We all face the same way, still it takes all day. I take a look to my left, pick out the worst and the best.

It doesn't look as bad as it felt.

This is the tyre that decided to blow out on me on Friday night.

After finishing the job on Friday, I went back to mine to have a good scrub up and then headed up to see The Girl. It was one of those 'things are really good' moments. The job was complete, I was going to spend the weekend with The Girl, the tunes were on and I was making good time due to lack of traffic on the roads.
Three quarters into the journey, I could tell something wasn't right. There was a noise that didn't sound like my familiar 'bone shaker' sound, so I turned down the music and wound down the window to investigate. Yep, definitely a new noise. The engine seemed ok and all the dials were reading as they should be, but there was definitely a new noise.
I pulled into the middle lane and noticed the steering was fighting against me. In a moment of complete stupidity, I eased my grip on the steering wheel and straight away the car veered off to the right. Time to pull over onto the Hard Shoulder methinks. As I drove over the cats-eyes between the middle and inside lanes, the noise increased dramatically and just as I was about to pull onto the Hard Shoulder, I felt the tyre blow. The steering went incredibly heavy, the steering wheel juddered as if I were driving off-road and smoke bellowed from the front of the car. The smell of burning rubber filled the car and it desperately wanted to go back into the Motorway lanes, but I fought with the steering wheel and luckily I won.
A very worrying 30 seconds!

It was dark and me being Mr Unprepared, I wasn't carrying a torch of any description, so I struggled with changing the wheel using the headlights of the cars zooming past as some kind of light. Twenty minutes and two very dirty hands later, I was back on the road.

It's the first time I've had anything like that happen to me and I'm convinced I was very lucky to be able to keep control of the car. I know it could have been a lot worse. I played the whole thing down when I arrived at The Girl's house, not wanting her to worry too much about it. A couple of days later, I mentioned it to Bling (the guy I've been working with) and he told me that when he had a blow-out on the Motorway, he lost control of his car and it spun round a few times before crashing into the central reservation.

Something or someone was looking out for me that night.