Back to Normal?

This week the Governor of the Bank of England, Mark Carney, said, "The recovery has finally taken hold." From my lowly standpoint, I'm inclined to agree with him.  This week, for the first time for quite some while, I felt deprived of the benefits of working from home.  Although they did still exist, the minutes between 8.0 am and 6.0 pm when I actually did something productive on the home front were very few.  There's not room here for a whole diary, but let me pick out some of the highlights.

Monday found me in the centre of Norwich, wallowing in a whole festival of memories from (ahem!) well over 40 years ago.  My delivery was to the long-established family firm of Jarrold & Son.  Early in my working life I had a job at a shop just around the corner from them in Exchange Street.  Having just passed my driving test, I took great delight in driving the firm's van, but when it came to parking it in their garage, it was a different story.  The garage was down a narrow passage, and this was decades before I had learned the wisdom and technique of reverse entry!  The poor van suffered many a blemish, each one lowering my reputation by another notch!

As I left the 'fine city' by way of the Newmarket Road, I passed the Eagle Tavern, and the nearby Eagle Walk, at the end of which in the 1960s was a motor-cycle dealer.  Here I paid a visit one day, accompanied by a more knowledgeable friend, to equip myself with independent transport.  I discovered that, even then, the price for something really worthwhile was just beyond the limit of my resources.  What I liked was a 200cc. Francis-Barnett; what I came away with was a 175cc BSA Bantam, which had started life fired by a magneto, in other words it made its own electricity as the engine rotated.  A previous 'clever' owner had modified it to work with a battery, more like a car engine, and this modification gave me many a scary moment as it refused to work, letting me down sometimes at home, but equally at my destination, with no ready means of getting home again.  After I'd acquired a car, I sold the Bantam to a local dealer, who later told me that he'd never been able to get it working again, and had to re-build it in the original mode so that he could sell it!

Monday finished like the last two Mondays, with my 'invoice and paperwork' visit to the office being greeted with 'something else for the evening'.  Unlike the last two, however, this one was quite a bit longer.  It took me to a new destination, the Golden Jubilee National Hospital at Clydebank.  This seemed very well appointed inside, and as I left (about 2.30 am) and looked back at the floodlit elevation down the avenue through the car park, I said to myself, 'My word, - it looks like a palace!'  Research after my return reveals that it was built on the site of a former shipyard as a private hospital with adjoining hotel, and was acquired by the NHS as a completed unit in 2002 (thanks, Wikipedia!)

Wednesday (after a good night's sleep!) offered two pairs of jobs, one nearby, the other at a comfortable distance.  One of each pair was a return to somewhere that had proved difficult to find on the first visit - it's one of the advantages of doing the job for eleven and a half years that I now know where to go on these occasions.  In the morning I made a delivery to an 'office in a garden' which is situated at the end of a row of cottages in a south Cambridgeshire village.  Many Cambridge post codes were changed a few years ago, and we have a shrewd idea how to amend any that SatNav doesn't like, but it doesn't work when the original one had an error in it as well!  In the afternoon I went to Leicester, taking some veneer to a construction firm whose premises are at the far end of an industrial cul-de-sac at the end of a Victorian housing estate.  Fortunately, the road name struck a chord as I wrote it down, and once I was in the area, I knew what to look for.

I never cease to be amazed at the way my mind can switch from something I'm listening to, onto a completely different track.  As I listened to 'In Our Time' on BBC Radio 4 on Thursday morning, which this week featured Shakespeare's The Tempest, one of Melvin Bragg's guests observed that Prospero had been born on the island, and saw it as his own.  At this point my 'switch' clicked, and I remembered something I'd heard in a programme a couple of years ago.  Someone was interviewing a middle-aged southern European gentleman, who said with amusement, "My son's wife is expecting a baby; now that Croatia has joined the EU, it will be born in Europe.  My son was born in Croatia; I was born in Yugoslavia; My father was born in Italy, and his father in Austria.  We have lived in the same village for over a century."  How the shape of the continent has changed down the years.

And so to yesterday, another very full day.  I began with a delivery to Coventry, ironically to yet another destination which I had difficulty locating when I first went there.  While still on my way, I was asked to make a collection in Milton Keynes on my way back, from Bletchley Park, "The home of the code-breakers" (as the sign on the road outside says).  I took this to the office, for someone else to deliver into south London, and after a few minutes' rest, I was sent to collect something in Letchworth for a firm in Shirebrook, Notts.  No sooner had I got this than the phone rang, sending me just around the corner to another customer who had something for Congleton - "and while you're in the area [so-and-so] will give you a job for Monday morning to Northampton".  As I made my way up the A1, the controller called again.  "When you've dropped the first one of those," he began, "call me, because I've got a collection in Oswestry - which isn't a million miles away!  That can be delivered tomorrow morning, if that's OK with you."  Such courteous phrases only come when he realises that he's asking something 'above and beyond the call of duty' ... and I'm pleased that they do come - I could imagine some people who would take such co-operation for granted, and look on it as a right to ask for it.

As I wrote here last weekend, I was planning today to go to the record office for some research before watching a football match further into Suffolk.  I think it was when I was asked to collect the second afternoon job, the one to Congleton, that I decided that, with no evening in which to prepare, and not too much sleep anyway, this plan wasn't going to happen.  In the event, having collected the goods from Oswestry about 9.30, I wasn't home until around 2.0 am, so this morning was taken up by a comfortable shopping trip, and the admin of the day before.  The journey to mid-Suffolk solely for a football match had been ruled out long ago, which was why I had intended combining it with a morning in the record office; instead I went to my local club, Arlesey Town, who had an FA Trophy tie against Marlow, which they won 2-0.

Normal again?  Watch this space!