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?