SO whose brilliant idea was it to decide that cars don’t need spare tyres any more? Sorry, but it must have been a man.

All that emphasis on saving space in the boot - what are you going to put in it that’s more useful than a spare tyre? And what if it saves you a few bob in fuel? That’s nothing to the fury of being stranded.

Women are so used to carrying around handbags full of spare lipsticks, tissues, tights and a hundred other things… that we would never, ever have done away with the spare tyre – of the get you back on the road type, that is.

Also, we have better things to do than hang around on a roadside waiting to be rescued. Might have been fine for those old-time damsels in distress but times have changed.

The vanishing spare started sneakily with one of those slimline “get you home” tyres. Now it’s dwindled down to a tube of gunk and a good luck message.

As I tend to have punctures on remote Scottish islands, where essentials arrive twice a week by ferry if you’re lucky, or on the top of Welsh mountains, or in the middle of the Holy Island causeway in a snowstorm, for the last two cars I’ve bought my own proper spare wheel and tootled off in confidence.

Not any more. Now Honda won’t even sell me a basic wheel - only ridiculously expensive alloy jobs. And no jack. Or you have to spend another small fortune buying the complete kit with the skinny tyre as an extra. An extra?

So if you get a puncture you can’t just open the boot and change the tyre yourself (And yes, I can and yes, I have), you have to wait to be rescued. And then you have to wait while the rescuer races round trying to get you a tyre – which on a Sunday night on a Scottish mountain, or anywhere else, come to that, could be very tricky and take a very long time.

And totally unnecessary.

Yes, I’ve just had a puncture on my new spare-less car and it made me feel totally, furiously helpless. At least I wasn’t far from home – so thanks to Barton post office for providing coffee and calm as I fumed, and to Darren from the AA who got me back on the road again.

Now I feel forced to fork out ridiculous amounts of money on the whole spare tyre kit and caboodle.

Still, with luck, now I’ve got all that sorted, I’ll probably never get a puncture again.

YOU could wonder, really, if these academics have got enough to do….

A couple of them have now come up with the bright idea that for children to call teachers “Sir” or “Miss” is sexist and degrading to women – because “Sir” implies a knighthood and respect and “Miss” doesn’t.

It gets worse.

They want children to call teachers by their first name, or – and it’s not April 1st is it? - call them all, men and women, “Sir”,

Oh dear.

Actually, my small school solved this problem a generation ago, insisting that we called all members of staff by their names. Miss Jones, Mrs Davies, Mr Thomas, etc.

Simple, easy, polite – and a lot less confusing than calling women “Sir”.

But obviously too simple for high flying academics.

MANY thanks to Geoff Carr who emailed with news (or, he points out, increasingly now pronounced, American-style, as “noos”) of another new word – winningest. He’d just seen an advert for an American golf driver described as "the winningest on the tour."

It’ll probably catch on.

What chance of the England football team being the winningest in Brazil?