This has always, and will always be a touchy issue. When is it ethical or moral to keep a ’spare’? In the words of Ray Parker Jnr from back in the day; “you should have kept a spare/a backup love affair…”.

Using a simple analogy, let me represent a standard relationship with a car, a motor-vehicle. I look at two main components here; the vehicle and the tyres on which it runs. Taking one side of the partnership as the vehicle and the other as the tyre(s) let us examine typical journeys as against a very important journey, possibly the trip of your life.

For day to day journeys, it would be logical to assume that any careful driver would make sure that apart from having all his mounted tyres in mint condition, there would also be a reliable spare in the boot (trunk?). Well… in the high speed world of Formula 1 the pace is too fast for spares to stay on board, rather tyres are used and discarded with impunity - a high rolling life … I digress as usual. Anyway coming back to the regular journey idea one would assume that the presence of the spare serves as a reassurance for the driver but is not something that would be in the foreground during any such journey. More like some fact that sticks somewhere in the periphery of your consciousness.

Now we come to the very important trip. Obviously for a critical journey the assumption is that all systems would be checked and rechecked, all spares and whatnot would be kept in pristine condition, after all; one can hardly afford surprises due to shoddy preparation on such critical journeys.

In plain english, this seems to suggest that for casual trips, a spare is useful but not essential whilst for critical trips the spare is an irreplacable part of the itenary. Hmmm…. Paradox?

Make what you will of this analogy. On the flipside I wonder, what kind of ‘tyre’ do you think you are? Personally I’ve always felt I’d be great in the trunk, best used sparingly and only in emergencies . Talk about ‘eating your cake and having it’. Heh heh.