It's been a good week for many reasons, not least that summer has got its act together at last. And despite my usual craving for 'jobs up north' because they're the ones with greater distances, with more likelihood of being able to combine jobs, and hence with greater profits ... only once did I get beyond Watford Gap.
Monday started the week in good style, with two interesting jobs into East Anglia that I would have absolutely hated in bad weather. The first was to a site just by the roadside near Thetford, where some electrical engineers were in need of an earth spike. I had been told 'three miles out'; consequently I'd been expecting to find them three miles away from the by-pass. Instead, what was meant was clearly three miles out of the town, and I was lucky to notice their characteristic orange generator as I sped past. Fortunately there was a convenient gateway in which to turn round, and the delivery was made without further ado.
On then to Wisbech, with a wide variety of consumables for a Shell filling station. It was one of those balmy afternoons when you can drive along the country roads paying little attention to where you're going until you get there. With half my mind on SatNav and half on the mp3-player, I was only mildly curious why I was being led through all kinds of pretty fenland villages instead of straight up the A10 to the big roundabout on the edge of King's Lynn. My reverie came to an abrupt halt when I stopped at a dead end, with the traffic of the A47 clearly visible on the other side of the field in front of me.
After finding my way 'round the block', I located my target, and drove around to the rear entrance. Here the girls on duty had no knowledge of the consignment being on the way, but suggested that I start unloading the goods onto the concrete footway outside the back door. Soon the manager appeared, and insisted on checking every item of about five pages of detail ... and, of course, there was one thing missing! We happily agreed that it must have been omitted from a sealed box from the outset, exchanged signatures to this effect, and I was on my way.
Tuesday's excitement came after three other jobs that were 'local', but only relatively so, and had taken me until early afternoon. The pick-up was at a grand estate near Marlow, Bucks., but instead of delivery near home, it was for a residential address in Faversham, Kent. Here the roads were named after English kings of the ninth to eleventh centuries although, judging from the age of the properties, this clearly wasn't a 21st-century quirk of someone in the planning department. I supressed an urge to smile when the householder, amidst his expressions of gratitude, hoped that on this hot afternoon "the journey hasn't been too arduous for you!"
The weather has really been a delight, and with a decent fan in this new van, I've not been too unbearably hot. That's not to say that the breeze outside hasn't provided welcome relief on occasions. On Thursday, I enjoyed a fairly frequent job to West Bromwich, where we have to wait for our customer's goods to be processed and then bring them back. There is a nearby Asda where it's pleasant to spend a couple of hours behind a mug of coffee or, if the time is right, enjoy a cooked midday meal instead of sandwiches. When I emerged this week, a whiff of barbecue caught my nose as I strolled across the car park and, with the breeze gently diluting the sunshine on my bare arms and legs, I could almost imagine myself on holiday in France again.
For the most part, the rest of the week's toings and froings have been to places I've visited before, although in some cases I've not realised this until turning the final corner. This afternoon I joined seven friends to ring the bells for a wedding - something I don't often do these days because of the vagaries of work demands. For a while yesterday morning I was wondering how I could best tender my apologies for this one, after a gentle enquiry from the office whether or not I would be prepared to make a delivery last night in Aberdeen. A second call about an hour later restored my equilibrium, as it was revealed that the job, delivery of a passport from an office in central London, wouldn't be happening. It seemed that the passenger was flying at 6.0 last evening - well before anyone could drive there from London! We presumed that arrangements were made for the passport to be flown there for collection on his departure.
Now, with a freshly-cleaned van at the ready, I'm wondering what next week will offer.
Saturday 26 May 2012
Saturday 19 May 2012
A Follow-up Week
In many ways this week has been a follow-up to last. I have often spoken about the 'Repeating Genie' that seems to be a characteristic of the courier life. It seems that ours isn't the only profession where this occurs, and in a newsletter I received this week there was a request for contributions to a survey into coincidence, of which this type of experience is one example. By Wednesday morning, I was beginning to realise a new manifestation of this phenomenon - teenage recollections.
You may recall that last Friday I visited Great Yarmouth with a consignment of wine. This was for a holiday camp on the North Denes; if you have any knowledge of the resort, you'll know that this is - predictably - at the north end of the town, beyond the extent of conventional residential development. It's also beyond, i.e. to the seaward side of, the site of the old M&GN railway line that used to go from the former Yarmouth Beach station out through broadland and ultimately to Cromer. Access to this part of the town is past the racecourse and over a railway bridge that nowadays appears to cross nothing but a car park. If my memory serves, it was on that car park, or one nearby, that I spent a number of evenings with my first girlfriend, who lived in nearby Gorleston-on-Sea.
Wednesday morning's job took me to the centre of Norwich, and SatNav - newly refurbished but mischievous as ever - turned me off the main road one junction too soon, and through a sequence of back streets that I'd not frequented for the last forty-odd years. Apart from being close to the office where I worked for almost a year in the late 1960's, it's also where that same girlfriend and I parked one Saturday afternoon on a visit to the city.
Another hazard for the unsuspecting courier - one I don't think I've mentioned before in these narratives - raised its head twice this week. I call it the "cost of postcode generalisation." I don't think customers do it on purpose, but one could be forgiven for being suspicious. The way it works is this. You have a consignment for a small place that is some miles beyond its post-town, or that city which gives its name to the postcode district; you summon a courier to go to the post-town, and unless the driver complains, that's where your job is charged. The poor driver bears the cost of the extra distance, which could amount to quite a discount in some cases. One example is the regular drugs delivery that I did twice last week, which is priced to Bury St Edmunds, although it's actually to a village about 9 miles further. Once the precedent has been established, it seems to be cast in stone, and everyone loses out.
This week's two incidences were on Tuesday morning, when I took some electronic equipment to Hedge End, which was described as 'Southampton', and on Wednesday afternoon, when I suffered Groby being narrated as 'Leicester'. Sometimes this does work in our favour, which is one reason I don't believe it to be a deliberate trick on the part of the customer; unless it promises to be a regular job, or is a great injustice one way or the other, I tend to ignore it and hope that 'swings will equate to roundabouts.'
It's been quite refreshing to see fuel costs tumbling in the last couple of weeks. Strangely, the same thing happened about a year ago, and after adjusting my budget for a higher fuel price at the start of the financial year, I spent the whole year with an apparent saving. Whether connected to this or not, I had a call this week offering me another fuel card. The caller had previously been with the company that provides one of the two cards I use at present, and I decided to reject his kind offer. There's a limit to the amount of plastic with which one can juggle, after all!
The end of the week got to be somewhat nose-to-tail although, with one job at a time, still not as profitable as the busy-ness would indicate. No sooner was I home from Groby (or Leicester!) than I was in bed, ready for an early morning collection to go back up the M1 for Rugby. And just as I thought Thursday had come to a natural conclusion, I was invited to take a laptop from Hertford to Hereford, which meant that I was out until 1.0 am. I was quite content to be given just two jobs yesterday that went together with a nice lot of undemanding rural driving, to Bedford and Oxford.
An unexpected casualty of the new pattern of working from a home base has been the time spent reading magazines. Whilst waiting between jobs on Wednesday, I picked up one that had been sitting unopened for a week or so, and yesterday's post brought another monthly publication before I'd finished the last edition!
And finally in the follow-up stakes, came the delivery on Wednesday morning of that birth certificate that I'd ordered for one of my uncle's nephews. I'm always amazed at the distortion created by large families. This man, who would have been my first cousin, was born little more than five months after my father! Now I have the information from his birth certificate, I've found his parents' marriage, his father's appearance on two earlier censuses, and have the wherewithal to track his mother down as well ... when time permits.
Now, where did I put my reading glasses?
You may recall that last Friday I visited Great Yarmouth with a consignment of wine. This was for a holiday camp on the North Denes; if you have any knowledge of the resort, you'll know that this is - predictably - at the north end of the town, beyond the extent of conventional residential development. It's also beyond, i.e. to the seaward side of, the site of the old M&GN railway line that used to go from the former Yarmouth Beach station out through broadland and ultimately to Cromer. Access to this part of the town is past the racecourse and over a railway bridge that nowadays appears to cross nothing but a car park. If my memory serves, it was on that car park, or one nearby, that I spent a number of evenings with my first girlfriend, who lived in nearby Gorleston-on-Sea.
Wednesday morning's job took me to the centre of Norwich, and SatNav - newly refurbished but mischievous as ever - turned me off the main road one junction too soon, and through a sequence of back streets that I'd not frequented for the last forty-odd years. Apart from being close to the office where I worked for almost a year in the late 1960's, it's also where that same girlfriend and I parked one Saturday afternoon on a visit to the city.
Another hazard for the unsuspecting courier - one I don't think I've mentioned before in these narratives - raised its head twice this week. I call it the "cost of postcode generalisation." I don't think customers do it on purpose, but one could be forgiven for being suspicious. The way it works is this. You have a consignment for a small place that is some miles beyond its post-town, or that city which gives its name to the postcode district; you summon a courier to go to the post-town, and unless the driver complains, that's where your job is charged. The poor driver bears the cost of the extra distance, which could amount to quite a discount in some cases. One example is the regular drugs delivery that I did twice last week, which is priced to Bury St Edmunds, although it's actually to a village about 9 miles further. Once the precedent has been established, it seems to be cast in stone, and everyone loses out.
This week's two incidences were on Tuesday morning, when I took some electronic equipment to Hedge End, which was described as 'Southampton', and on Wednesday afternoon, when I suffered Groby being narrated as 'Leicester'. Sometimes this does work in our favour, which is one reason I don't believe it to be a deliberate trick on the part of the customer; unless it promises to be a regular job, or is a great injustice one way or the other, I tend to ignore it and hope that 'swings will equate to roundabouts.'
It's been quite refreshing to see fuel costs tumbling in the last couple of weeks. Strangely, the same thing happened about a year ago, and after adjusting my budget for a higher fuel price at the start of the financial year, I spent the whole year with an apparent saving. Whether connected to this or not, I had a call this week offering me another fuel card. The caller had previously been with the company that provides one of the two cards I use at present, and I decided to reject his kind offer. There's a limit to the amount of plastic with which one can juggle, after all!
The end of the week got to be somewhat nose-to-tail although, with one job at a time, still not as profitable as the busy-ness would indicate. No sooner was I home from Groby (or Leicester!) than I was in bed, ready for an early morning collection to go back up the M1 for Rugby. And just as I thought Thursday had come to a natural conclusion, I was invited to take a laptop from Hertford to Hereford, which meant that I was out until 1.0 am. I was quite content to be given just two jobs yesterday that went together with a nice lot of undemanding rural driving, to Bedford and Oxford.
An unexpected casualty of the new pattern of working from a home base has been the time spent reading magazines. Whilst waiting between jobs on Wednesday, I picked up one that had been sitting unopened for a week or so, and yesterday's post brought another monthly publication before I'd finished the last edition!
And finally in the follow-up stakes, came the delivery on Wednesday morning of that birth certificate that I'd ordered for one of my uncle's nephews. I'm always amazed at the distortion created by large families. This man, who would have been my first cousin, was born little more than five months after my father! Now I have the information from his birth certificate, I've found his parents' marriage, his father's appearance on two earlier censuses, and have the wherewithal to track his mother down as well ... when time permits.
Now, where did I put my reading glasses?
Sunday 13 May 2012
New Light on Old Ways
It's been a strange sort of week, but at last a new pattern of life seems to be emerging after the relocation of the office. Some of us had rather taken matters into our own hands, but now it's official. A notice appeared in the crew-room this week asking that, if we live in Letchworth, Hitchin or Stevenage (the areas where about three-quarters of our customers operate), we stay at home, ring in to be added to the list, and have confidence that, when our turn comes, we will be contacted with details of a job. This means that, apart from saving us unneccesary journeys to and from the office, we will still be able to offer a prompt corporate response to urgent calls. But that's not the only reason.
You'll have noticed, I'm sure, how politicians campaigning for election make certain promises that, once the candidate is elected, seem to fall off the agenda. That is, in one aspect, how the new office has turned out. One of the alleged advantages of moving was that the new office had lots of space, and far more room to park vehicles without inconveniencing other users of the estate. We now find that there is room for at most about a dozen vans of various sizes in the compound around the building, with perhaps another half dozen in the roadway behind. While that may seem quite a lot, it's but a small proportion of the whole fleet. Until work builds up so that the majority of them are already out on jobs when the day starts, there can be many more vans around first thing than there is space for.
Anyway, it suits me well to be at home in the mornings. I can easily find stuff to do, whether catching up on admin, or furthering my family history searches, or simply watching the odd interesting TV programme on i-Player. And if the weather is fine, there are always the windows of the van to clean. Scarcely a day goes by without me grumbling about either the dust from dry roads, or the oil thrown up in the spray from wet ones.
Workwise, for a four-day week, this hasn't been too bad. I won't bore my reader with the full details, but the highlights included the regular daily delivery of medicines on two afternoons to a rural health centre in Suffolk, a replacement computer part for an office in beautiful Oxfordshire countryside, and an early evening collection of prescription drugs from the hospital for a patient in a Letchworth nursing home. The week finished with me taking 20 cases of wine to the seaside. This wasn't for a wild beach party, nor to give the bottles a treat, but to re-provision the bar at a holiday camp.
The fact that this was at Great Yarmouth was too tempting for me not to dawdle awhile rather than come home by the most direct route. Both the place itself and the surrounding area carry far too many memories for that. For all its being only 112 miles, the journey home took me about three-and-a-half hours, turning down one lane after another, soaking up the bright rays of sunset and casting my mind back to one of life's episodes after another as the scene changed around me.
It was fitting that this was the day before a meeting of the Family History Society at Hillingdon (see the picture here). I had built up a list of things to be done before leaving for West London, but thanks to the new working arrangements, I had had the opportunity to deal with at least some of them during the week, so there was only really the shopping to be attended to.
Recently, I've been looking into the family of my oldest aunt's parents-in-law. When she appeared in the 1911 census, uncle Tom's mother was said to have had nine children of whom seven were still living. Only five were listed with their parents and I've now managed to trace all the other four, two of them having died at a young age; the other two married and living nearby with their own families.
One of these families consisted of two stepsons, and it was to some amusement that I announced last weekend that I was looking for 'three weddings and a funeral.' I found the weddings of the two brothers of uncle Tom, but the identity of the late first husband of the wife of one of them eluded me. In order to learn more, I was faced with sending off for either the couple's marriage certificate or a birth certificate for one of the boys, and I questioned whether I could justify this expense for someone who wasn't actually related to me at all. At last temptation overcame me and I'm now looking forward to the delivery of the birth certificate sometime next week.
Talking of ordering things on line: before the recent increase in postal charges, when there were reports of shortages of stamps as people buying thousands of stamps at the lower prices, I followed up a tip I'd seen about buying them on line direct from Royal Mail. The chap who'd posted this tip had calculated that, even for a small quantity, the delivery charge was less than the difference between old and new prices, making it economical to place a direct order and avoid a perhaps fruitless queue at the post office. I place my order - for just two books of stamps - and on 17th April I received an e-mail acknowledgement stating that delivery would be in about five working days. By 30th April, I was beginning to think they wouldn't be coming, so sent them a complaint. I'd just about forgotten about the whole matter by Friday this week when ... they arrived, along with a delivery note dated 1st May! I now feel justified in making the complaint, as well as in my initial decision to stock up at the old prices in this way.
You'll have noticed, I'm sure, how politicians campaigning for election make certain promises that, once the candidate is elected, seem to fall off the agenda. That is, in one aspect, how the new office has turned out. One of the alleged advantages of moving was that the new office had lots of space, and far more room to park vehicles without inconveniencing other users of the estate. We now find that there is room for at most about a dozen vans of various sizes in the compound around the building, with perhaps another half dozen in the roadway behind. While that may seem quite a lot, it's but a small proportion of the whole fleet. Until work builds up so that the majority of them are already out on jobs when the day starts, there can be many more vans around first thing than there is space for.
Anyway, it suits me well to be at home in the mornings. I can easily find stuff to do, whether catching up on admin, or furthering my family history searches, or simply watching the odd interesting TV programme on i-Player. And if the weather is fine, there are always the windows of the van to clean. Scarcely a day goes by without me grumbling about either the dust from dry roads, or the oil thrown up in the spray from wet ones.
Workwise, for a four-day week, this hasn't been too bad. I won't bore my reader with the full details, but the highlights included the regular daily delivery of medicines on two afternoons to a rural health centre in Suffolk, a replacement computer part for an office in beautiful Oxfordshire countryside, and an early evening collection of prescription drugs from the hospital for a patient in a Letchworth nursing home. The week finished with me taking 20 cases of wine to the seaside. This wasn't for a wild beach party, nor to give the bottles a treat, but to re-provision the bar at a holiday camp.
The fact that this was at Great Yarmouth was too tempting for me not to dawdle awhile rather than come home by the most direct route. Both the place itself and the surrounding area carry far too many memories for that. For all its being only 112 miles, the journey home took me about three-and-a-half hours, turning down one lane after another, soaking up the bright rays of sunset and casting my mind back to one of life's episodes after another as the scene changed around me.
It was fitting that this was the day before a meeting of the Family History Society at Hillingdon (see the picture here). I had built up a list of things to be done before leaving for West London, but thanks to the new working arrangements, I had had the opportunity to deal with at least some of them during the week, so there was only really the shopping to be attended to.
Recently, I've been looking into the family of my oldest aunt's parents-in-law. When she appeared in the 1911 census, uncle Tom's mother was said to have had nine children of whom seven were still living. Only five were listed with their parents and I've now managed to trace all the other four, two of them having died at a young age; the other two married and living nearby with their own families.
One of these families consisted of two stepsons, and it was to some amusement that I announced last weekend that I was looking for 'three weddings and a funeral.' I found the weddings of the two brothers of uncle Tom, but the identity of the late first husband of the wife of one of them eluded me. In order to learn more, I was faced with sending off for either the couple's marriage certificate or a birth certificate for one of the boys, and I questioned whether I could justify this expense for someone who wasn't actually related to me at all. At last temptation overcame me and I'm now looking forward to the delivery of the birth certificate sometime next week.
Talking of ordering things on line: before the recent increase in postal charges, when there were reports of shortages of stamps as people buying thousands of stamps at the lower prices, I followed up a tip I'd seen about buying them on line direct from Royal Mail. The chap who'd posted this tip had calculated that, even for a small quantity, the delivery charge was less than the difference between old and new prices, making it economical to place a direct order and avoid a perhaps fruitless queue at the post office. I place my order - for just two books of stamps - and on 17th April I received an e-mail acknowledgement stating that delivery would be in about five working days. By 30th April, I was beginning to think they wouldn't be coming, so sent them a complaint. I'd just about forgotten about the whole matter by Friday this week when ... they arrived, along with a delivery note dated 1st May! I now feel justified in making the complaint, as well as in my initial decision to stock up at the old prices in this way.
Saturday 5 May 2012
Twists and turns
It seemed at the start of the week as if all had returned to normal. The sun was out, and warm - just as April weather should be. What a pity it took 29 days to get its act together! Workwise, too, the week has indicated some kind of return to normal. I know from experience that so much depends on the 'shape' of any individual day, and elation is seldom justified, but nevertheless I've felt encouraged.
I began with a local job I'd been given on Friday, to collect something from the far side of Northampton to go to Bedford, and it was lunchtime before a top-line main job was allocated. I collected a computer part from Biggleswade to go to Kingston-upon-Thames. This is a place I don't like: not least because, some years ago, I got a parking ticket there. I was convinced that I had parked at the right time, in the right place, but it wasn't worth contesting it, I wasn't likely to go back there to check the signs nearby. But it still rankles, as does my confusion at their one-way system. However, I didn't have long to muse over these matters, for I was quickly diverted to collect a letter from a Hitchin solicitor for an address in Aldershot, and with these missions duly completed, I was home in time for the bell-ringing practice. Here, albeit a couple of weeks 'late', we rang a new composition in honour of the Titanic centenary, Titanic Triples.
This set the pattern for the next two days. On my way back from a local job on Tuesday morning, I was called to pick up two items from the office. One was to go to a hotel in the middle of Birmingham, and the other was for the NEC. I've often delivered to an exhibition centre while the stands are being erected, actually in progress, sometimes when there's been no one there from the exhibitor to receive the goods, but never before when the exhibition is actually in progress. This situation carries its own snags and security problems, and I was very glad that the delivery in Birmingham afterwards was not urgent. On Wednesday morning, I stayed at home until I was required. This will be a feature of life now the office has moved, since most of our customers are more easily reached from here than from the office, and it keeps my own mileage down too. I didn't have long to wait before I was despatched to a packaging firm in Chatteris with some large cutting boards that are made at a factory just down the road from my flat.
I was on my way back from this when I received instructions for a collection in Biggleswade for a regular job to a racing firm in Oxfordshire. Before I got to the pick-up I'd been diverted instead to another customer just across the road who had an urgent delivery in Lincoln. With my mind quickly re-tuned, I seized the box and set off back up the A1 again. The location of this delivery was one I'd been to before, in a pedestrian (except for access) precinct beside the river's edge, and in the early afternoon sunshine it was quite beautiful. A college rowing team had just completed a photo-shoot as I arrived, and I couldn't fail to be impressed by their colourful regalia. On my way there I'd had another call for a collection in Hull. Since Humberside is one area for which I never did get a map, and with SatNav still on the sick list, I had the unusual experience of being talked in to the pick-up address. This was a consignment of - believe it or not - door handles, which I then took to a building site in north-west London. I was home not long before bedtime.
Sometime during Wednesday's excursion I'd been told of a job for the following morning, an 8.0 pick-up from a firm in Soham that used to have premises in Letchworth, and required some panels to be taken to Melbourne, Derbyshire. To my surprise, I arrived only a couple of minutes late, but then had to wait while the goods were identified and located. Fortunately, some months ago when the M1 had been closed, I'd diverted through Melbourne to get to Derby, so the road was familiar to me, and the delivery point couldn't have been more favourably located, the second premises off the approach road to the town. A collection near Milton Keynes, in fact the reverse of a job I'd done only a couple of weeks ago completed a nice wind-down day after the rigours of Wednesday.
In fact, the wind-down was more of a re-charge for, before leaving the office that evening, I'd been assigned a straight-forward, but demanding pair of jobs for yesterday, a 10.0 collection from a hospital in Manchester, followed by a delivery in central Birmingham. I reached the delivery - at a medical conference centre - just as that day's participants were gathering for lunch, and the goods were to be left in an office beside the dining room. The temptation was great to join the food queue! I resisted, however, since I knew I must call the office: another job awaited me. I was to divert to an hotel in Kidderminster, one of a national chain, where I would collect a parcel for their head office near Luton.
It's been a busy week, but there has been time for a bit of reading, and some planning for the weekend. Today holds the attraction of a half-day course at the Society of Genealogists, and then I'm off for a family weekend in the east midlands.
I began with a local job I'd been given on Friday, to collect something from the far side of Northampton to go to Bedford, and it was lunchtime before a top-line main job was allocated. I collected a computer part from Biggleswade to go to Kingston-upon-Thames. This is a place I don't like: not least because, some years ago, I got a parking ticket there. I was convinced that I had parked at the right time, in the right place, but it wasn't worth contesting it, I wasn't likely to go back there to check the signs nearby. But it still rankles, as does my confusion at their one-way system. However, I didn't have long to muse over these matters, for I was quickly diverted to collect a letter from a Hitchin solicitor for an address in Aldershot, and with these missions duly completed, I was home in time for the bell-ringing practice. Here, albeit a couple of weeks 'late', we rang a new composition in honour of the Titanic centenary, Titanic Triples.
This set the pattern for the next two days. On my way back from a local job on Tuesday morning, I was called to pick up two items from the office. One was to go to a hotel in the middle of Birmingham, and the other was for the NEC. I've often delivered to an exhibition centre while the stands are being erected, actually in progress, sometimes when there's been no one there from the exhibitor to receive the goods, but never before when the exhibition is actually in progress. This situation carries its own snags and security problems, and I was very glad that the delivery in Birmingham afterwards was not urgent. On Wednesday morning, I stayed at home until I was required. This will be a feature of life now the office has moved, since most of our customers are more easily reached from here than from the office, and it keeps my own mileage down too. I didn't have long to wait before I was despatched to a packaging firm in Chatteris with some large cutting boards that are made at a factory just down the road from my flat.
I was on my way back from this when I received instructions for a collection in Biggleswade for a regular job to a racing firm in Oxfordshire. Before I got to the pick-up I'd been diverted instead to another customer just across the road who had an urgent delivery in Lincoln. With my mind quickly re-tuned, I seized the box and set off back up the A1 again. The location of this delivery was one I'd been to before, in a pedestrian (except for access) precinct beside the river's edge, and in the early afternoon sunshine it was quite beautiful. A college rowing team had just completed a photo-shoot as I arrived, and I couldn't fail to be impressed by their colourful regalia. On my way there I'd had another call for a collection in Hull. Since Humberside is one area for which I never did get a map, and with SatNav still on the sick list, I had the unusual experience of being talked in to the pick-up address. This was a consignment of - believe it or not - door handles, which I then took to a building site in north-west London. I was home not long before bedtime.
Sometime during Wednesday's excursion I'd been told of a job for the following morning, an 8.0 pick-up from a firm in Soham that used to have premises in Letchworth, and required some panels to be taken to Melbourne, Derbyshire. To my surprise, I arrived only a couple of minutes late, but then had to wait while the goods were identified and located. Fortunately, some months ago when the M1 had been closed, I'd diverted through Melbourne to get to Derby, so the road was familiar to me, and the delivery point couldn't have been more favourably located, the second premises off the approach road to the town. A collection near Milton Keynes, in fact the reverse of a job I'd done only a couple of weeks ago completed a nice wind-down day after the rigours of Wednesday.
In fact, the wind-down was more of a re-charge for, before leaving the office that evening, I'd been assigned a straight-forward, but demanding pair of jobs for yesterday, a 10.0 collection from a hospital in Manchester, followed by a delivery in central Birmingham. I reached the delivery - at a medical conference centre - just as that day's participants were gathering for lunch, and the goods were to be left in an office beside the dining room. The temptation was great to join the food queue! I resisted, however, since I knew I must call the office: another job awaited me. I was to divert to an hotel in Kidderminster, one of a national chain, where I would collect a parcel for their head office near Luton.
It's been a busy week, but there has been time for a bit of reading, and some planning for the weekend. Today holds the attraction of a half-day course at the Society of Genealogists, and then I'm off for a family weekend in the east midlands.
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