Honesty

Shirley spotted a nail in one of our beautiful new car's front tyres. I didn't want to yank it out myself in case that caused instant deflation. Instead, I immediately booked Butch into the Halfords Autocentre on Savile Street over in the Don Valley.

Having battled through unexpected traffic, I arrived at Halfords bang on time. The fellow on the front desk asked me to return within an hour and hopefully the problem would have been sorted out by then. So off I went for a mosey around the massive Tesco Extra store just down the road. I also had a cup of coffee in their cafe as I read the first few pages of the novel I bought from a charity shop to see me through the rest of February: "The Dirt Road" by James Kelman.

When I returned to the autocentre, the same young man on the reception desk told me that my appointment had been cancelled and I would be getting my pre-payment back. I was puzzled but then he explained that it had been a very short nail  and it had not in fact entered the tyre's inflated cavity. Of course I could not have known that myself and he agreed.

I thanked him for his honesty and we agreed that some tyre businesses would have simply kept the dosh. A brownie point goes to Halfords for doing the right thing.

It was like this

In other Yorkshire Pudding news, today I finally got round to doing something I had been meaning to do for ages. I parcelled up a brass thermometer and posted it to a certain school in York.

In fact, I was returning it to its rightful owners having stolen it from that school one Saturday afternoon when I was thirteen years old - fifty nine years ago by my reckoning.

That morning I had arrived in York aboard a school coach ready to play a game of competitive  rugby union. In those days, after games, it was the custom for home schools to provide refreshment for visiting teams. 

Following lunch, with three or four teammates, we went on a bit of a rampage around the host school seeking stuff we could thieve. That is how I ended up with the brass thermometer. It was in a science lab drawer.

As I wrote in my explanatory letter to the present headteacher of the York school, seeing that brass thermometer through the decades had always been tinged with shame and regret. As an adult and as a father, a husband, a neighbour and a friend I have always sought to live a very honest life - adhering to the motto, "Honesty is the best policy". And yet there was the brass thermometer - reminding me that I was not as entirely honest as I claimed to be.

Well now the thermometer has gone back where it belongs with sincere apologies. It now feels as if the load I carry around with me is slightly lighter this evening. I should have sent the stolen  booty back years ago.