Dear Phantom Puncture Pr***,
Perhaps, who knows, you are a very nice phantom?
Personally, though, Phantom Puncture Pr***, I’m not so keen on your preferred pastime. It really isn’t so very pleasant to sneak around in the shadows, outside my cave home, with your hammer and nails, poking holes in the tyres of my car. On another point, albeit quite a similar point (a parallel point one might say) then my Hubby’s not overly keen on having holes poked in his car’s tyres, either!
In fact, I have to say, and I’m hoping (against all probability) that you will agree with me, then the whole project that you have embarked upon does seem just a teeny-weensy bit …… pointless!
To give you the full lowdown, to further emphasise my point, so to speak, then it costs £45 to replace one of my car tyres! Okay, so this may not be a lot of cash to someone in full employment but, as I am currently claiming Jobseeker’s Allowance, which amounts to something like £72 a week, then I hope you will feel just a teensy-weensy prick to your conscience!
I am trying to be a big earner (really, I am!) but, to date, as detailed in my other writings , I have only made 40p for the sale of one tiddly-little book! I am a mother, with three sprogs who are not bringing in any dosh of their own; rather, they are taking out the dosh. Taking out my dosh! As you can imagine, even if you are as c**p as me at the maths, then this really does not leave a lot of change from my £72 weekly income! Certainly not enough to be forking out £45 for a car tyre!
Now it really can’t be just a coincidence that, of very recent times, the cars in our Cool Neanderthal family possession, have been victim to four punctured tyres, all of which occurred whilst they were innocently parked outside our cave home. My car really is not the vindictive type (being at the budget end of things, it really can’t afford to be!) and it has never parked upon anybody else’s territory, only on the driveway to our cave, and on the road that adjoins it – never obstructing anybody else’s access to their own abodes!
And, I can vouch, too, for the good nature of my Hubby’s car; he only spent £500 on the little gem, so really it has a lot to be grateful for – he saved it from the knacker’s yard, and a long-slow-painful death under the crusher! So please, please, please, have mercy on it. Don’t make it’s remaining days a misery, by hammering nails into any of it’s tyres – it will meet it’s end soon enough and, in the meantime, my Hubby needs it to get to his place of employment. If he keeps being made late by you, my Phantom Puncture Pr***, then it is highly unlikely his boss will be pleased enough to be paying him – and then where will this family be?
Okay, so if we lived back in the 1800s, I could just sound the sprogs out to work with their clackers, scaring away the crows from the farmlands of Chilton. But, seeing as we are living in 2019, then I’m pretty certain this is not going to happen! And, if I send the sprogs out in the dark, with the same said clackers, to scare off you, Phantom Puncture Pr***, then they will undoubtedly be served up with ASBOs! It’s bad enough for Sprog 2 that he’s been made late for school by the puncture issue, and acquired a poor reputation for punctuality, without having a criminal record clocking up points in his school’s book for pointlessly-naughty sproglings!
Of course, there is always the possibility that, with too much time to be a lazy dosser, I have become a tad paranoid, and that the flat tyres just happened in the general run of things. But, as the garage man, asked, “Where have you been with so many nails in your tyre?”, and I could only answer that I had been back and forth from various local schools and sports training events doing the mum thing, I am inclined towards the belief that my sanity is intact! At least, as intact as it possibly can be, in one who chooses to live in a cave and prance around in a Neanderthal costume!
Once my car has gone kapput, I will not, unless in the meantime some kind publisher takes pity upon me and does the charitable thing by signing me up, be able to replace it! it was purchased, needless to say, whilst I was in employment, and is currently maintained by my dwindling redundancy funds. When it’s gone, it’s gone for good!
So, please, Phantom Puncture Pr***, please take up an alternative pastime, and go haunt some other inanimate objects, (i.e. not our car tyres), and preferably ones that don’t belong to a real families with real expenses.
And if, indeed, I have imagined you up, be alert and prepared for my fairy dust. In just one single sprinkling, I can make you fly ……..! Sounds like fun? It’s not! Phantoms, so I’ve heard, are absolutely petrified by heights! And, remember those dreams – the ones when you are flying and all seems tickety-boo, until the moment when you want to land, and you can’t ….? The never-ending-flying-in-the-sky-forever NIGHTMARE?
Get the point?
Bestest of the bestest regards,
from Jay Cool (the classiest of the Neanderthal matriarchs!)
P.S. If you, the cat who keeps pooping on the lawn beneath my washing line, is also the Phantom Puncture Pr***, then ……..!!! Okay, you may well be ginger but, in this case, even that won’t spare you from ……………………………………….!!!
Other posts by Jay Cool:
Savvy Letter – Dear Mark Twain
Savvy Letter – Dear Top-Notch Editor
Savvy Book – The Marble Collector
Copyright owned by Jay Cool, October 2019
Image by TheoRivierenlaan from Pixabay
The Silly-Savvy Salopian in Suffolk: read, believe and write ... 