Jinxed

My saviours at the fastfood joint

And the puncture mystery deepens. Finding myself shouting profanities at a half-deflated tyre on a Tehran expressway settled it: I had to get to the root of the problem or I would lose my mind. A bad streak, OK, fine, I can handle that. But this particular bad streak was creeping up a bit too high on the improbability scale. In fact, things were getting so unlikely that I started suspecting there might just be a logical explanation for the mess I was in. On my first day off in Tehran I had a go at the case. While my host's mum served me scrumptious pancakes, I scrutinised the inside of the rear tyre. After a few fruitless spins, feeling my way like a surgeon who's looking for a nasty protrusion, my fingertips detected something that felt like a fixed grain of sand. A bit of tweezing revealed a microscopic piece of metal wire. Victory is mine, I thought. Case closed.

My smugness didn't go down well with the gods of cycle touring. I'd hardly left Tehran when disaster struck again. An undeniable loss of pressure in the rear tyre. I bowed my head in defeat and halted at a fastfood joint at the edge of a small town. The owner proved to be an obliging fellow who led me to a small storage room where I could peacefully fiddle with patches and tubes. After a while his brother came in to bring me a plate of deep-fried I-don't-know-whats. (He must have sensed that bike repair and food make an excellent combination.) Unable to find whatever it was that caused the puncture, I decided that the tyre was jinxed. I managed to resist the temptation to burn it, then fished around in one of my panniers for a spare. By then it was too late to hit the road again, so I gladly accepted the owner's invitation to roll out my air mattress and stay for the night.

Now, the good news is that tyre and tube seem to hold up. The bad news is that this episode turned me into a complete neurotic, checking the tyre pressure whenever I can, sighing with relief when I find that everything is all right.