Hello Swindon!!

I'd sort of forgotten about Swindon.

I've only ever been there a few times and unless I'm very much mistaken it's probably more than thirty years since my last visit, so when I noticed that someone in Swindon has been visiting this blog, a memory surfaced from the deep and I started thinking...

[Insert arty dissolve and descending harp music]

It is the nineteen-seventies, I've got lots of hair and I'm driving a white, twin-wheel Ford Transit van for Home Delivery Services. It's the first proper job I've had for quite a while.
In the few years between leaving school and this point in my life, I've spent a year at Salford University discovering that I'm not suited to becoming a civil engineer, I've dropped out and taken labouring jobs on building sites, been a self-employed steel-fixer and shuttering carpenter, and I've abandoned my dream of being a road-manager with a progressive rock super-group.
I've shared a flat with friends, been evicted, moved back home to my parents, left home again to live with a band of friends in a cottage in the middle of an orchard. Now, I am sharing another house with another couple of friends on the outskirts of Bristol.
It is a relatively calm point in an otherwise turbulent part of my life.

The job is not ideal, but it is a driving job. More importantly, it is a reasonably well-paid driving job. HDS is the Littlewoods organisation's own company, set up to distribute their vast quantity of mail-order goods to their catalogue agents across the UK. This is an idea that will be copied by many other firms over the years, breaking the virtual monopoly of the Post Office and spawning a new archetypal road user; "White Van Man".

I have lucked into this job a couple of weeks after a mate of mine has been taken on. A fellow roadie and refugee from the implosion of the prog-rock band, he had seen the advert at the local Job Centre and had already completed his on the job training and been allocated his own van and delivery area. From his description, it sounded pretty good; OK, it was multi-drop, house to house deliveries, but the basic pay was better than average, and with the thinly disguised bonus scheme, it was possible to earn quite a bit more than basic. When he told me they were looking for more drivers, I was swiftly down to the Job Centre and after a quick interview and a driving test, I was in!!

The first few weeks at HDS have been an eye-opener. There are a couple of dozen drivers, including the usual old lags, the boy racers, several women and an airline pilot. Most of the drivers seem OK, although the women are pretty scary; equal pay for women is not yet a universally accepted concept, and having landed a job in one of the few companies that doesn't discriminate, these women seem to be tougher than the blokes. Ellen Ripley from 'Alien' would have blended in perfectly.
I am trained by one of the women. Raddy is a hard-core delivery driver; she's been with the firm long enough to have worked out most of the angles, and over the course of two days she explains how the job is supposed to be done, whilst demonstrating how this differs from the actuality of driving a hundred miles and making over a hundred deliveries in about five hours.
"We're supposed to get a signature for every delivery, but they know it's impossible. If you can get half of them signed you'll be OK. Learn which neighbours are in and where to stick parcels if there's nobody at home."
"OK"
"Don't forge signatures "
"What, not even to make up the numbers?"
"No. If stuff goes missing when you left it in the shed or somewhere, they'll get pissed off, but if you've faked a signature, they'll say you've nicked it. It's not bloody worth it. They'll still moan about 'too many Not Signed For', but sod 'em."
"Right."
As she explains all this, Raddy hurtles across the suburbs. We barrel down every single road in Fishponds, screeching to a halt and bundling out of the van with armfuls of anonymous brown parcels. Her knowledge of the area is astonishing; not just where every road, lane and cul-de-sac is, but where the individual houses are on those streets.
We only stop the engine once, while we have a quick snack for lunch and she explains about the 'Safe Driving Bonus'
"We get a bonus each month if we don't have an accident, and there's another bonus if you can do a whole year without crashing."
"Do you usually get the bonus?"
"Yes... usually. So when I let you drive, don't bloody hit anything."
"Er, OK"
"This is worth having though,", she pauses, and reaches into her handbag. She takes out a can of White Duplicolour aerosol touch-up paint and laughs "Oh yeah, I usually get the bonus..."

So, the weeks roll by, and while waiting for a regular delivery area to become available, I spend my days covering routes for the drivers who are off sick or on holiday. One morning as I head into Swindon, I see an extraordinary road sign. At first glance it looks like a normal roundabout, but as I get closer it looks more like a pentagon with five dots in it,
"What the...?"
Before I have enough time to work out what it might mean, I'm driving into a maelstrom of vehicles. There is an expanse of nearly featureless tarmac, with cars and trucks and buses driving in all directions. I drive tentatively into this mayhem, aim in the general direction of where I think my exit is, and give way to any vehicle that approaches from my right, looks bigger than my van or else seems determined to collide with me.
Miraculously, I emerge on the other side of this extraordinary piece of traffic engineering with my van unscathed and my underwear unsoiled.

I am delighted to report that this masterpiece is still there, and is now officially named "The Magic Roundabout", in homage to the childrens TV show of the same name. It looks as if the original free-for-all aspect of it has been slightly moderated by adding more road markings and raised areas of tarmac, but it's still totally bonkers.

If you want see how it looks from the air, the satellite view is here.

Thank you Swindon.