I spent all day sorting this out., and it was made a lot easier by nice people helping me along the way.

I go and pickup the green wheelie bins full of vegetable/fruit first thing in the morning. I need a bit of room as I need to drive a trailer into the supermarket car park, and reverse back it into the "Pay and Collect" parking space, which is next to where the bins live. To get lined up I have to go against one-way arrows painted on the road. After the store opens at 7.00 the carpark starts to get cluttered, and people start being aggro about me trying to reverse. They will, for example, drive up nose to nose and block me from moving back and forth in a tight space.

I think they assume I work for the supermarket and therefore they can be as horrible as they like and I won't bite back. That isn't what happens. I don't take any crap from entitled tossers, and have had at least one try and escalate a complaint against me. So, best if I go early before they get there and just avoid them.

The staff turnover at the supermarket is high, so there is very little consistency in what they do. The wheelie bins have to be lifted into the trailer. Its not high, 10 cm, but if the bin is overfilled the sheer weight of it makes the job difficult. For a couple of months the supermarket staff were doing it properly, spreading the load across a couple of bins, not overfilling them, putting them out at the end of the night shift rather than waiting another day. But all those experienced hands have left and the newbies overfill the bins.

Most the time I can get the bin into the trailer by tilting it, catching one edge on the trailer deck and levering it in. Sometimes I have to put an empty bin in the trailer and move, say, 80 kg of watermelon into the empty bin then lift in the remainder. That all takes time, so again, better to go early and not infuriate the public by taking up space and time in the carpark.

So, on my way home I had a heavy load, three very full wheelie bins.

Two minutes down the road the trailer starting rattling. I looked in the rear vision mirror, and saw the trailer tilt dramatically, then start grinding on the road. Luckily I wasn't going very fast and slowed and pulled off the road.

The wheel was missing. One nut remained on the hub. No sign of the wheel. The hub itself showed some scour marks. My guess was the wheel was rattling because of...loose nuts? Worn bearings? Luckily I was moving past the golf course when it happened rather than in a residential area. I figured the tyre had taken itself off for an exciting ride. Plenty of room to bounce its way through the golf course. Could have been awkward if it had hit someone's house. I did walk up and down the road to see if I could see it. As it was early it was still dewy on the grass, but there was no trail visible. And lucky it was early, there was no one else on the road to cope with my erratic driving, and no one on the bike path to get wiped out by a loose wheel.

It took a minute or two to to sort out what I needed to do. I don't carry the trailer spare tyre with me on short trips. I also needed 5 wheel nuts. And if the bearings were shot the whole thing needed attention, not just a replacement wheel.

Where I stopped the roadside was very soft soil, and the hub had buried itself deeply. Jacking it up fully loaded was out of the question, so I manually unloaded the wheelie bins, unhitched the trailer and went home for the spare wheel.

At home I stopped for breakfast, then grabbed the spare wheel and headed back. I went to town to the tyre place with the one wheel nut that had stayed on. I explained what had happened and that I needed to buy 5 wheel nuts that matched. They had a box of spares and a handy thread tester...a piece of wood with one of each "standard" wheel threads. He wouldn't take payment.

"You're local, aren't you? That's fine."

Back I went to the trailer. I had brought some heavy timber pieces with me. With the soft ground I used the timber to stop the jack from burying itself. That was the theory, but it didn't work. The trailer was parked on a steep area, with the flat side downhill. There was no way I was going to be able to jack it up high enough.

Just then the groundsman from the golf course came over.

"Have you lost a tyre?" he asked me. I followed him through the fence, into the golf course and he took me to where the tyre was. It was sort of in the direction you might expect it to be, but a long way from the road so I would never have found it. I rolled it back and he came back with me.

He saw straight away the problem I was now facing, of the trailer not being high enough. He had a simple solution, off he went and came back driving a trench digger. With the scoop he lifted the trailer by the lowest corner, and made enough room for the wheel .....except it was the wrong spare. Yes, correct number of holes, no, different spacing.

My problem. He lowered the trailer, but on top of my stack of timber, so the trailer was resting at the correct height, and went back to his mowing.

I went home again, got the correct wheel, went back to the trailer and put the wheel on, hitched up the trailer, then levered the bins back on the trailer. That was hard. They were very heavy, the ground was soft and trailer's height was 10 cm higher than in the supermarket car park, where I had the curb to my advantage.

I went home, emptied the trailer, then took it back to the tyre place. They had a look at it. Needed a new wheel....the escapee had rattled itself loose and stretched the bolt holes. Completely unsafe and unsalvageable. The tyres didn't match. The spare was a light truck tyre, unlike the original tyres. So I needed two tyres. Bearings were worn, which is why it was rattling, and needed replacing. The rattling HAD scoured the hub itself, which also needed replacing.

The replacement hub came with its own nuts, so at the end of it all I was able to return the nuts I was loaned.

Poor old thing, it does a lot of work and regularly needs repairs.

A bit like me, really.