A Time to Remember

This week started much as the last, with a Monday that appeared to come to a natural end with the weekly paperwork 'ritual', and then provided me with another job in the early evening.  Last week I arrived at bell-ringing practice to announce proudly that I'd just saved part of St Albans from the agonies of a power-cut - I'd delivered the essential fuse unit to the contractors waiting by the roadside.  This week I bore no triumphant tale, so arrived just in time again, but quietly.  The greatest excitement of this Monday evening's delivery, to a store on Watford High Street, was being moved along by a couple of traffic wardens because the place where I'd stopped outside the shop - albeit at 6.30pm - was a disabled parking bay.

Tuesday was a day of repeats.  First came the regular run to Pinewood Studios for a company based opposite my home, and then the combination of another trip to Corby, to the same firm as I've been to a number of times recently, but on this occasion for a different customer; and then on to an electronics firm on the Hardwick estate at the edge of King's Lynn.  It was when I returned from this that the week took on a transparent hue (if that's not exactly an impossible metaphor).

One of the controllers had been asked to quote for a particular enquiry, and before he did so he was anxious to make sure that there was someone (I was his choice of the most likely driver) willing to undertake the job, should the quote be accepted.  The job was to service three consecutive evening events, delivering our customer's goods to the first one in the late afternoon/early evening, collecting them after the event, and taking them to the next venue ... and so on.  The first of these was to be in Inverness tomorrow.  Needless to say, the fact that I'm writing this blog now, instead of settling in to a B&B in Carlisle means that the quote wasn't accepted. However, the pleasure of looking forward not just to a Scottish job, but this time to three venues in one (Dundee and Aberdeen in addition to Inverness), not to mention the excitement of looking out possible B&B locations in these cities, made the remainder of the working week pale into insignificance.

As I waited to hear whether my plans and the anticipated enjoyment of these next few days would happen or not, I found myself taking less delight than usual in the work in hand (or under the wheels, in my case!), even though these last three days have included a return to an events company for whom I've not done a job for four and a half years, and who nearly always come up with interesting destinations (albeit this one was only to Luton), and a trip to Cirencester.  In fact, it wasn't until 5.30 pm on Friday that the 'no' option was confirmed, although by then I would've had to have collected the goods, so it was looking fairly obvious.

And so to Remembrance weekend.  I don't usually clutter this blog with weekend happenings, but I think this one is justified.  This year, I was asked to give one of the short Bible readings in church, which was no bother, of course, but it did tend to focus my attention - if such focusing were necessary.  For the second year running, I went along equipped with a note of those people whom I've identified in my family history exercises who died during the two World Wars, and I'd like to share some statistics with you.  I wonder how typical these are.

Out of the thirteen deaths, ranging in closeness from an uncle, through great uncles and various cousins to a fifth cousin twice removed, nine related to the First World War, and four to the Second.  Ten were soldiers, one served in the RAF, one in the Royal Navy, and one was a Second Officer in the Merchant Navy.  Out of the nine soldiers who died in World War One, no less than six died on the Somme.  I hadn't noticed until today that, out of those six, it was the one who served in the Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers who died on 1st July 1916 - just one of the 19,240 who died, out of the total of 57,470 casualties, on that worst day of Britain's military history.  I had read recently that it was the Irish divisions who were put to the forefront of the lines, and the cynic in me wonders whether it might have been a way of dealing with a potential problem on the home front, following the Easter Rising only a few months earlier.

Let me end on a lighter note; simply to observe that, after watching one of my local football teams, Biggleswade Town, reach the first round proper of the FA Cup the other week for the first time in their almost 140-year history, I listened with some sadness to the radio yesterday afternoon as they suffered a 4-1 defeat at the hands of Stourbridge.  Now my attention turns to the Vase, and next weekend, when I'm planning to watch one of 'my' East Anglian clubs, Walsham-le-Willows, who entertain Haringey Borough in the second round.  If it's raining, of course, I might well find a reason to prolong my 'halfway' visit to the record office in Bury St Edmunds.  I should, perhaps, be ashamed that I am, after all, a 'fair-weather footie fan' ... but I'm not!