tyres changed this weekend before the snow comes. Have you changed yours yet? Did you have them balanced or just mounted?". To change them yourself or have them changed by specialists is an almost religious decision.

Until some years ago when a foreign friend marvelled at the profile of Flocki's winter tyres it never occured to me that in a lot of countries cars have all-weather tyres. How boring. What on earth do motorists in those deprived countries talk about in spring and autumn?