The world is full of nutters... (Thank Heavens)

The technology that delivers the music we listen to has come a long way during my lifetime.
I was reminded just how much things have changed by a recent post on Techno-Billies.

The first record player I can remember was a varnished mahogany box with a handle at the side to wind up the clockwork motor, and louvred vents at the front to control the volume of the sound that was produced by a steel needle as it tracked the groove in a 10 inch disc, spinning at 78 rpm. I can't have been more than four years old, but the memory of The Goons singing "I'm walking backwards for Christmas" is still clear, more than fifty years later.

During the time that has passed, the way we listen to music has changed almost beyond recognition. Now, my entire music collection is available, stored on pocket sized sliver of digital wizardry that barely weighs as much as that single, scratchy recording.

So bearing in mind the compactness of modern audio equipment, the ease with which we can use it and the quality of the sound that it produces, I find it hard to understand just what possessed  Simon Jansen of Auckland, New Zealand to build his "Steampunk Record Player".

Whatever drove him to create this work of whimsy, I salute him.
The Sex Pistols have never sounded better.

The best car I ever owned

After more than six months of self-imposed exile from the land of "Back-in-the-1970s", I think it's probably safe for me to do another nostalgia post and tell you how I came to buy a luxury saloon car at a far from luxury price and why it changed my life.

By the time my Austin A40 finally became too unroadworthy to struggle through an MOT, I'd been working as a self-employed steelfixer for several months.
Steelfixing is one of the lesser known occupations in the building industry and it involves the assembly and placement of all the steel reinforcing bars that are subsequently covered in concrete, creating the extraordinarily versatile and strong composite material, reinforced concrete.

Most of the building contracts that I was working on were in Stratford upon Avon, some fifteen miles from home, so the demise of my car was a bit of a problem. Getting to work entailed cycling ten miles to my workmate Brian's flat, changing into my working clothes, then travelling to the job in his pickup truck. We'd spend all day grafting away on site and then I'd return home via his flat.
I don't recall how long I managed to keep up this ridiculously energetic regime, but I do know what convinced me that I needed to rethink my travelling arrangements. One morning, the front light on my bicycle unsportingly fell into the front wheel half way to Brian's place. The wheel imploded in a welter of shredded spokes and as the front forks plunged into the tarmac stopping the bike in its tracks, I inevitably continued for a short time until I too plunged into the tarmac.
I went off the idea of cycling to work.
I needed another car.

As often happens, help came from an unexpected quarter.
Brian and I were at work one morning, assembling the column reinforcement for part of what was to become a covered shopping precinct in the centre of Stratford, when we were hailed.
"Oi! Steelfixers! D'you want to buy a car?"
It was one of the labourers. He was a young bloke who had only recently started work at the site, having moved into the area from somewhere in London. As far as I knew, the only car that he owned was an enormous old Rover that he used every day.
"What?... You're not flogging that old Rover are you?"
"Yeah... can't afford to run it. You can have it for fifty quid."
Brian and I both burst out laughing. This was clearly a joke, or possibly some sort of scam. The vehicle he claimed to be selling was about fifteen years old, but when it was brand new it was a top quality luxury saloon. This was the sort of car that the Prime Minister could be seen getting into in Downing Street.
"Fifty quid?" I said, "I don't think so... I'll give you a fiver for it."
He found my offer, shall we say, derisory. I can't remember his exact response, but I know that the second word was "off".
He left us and set off across the site to continue trying to find a buyer.

Brian said, "Y'know, fifty quid's probably a good deal, assuming that it's got an MOT."
"Yeah, but it's a bloody monster. Christ, it's got a three litre engine, it weighs a ton and it must drink petrol like it's going out of fashion. And what's the insurance gonna be for something like that?"
"A nice motor though....", he pondered "Well, it used to be a nice motor."
"For fifty quid there's gotta be something wrong with it. It's probably stolen or something. He's only been here a for week and he's hardly the sort of bloke you'd expect to have a Rover 3 litre."
"Yeah. I s'pose so... Come on, let's finish this and get over to the caff."

We didn't think any more about it. After all, if somebody really did want to risk buying what was bound to be a heap of trouble, they'd be sure to offer more than five pounds. So it was a bit of a surprise when, shortly after lunch, the guy came back and said, "Err, how about six quid?"
"Are you serious?"

He was serious. Which is how I ended up paying six pounds for a two-tone green Rover P5 3 litre

Same make, same model, same colour, but not my Rover, alas.

I gave him the cash. He gave me a receipt, the car keys and all the vehicle documents.
I hadn't even had a proper look at the car, let alone driven it, so the first time I got into the driving seat I was surprised to find that it was an automatic. I'd never driven anything without a manual gearbox before, so my journey home from work that day was something of an education. Just getting to grips with a vehicle that was far larger, heavier and more powerful than anything I'd driven before would have been alarming enough, but the added complication of trying to unlearn all those reflex actions that are a part of driving with a manual gearbox made me wonder whether I'd really made the right decision.
By the time I got home, I was a nervous wreck.

Given this inauspicious introduction to my new vehicle, you may wonder why it became the best car I ever owned.

It was certainly the cheapest car I've ever bought. It was also the most luxurious; well it would have been if it hadn't been fifteen years old and steadily disintegrating. For such a large and apparently unwieldy car, it was beautifully well mannered and even when I made the sort of poor decisions that only a man in his early twenties can think are sensible, it never punished me for my stupidity, steadfastly allowing me to keep control; the stabilty and trustworthiness of its handling saved me from myself several times over. It was the only car that I've ever been able to put into a four-wheel drift without any fear of it going badly wrong. (Yes, that's just the sort of decision I meant)

 I went on some memorable trips in that car with various friends, hurtling up and down the gloriously uncongested motorway network to gigs, to parties, or for weekends away camping. But none of these things are really what made Aunty Rover so important in my life. It's more about the people who I met through owning that particular vehicle.

If I hadn't had such an unfeasibly large car, it's unlikely that I would have been asked by some old school friends to help them collect some musical equipment from London. If I hadn't taken that particular road-trip I doubt whether I would have got to know those friends quite so well and it's even less likely that they would have invited me to share a house with them and join them in their musical enterprise as road manager.
When it was time to move on again, friends I'd made through the band, who lived near Bristol offered me a place to live, sharing their house while I worked as a van driver for a mail order catalogue company.
Six months later, when the company opened a new depot in Devon, I transferred and lived in another shared house, near Newton Abbott. When we had a party, one weekend, various far-flung friends turned up, including a girl who had been to college with one of my housemates.

And that's how I met Blight-of-my-life...

The family curse

Yes. I can reveal that our family is beset by a dreadful curse.

We seem powerless to resist the siren call of the bass guitar.

OK, it can't compete with the Hound of the Baskervilles, but there is something vaguely unsettling about the way it follows us.
It shows no respect for either age or gender and it can strike without warning at any time.

The first victim was the elder of my two brothers. He played bass in a group in Worcestershire around the end of the 1960s. As far as I can remember, they stuck together for a couple of years playing functions and some local clubs, although I never saw them play. I do remember the guitar he had though, a rather pleasing Hofner Blonde semi-acoustic.

It was several years after my brother had stopped playing that I fell under the spell. A friend of mine decided that a smart way to supplement our meagre wages would be to form a dance band. As we were living near Torquay at the time, he reckoned it would be a doddle to get some gigs during the tourist season. I had played acoustic guitar in folk clubs for several years, but I'd never considered playing in a band before, so I was quite surprised when he suggested that I join him. I probably could have resisted if he hadn't said the one thing guaranteed to sucker me in.
"You'd look great playing bass", he said, and I fell for it.

At the end of that summer, the band broke up and we went our separate ways. I moved to Cheshire and although I kept the Fender Jazz copy that had served me so well, it was exiled to the loft.
It seemed that I had shaken off the curse.

Then another member of the family was ensnared. This time it was the daughter of my other brother. The curse had somehow skipped a generation, missing him but catching my niece instead.
To make matters worse, at around this time I was lured out of retirement by a work-mate who was learning to play the guitar and needed someone to play with. I retrieved my bass from the loft and discovered how much I'd missed playing it. I began practicing again. I bought a Rickenbacker 4003. I was invited to join a band. We played a few gigs. We split up. I joined another band...

...and we're still gigging.

A few of days ago, it was my eldest brother's birthday, so I 'phoned him for a bit of a chat.
It turns out that he's just got hold of another bass guitar and has started playing again.
After all these years of lying dormant, the curse has re-awakened and caught up with him.
He's just turned sixty-nine.

Happy Birthday mate!

What lies beneath

I reckon that there's always something intriguing about the stuff that lurks behind the scenes at any workplace. I suppose that this may be one of the reasons why fly-on-the-wall documentaries are so popular.
What self-respecting nosey so-and-so wouldn't want to get a sneaky peek at the inner workings of an aircraft carrier or the back-stage business at a major theatre.

When I was a very small boy I was fascinated by those small doors that could be seen in wooden hoardings that surrounded building sites. Trailing along behind my Mum on a trip to the shops, I always wanted to linger in the hope of catching a glimpse of the exciting things that were going on behind those blank plywood facades. Occasionally these doors would be tantalisingly open and the wonderland could be seen. Cement mixers, piles of bricks, pneumatic drills and all the other paraphernalia of construction were briefly fully revealed.

I hadn't realized just how much I had been captivated by the mystery of what lay behind the door to the World of The Building Site until one day, nearly twenty years later, I actually stepped through one such door.
I was working on the redevelopment of the shopping centre in the middle of Stratford on Avon and my mates and I had just been for breakfast at "The Hatch" Cafe. As we clumped along Wood Street in our cement-crusted boots, up to the blank blue door, I noticed that we were being watched by a small boy, as his mother hurried him along the pavement. It was like travelling back in time and seeing myself. I could imagine him thinking, "I wish I could go through that door..."
I've never really had any grand scheme or a life plan, but at that moment I knew that I'd fulfilled some kind of ambition.

It's probably just as well that I've never had a Life Plan, because there is no way that I would have ended up doing my present job if I'd tried to follow any sensible career strategy. I think I just got very lucky
So here's a special behind the scenes picture of a part of Jodrell Bank that not too many people get to see.

This is the tunnel that runs from the Basement of the Main Building to the Annular Lab, under the Lovell Telescope. It lies beneath the concrete path you can see leading away from the foreground of the picture at the top of this post.

This tunnel is the main service duct for cables that supply electrical power for the telescope motors and the many control and data feeds that run from the receivers to the instrument racks in the Observing Room. It also provides a convenient subterranean route for our staff to get to the telescope structure.

One of the best things about this tunnel is that it wouldn't look out of place in many computer games.
Anybody who has played "Half Life 2" or "Deus Ex" will know what I'm on about.
It's also the kind of location that you find in the sort of film where someone always says, "I'll just go down and check the tunnel...", shortly before dying horribly.

If zombies ever invade Jodrell Bank, I know where they'll be coming in...

That Jack Kerouac has a lot to answer for

The demise of Blight-of-my-life's Vauxhall Corsa has thrust us into looking for a replacement car.

For many people, the prospect of going shopping for a car will be a source of joy and excitement. We are less enthusiastic. It's just like most other shopping; time consuming and irritating, but with the added bitterness of being expensive.
Furthermore, it all seems to be a much more long-winded exercise nowadays too. All the trawling through magazines, brochures and websites, then traipsing round various dealerships asking the same set of questions and getting the same sorts of answers from the weary looking sales people.
Perhaps things used to be simpler back in the 1970s.  I can remember when...

...my first car had finally gone for scrap.
I was working as a self employed steel-fixer and living back with my parents. Money was pretty tight. I was earning a reasonable wage, but I had no savings whatsoever, so my search for a replacement car was severely constrained by my budget. In those days, the concept of readily available credit was unheard of. Unless you were prepared to tie yourself down to a 3 year "Hire Purchase" agreement, you didn't buy something unless you could pay for it there and then.

I went through the local newspaper and optimistically circled a few adverts, then walked to the nearest 'phone box to see if any of them sounded like they'd be worth seeing. The short list got a bit shorter and I arranged to see the likeliest candidates.
After a couple of false starts, including a decrepit Volkswagen covered in chicken droppings in a farmer's barn, I ended up, on a sunny Saturday morning, at a small garage where there were two cars that I could afford. I dismissed one as too shabby even for my limited resources and had a test drive in the other. It was OK. I paid the man £125, he gave me a receipt, the log book and the keys and I drove it away. I was the proud owner of a 1964 Austin A40.

On the way home, I called in at a local broker and a got an insurance cover-note. Then I went around to see my friend Ian and show off the new wheels.

Ian had been one of my best mates since we'd been at school. We had both underachieved companionably for several years. He had been one of the first of my friends to pass his driving test and thanks to his Dad, who somewhat rashly allowed Ian to borrow his Riley Elf, our horizons had expanded. Visits to friends or concerts in Birmingham had become that bit easier.

Ian was suitably impressed.

"Let's go and see Julie", he suggested.
"Yeah. Great idea...", I had a sudden thought, "Hang on, she's not at her folks anymore. Where's she living now?"
"Liverpool."
"Blimey, that's more than a hundred miles away."
"You could treat it as a proving run... You can see if everything works properly."
I was still a bit dubious.
Then he said, "She's having a party tonight..."
That did it.
We bundled Ian's travelling bag into the back, nipped back to my house for my stuff and we were off.
It was the first of many trips up the M6 in that car and it set the standard. We were barely at Birmingham before a hole opened up in the exhaust system that threatened to gas us, as the fumes found their way through the not entirely complete floor. We bought an exhaust bandage, mended the leak and continued. Another thirty miles and the exhaust was beginning to sound a bit throaty again. We bought some Gun-Gum and plugged up a fresh hole that had appeared in the silencer. We carried on until the first repair gave up the ghost somewhere near Manchester. More exhaust bandage was wound around the exhaust pipe, but this time we reinforced the repair by wrapping a butchered Coca-Cola tin around it too.

That got us to Liverpool.

The return trip on the following day was mostly uneventful until, thirty miles from home, with a tortured graunching sound, the horribly abused exhaust pipe broke in half and sagged feebly onto the tarmac. It was probably the extra weight of all that exhaust bandage, repair putty and soft drink cans that did it.
As I surveyed the damage from my, by now increasingly familiar position under the car, it was clear that the exhaust was wrecked, but if we removed the broken section completely, the noise would attract the interest of every police officer in the West Midlands. A final heroic repair was accomplished by removing the metal rod that normally supports the bonnet when you need to check the engine, and using it as a splint for the fractured pipe.

When I got home, my Dad came outside to cast a parental eye over the Austin.
"How was the trip?", he asked.
"Not too bad. Why?"
"I just thought the exhaust sounds a bit rough..."

Rising to the challenge

Guess what...

We've just got our first Christmas card.

Greeting Reads: Merry Christmas for 2010 from Ray & Angie (Beat this Cousin Maureen)

OK, a bit of explanation is required.

At the tail end of the 1970s (Yes, it's that decade again) I was driving a van for a living, delivering industrial fastenings across Devon. From a small warehouse on the edge of Dartmoor, I distributed nuts, bolts, washers and screws to factories, shops, building sites and boat yards across much of the South-West tip of the country.
I even had to make deliveries inside Dartmoor Prison. You can probably imagine how amused the prison warders were when I arrived and they asked me what I was delivering and I replied, "Screws..."

It was a really enjoyable job. As is so often the case, it was the people that made all the difference. Even if it had been a difficult day out on the road, simply getting back to the depot and getting the van loaded for the following day was almost always good fun thanks to the warehouse guys in general and Ray, the warehouse manager, in particular.
Even after all the years since I left Devon, we're still in touch. Each Christmas, the first card to arrive generally has a Devon postmark and our address written in Ray's distinctive, looping handwriting. 2009 was one of the rare years when somebody elses card put Ray and Angie into second place. When I sent our card, I mentioned that my cousin Maureen had pipped them at the post and it seems to have touched a competitive nerve. Clearly, second place is not an option.

Hopefully things will calm down now.

...as long as Maureen doesn't decide to put in a pre-emptive strike for Christmas 2011.

The ghost of Christmas Past

 We've had a pretty quiet Christmas. Apart from the festive cards and the occasional box of Thornton's chocolate coated ginger, there's not much evidence at Cyber Mansions to indicate the season of feasting and family feuds.
It suits us just fine.

Of course, there was a time when the idea of such a seemingly dull and boring apology for a Christmas, without turkey and all the trimmings would have been unthinkable.

Probably the most extraordinary Christmas meal I've ever had was when I was sharing a house with some friends, back in the 1970s.
A couple of my friends had formed the nucleus of a band and over a number of months, they'd gradually accumulated the remaining musicians and sundry road-crew that were going to propel us all to the rock and roll lifestyle we so obviously deserved. We had rented a farm-workers cottage in the middle of an orchard in Worcestershire and when the number of people had become too big for the house, had put a couple of caravans in the back garden for extra living space.
The band rehearsed in a barn at the nearby farm.
We didn't have a lot of money, and until the band were gig-fit there was no real prospect of income from that quarter. For a lot of the time we lived there, most of us didn't have proper jobs. There was usually at least one person earning, but a lot of the work was casual stuff on the farm so we were always running on a ridiculously tight budget.

During that December, most of us had decided that although we could have scuttled back to our respective families for Christmas dinner, if not the whole festive season, it would be much better to have Christmas 'at home' together.

I can't remember if it had snowed that Christmas Day, but I have a vague memory of there being snow on the ground on the night we "acquired" our Christmas tree from a nearby wood.
The tree had been decorated by our bass player and it had pride of place in the living room; decked out in red and gold cardboard astrological symbols, it was bit unorthodox to those of us that were brought up with tinsel and fairylights, but it was the closest thing to normal festive decoration that we had.
There was an open fire, with an enormous log sullenly smouldering away, with just the occasional burst of more enthusiastic flame. Above the fireplace, the chimney breast was covered by a large temporary mural that I had drawn, with merry, seasonal caricatures of each of the housemates.
The crowning glory of the decorations, however, was created by the drummer.
He had connected up various coloured lights and electrical appliances to an industrial cam-operated, multiple switch. These were strategically placed around the room and activated by a concealed pressure pad under one of the sofa cushions. When somebody sat on the sofa, a sequence of bulbs lit up across the room as a concealed vacuum cleaner whirred into life, an electric fan set all the tree ornaments dancing and a pair of disco turntables burst into life both playing The Move's "Blackberry Way" slightly out of step with each other.
I'm not sure if it was awfully Christmassy, but it did have a sort of weird, magical quality.

As lunch-time came closer, and the smell of roasting turkey wafted through the house, we hauled a pair of trestle tables into the living room, and set out the cutlery, glasses and crackers.
And then the food was served. It was a magnificent feast.

OK, there was a small problem with the wine.
We'd bought a couple of bottles of wine, but we hadn't got a corkscrew. We couldn't normally afford to buy beer, let alone bottles of wine, so it's hardly surprising that nobody had even thought about how to open it. We rummaged through the kitchen drawers to no avail. It was hopeless, we hadn't even got a Swiss Army Knife.
We sat, scowling at the bottles...
Then someone had a brainwave

A quick visit to the tool shed produced a suitable bottle opener.
There can't be many Christmas meals where the sound of festive cheer is interrupted by the gutteral whine of a Black and Decker electric drill.

Incidentally, this was also the only time I'd seen somebody ensure that the Christmas pudding caught fire when the brandy was poured onto it, by giving it encouragement with a gas blowlamp.

Happy New Year Everyone!

Send for The Nostalgia Police, now!!

Last Sunday's "Top Gear" included a challenge featuring the delights of buying and owning your first car.

Mssrs. Clarkson, Hammond & May were each given a budget of £2500 to buy and insure a car, as if they were seventeen year-olds.

I'd have thought that they needed no additional encouragement to behave like teenagers...

It did set me thinking though. It took me back to the first car that I owned...

I think it must have been 1973.

I had been working on a building site in Stratford upon Avon and living in nearby Alcester. A crisis had loomed, when the landlord of the place I was sharing discovered how many of us were living in his "single person's flat"; three of us were asked to move out.

Luckily, my parents were happy, or at least prepared, to let me move back to their place, but this meant that I would be living much further from work. At that time I hadn't learned to drive, so as there were no suitable trains or buses, my only practical option was cycling the thirty mile round trip each day.

A better solution had to be found.

Keef, one of the guys that I worked with, came up with the answer. He'd also been evicted from the flat in Alcester, and was now living at his Gran's house, three miles away from my parents.

"Look," he said, "I can drive, but I can't afford a car. You can't drive, but you can afford a car. You buy a car, learn to drive and while you're learning you get loads of practice driving us to and from work."

So I got a provisional driving license and bought a car.

It was a black, 1959 Austin A35 and I bought it from a little old lady in Stratford upon Avon for forty pounds. I have no photographs of the actual vehicle, but the wonderfully preserved example of the marque in the picture will give you the general idea.

"The Black Pig", as it became known was somewhat less well preserved.

Keef must have had nerves of steel, because he sat stoicly in the passenger seat every day that we trundled to work and back, with only an occasional sharp intake of breath or an understated, "You might want to give the next cyclist a bit more space...".

I'd like to take the opportunity to thank him here, for his encouragement and self-control.
He also managed not to look shocked or surprised when I subsequently passed my driving test.

Stuff I Learned With My First Car.
How to:-

• clean a carburetter
• cope with Birmingham rush-hour traffic on the M5.
• decoke a cylinder head and grind valve seats.
• replace a clutch.
• smoke cigarettes.
• use a starting handle without breaking my thumb.
• work out which cylinder is misfiring by short-circuiting each spark-plug with a screwdriver.
• install a set of windscreen washers. (They weren't fitted as standard in 1959)
• replace a flat tyre in pitch darkness.
• replace rusted bodywork with aluminium sheet and timber. (Don't try this at home kids)
• negotiate with traffic police.

There was one more thing that I learned from my first car.

I never actually had any accidents in "The Black Pig", but during the time that I owned it, the bodywork became more and more decrepit. With one door-sill made of wood, the front wings held together by pop-rivetted plates of aluminium and the headlight mountings so rusted that if I stopped suddenly they were in danger of falling out like joke-shop eye-balls, it was never going to get through an MOT test.
At that time, no breakers yard would pay to take a vehicle that was in such poor shape, so I would have ended up paying them to take it. This seemed even more ridiculous, when my mate Brian told me that, if I were to take the equivalent weight of scrap metal to a breakers yard, they'd happily pay cash for it.

"Right-ho" I said, "Let's do that then."

I bought a 6lb felling-axe from an agricultural supplies store, and we set off to some nearby waste ground to dismantle the car. We simply hacked it apart with the axe. You'd be amazed at how easy it is to sever something as sturdy as a door pillar with a well placed axe blow. Door hinges, engine mountings, engine bulkhead, prop-shaft; you can cut all of them apart with very little difficulty.

In the course of an afternoon we chopped the car into bite-sized pieces, loaded them into Brian's van and then drove them to the scrap yard where they were weighed in as "light ferrous metal".

We didn't get a lot of cash for it, but we did make a (tiny) profit.

It was also good, brutal fun.

So what did it teach me?

Cars are very easy to break. A useful warning to any twenty year-old, I think you'll agree.

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.

Told you so...

I was driving to work tonight when I heard on the radio that over a hundred motorists are stuck in their vehicles, on snow-bound roads near Exeter in Devon. I'm ashamed to report that I smiled a smug little smile.

We've had a bit of snow here over the last few days, but either we have got off much more lightly than other parts of the country, or they've just over-reacted about how bad it is. In spite of this, I've taken the usual precautions of putting extra, cold-weather clothing, a sleeping bag, bottled water, food and my faithful Trangia camping stove in the back of 'The Tractor'.

When I was on the 'phone, chatting to one of my brothers a couple of days ago, I'd asked him if he'd put any emergency gear in his car. He admitted that he hadn't, but doubted whether it would be necessary, as he couldn't remember any serious snow falls in his neck of the woods since he moved to Devon. Yes, that's right, Devon. He lives within 30 miles of Exeter.
"What d'you mean? 'it doesn't really snow around here'. ", I said, " I spent three days stuck in the snow down there in 1980. It's not something I'd care to repeat."
"Oh yes,", he replied "so you did. That was on Dartmoor though.",
"Well, the edge of Dartmoor. But it's not so far away, and you never know when you're going to get caught out."

We had been royally caught out as it happens.
I was living in Devon at the end of 1978, and although Blight-of-my-life was living and working near Manchester at the time, she had driven down to stay for the New Year festivities. We'd been to a wedding reception with a couple of her old college friends during the afternoon of 30th December.
Quite why we decided to go to the pub, instead of heading straight home, I can't remember, but I do remember that it was already snowing a bit as we drove there.
When we all came out of the pub, it was obvious that we'd miscalculated. Several inches had fallen, and settled very convincingly. Snow was still falling, the temperature was way down and there was a biting wind too.
We piled into Blight's Datsun, and she set off. We probably got about halfway back to our friend's cottage before the conditions finally beat us. We were balked on a hill by another car, mired in more than a foot of drifting snow. We abandoned the car and finished the journey on foot. It was fearfully cold, and we had all the wrong clothes. We were all still dressed for a wedding reception, and apart from a couple of extra jackets that were in the car, we were hopelessly ill-equipped to deal with sub-zero temperatures and over a mile of knee-deep snow.
When we finally made it to the cottage, I had the full Ranulph Fiennes ice-beard and matching eye-brows. Just how close to hypothermia we were, I don't know, but it was certainly much too close for comfort.
We were stuck at the cottage for several days. The temperature dropped to minus 17 degrees; so cold that the central heating oil froze. We had to go out foraging for firewood, and the metal handle of the bow-saw froze to the skin of my hand.
We finally made it off the moor , and into the nearest town on about January 2nd.
I won't forget that New Year in a hurry.

So if my brother is unfortunate enough to have been one of the motorists stranded on Telegraph Hill. . .

"My names are Legion . . ."

I’ve lost count of the names that I’ve had.

Of course, there aren’t too many people who get through their lives with just one name. You get the name on your birth certificate, and almost immediately your family will start using a variation of this. When you go to school you’ll probably get stuck with a nick-name or two; you may even like some of these. As a working adult, you can pick up new, exciting names. Again, some will be bearable (Guv’nor, Chef, M’lud etc.) but others won’t (Insert unpleasant rude name of your choice here). If you get married you may take a new name, your spouse may call you something special, and your children will call you something else as well. If you become an author you may take a nom de plume, and if you become an actor, stage names are the norm rather than the exception.

These days, it’s even easier to acquire aliases, especially if you have any kind of internet presence. Every new software registration, blog or forum seems to need a login name, and if you participate in on-line gaming, you have to come up with something appropriate and unique for every new character that you create.

Having alternative names is often useful, occasionally annoying and sometimes impossible to avoid.

So why do most people know me as Kim, whilst my newsagent calls me Chris?

When I was born, there was a lot of difficulty settling on a name. I was the third of three brothers, so my parents had already used up their top choices. My mother really liked ‘Kim’. I never found out why, but like to think it was after Kipling’s hero. To my mother’s dismay, there was resistance to this name from her family, so my parents decided that even if that name didn’t go on my birth certificate, it would be my name within the family. To justify this deceit, they hit on the plan of making my initials spell it. Our family name begins with ‘M’, so that was fine and everyone liked Ian as a middle name, so the ’I’ was sorted.

Then it all went wonky.

Nobody liked any of the other names beginning with ’K’.

In the 1950’s, the sources of inspiration were limited, so I don’t think they got much past Kenneth, Kevin and Keith before they started looking at names starting with ‘C’.

So that’s how I ended up being named ‘Christopher’. I suppose it would have been more honest to have named me ‘Compromise’, now I think about it.

Twenty odd years a go, I worked at a shop up the road from the newsagents. When I started work there, I failed to explain that I never normally answered to my official name, and so for the entire seven years that I worked there, I was called Chris by everyone at the shop, all our customers and anyone who we knew in the neighbourhood.

That’s why the newsagent calls me Chris.

A similar thing happened when I spent nine months on industrial placement at ICL, so when I started work at Jodrell Bank, I ensured that I was called Kim from my first day there and I’m very glad that I did.

There’s absolutely nothing wrong with the name ‘Chris’, it’s just that I never feel like it’s actually a part of me; it’s as if I’m wearing it, but it just doesn’t quite fit properly.

And if you want to know what I was known as at GKN, when I was driving a Transit van and delivering industrial fastenings for a living, please feel free to try and guess. You’ll have to ply me with copious amounts of strong drink before I’ll willingly reveal that one.