One change I hope I’ll never be making

I should come clean. I don’t live in Gloucestershire and I’ve never even attempted to change a tyre. Perhaps this is why I am not shocked, surprised, alarmed or even remotely ashamed at news that well over half of all women in the county can’t change a car tyre.

Well, so what? Of course, it is helpful to be able to change a car tyre, but, most of us don’t want to. And why would we? It’s why many of us include breakdown assistance in our women’s car insurance policies.

In an ideal world I would know how to change a car tyre, but so too would my boyfriend, so would my brother, my mum, my best friend and my colleagues.

We live in an age where we are deprived of time. We spend countless hours working and belong to a generation where we have become divorced from the processes that we rely on to function.

As a result, we don’t know how to change a car tyre and we don’t know how to repair and re-cut our clothes. Perhaps this is a bad thing, but, realistically, how much time do we have in our lives?

After we’ve been to work, cooked our meals and done things such as make a car insurance comparison, do we really want to be learning how to change a car tyre?

This is why I feel less than kindly towards those who respond to such surveys by using it as an opportunity to criticise women for a lack of technical know-how. We’re busy, modern women and sometimes it’s okay if being emancipated means we’re free to pay for outside help.


Image © Afroswede via Flickr, under Creative Commons Licence