Ouch - that was expensive!

Yes, McGuinness's didn't have any 15" Transit wheels at all but there was some kind of better luck at the Ford breaker's at Fenton. He pulled a superb set of 15" wheels out of the back of his shed, with some really nice tyres - 205s, not 195s like mine, but a set of four would have done the job just fine. However, closer inspection revealed them to be 6-stud, not 5-stud, and so they were no use at all.

He did however point me in the direction of a tyre place that was the cheapest in the whole of the Potteries for van tyres, and all they had in stock of my size was a pair of Hankooks. Needs must when the devil drives, and that was when we found out that the wheel was in fact slightly buckled. Ahhh well.

But apart from that, I accomplished all of my tasks in Stoke today, and had one or two pleasant surprises, and that's not counting the half-dozen DVDs I found in the local charity shops.

You might think that a set of three pyrex casserole dishes with lids, to use in my little oven, would be a major purchase, especially at £7:50, but that pales into insignificance when compared to the slow cooker that I found in one of these cheapo shops. Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that back in 2010 I bought a cheap 1.5 litre slow cooker in a Walmart in Newfoundland - one with a porcelain insert and running at 120 watts. That lives in my lock-up in Montreal and I use it on my travels in the car and in motels. All of the slow cookers that I've seen in the UK are big things, 3.5 litres and 200 watts and the like but there, at £9:99, was my little slow cooker, exactly the same as the one back in Canada.

The aim, as you know, is for me to get away from using gas as a means of cooking. In winter, that's not so difficult as the oven attached to my fire will do most things, but in summer it's not so easy. The little vegetable steamer did a good job, but it won't do everything. The slow cooker, if I can teach it to fry onions, will do the rest I hope.

Another thing was that one of the shops was selling onion and shallot sets - £2:00 a bag and buy one, get one for free (or BOG OFF in the vernacular) so I bought a few bags of those.

Tomorrow it's to the bank, and then I'm heading off on my travels, calling at Car Transplants on the offchance that they might have a wheel or two.