winter tires

Or should that be 'tyres'? One of the more insidious effects of living a long time in Japan is that your spelling takes on a distinctly American bent so that superfluous 'o's go missing (as in 'colorful'), the depraved French derived 'metre' becomes the phonetically more helpful 'meter', while 'enquiry' and 'inquiry' can take a whole class to tease out their etymological differences. Such issues crop up quite often in my classes principally due to the fact that my students have been schooled in American English whereas yours truly is a (somewhat rueful) user of British English . "But you're from Ireland" some of the smarter students will point out. "Yes, but we suffered from 800 years of linguistic oppression, so my lexis is a victim of history". Occasionally the odd Hiberno-English expression slips through - "Jaysus Satoshi, but ye made a right feckin arse of answering that question" - but by and large I succumb to the type of banal speech patterns favoured by 98FM presenters, what I call the Mid-Atlantic DJ accent.
But I digress. Today was a fine, sunny day but we are due to get our first big winter storm on Monday (with 20cms of snow), so it was time to equip our cars with winter tires. Here in Hokkaido car ownership involves more than just a car; it necessitates owning two sets of tires (a separate set for winter and summer), two sets of wipers (ibid), a boot big enough to hold a snow shovel, ice-scraper, jump cables, a tow rope, and in my case a metre (er?) long cast concrete slab. My car is (somewhat inanely) a 2 wheel drive (Mazda don't sell manual transmission 4 wheel drives and I like to think I am not quite at the age for an automatic), so to avoid fishtailing around icy corners, I put the concrete slab in the boot above the rear axle.
Works for me. Plus having a 2 wheel drive means I take more care in winter whereas 4 wheel drivers tend to take false succour in their cars' abilities and drive way too fast. Or at least Sanae does. I think she has been taken in by the Japanese tire manufacturers advertising of total control over the roads (and the rebel alliance).

To be honest I try to limit my driving in winter as much as possible, preferring to walk everywhere. It helps that the university is only a few minutes walk away, Cian's school is directly across the road, and there is a small supermarket just down the street from our house. Sanae's school is further away so she does have to drive, but does so on city streets where (despite her best efforts) she can't go all that fast. A colleague of mine comes to work from further afield and every winter he has a tale of woe about getting stuck in snow, sliding into ditches, or roads being impassable.
Ahh Hokkaido - I wouldn't be writing this if I lived in Kobe.