Bread and Butter

At first glance, October hasn't been too bad for this individual courier.  Despite my misgivings about the length of jobs, the fact that there hasn't been anything spectacular or outstanding has been counter-balanced by an almost constant flow of not-quite-local work, yielding quite an acceptable result.  The downside, if there is one, is that when a late night or two do emerge from the mundane bulk, the body isn't quite ready for it.

This week began with a van service, followed by two and a half days of these 'bread-and-butter' jobs, the highlight of which was the satisfaction of going to Corby for the second time and knowing that I had to tell SatNav to find a way around the little stretch of the A43 that was closed for resurfacing.  On the first occasion I told it to 'avoid a roadblock' and quick as a flash it responded 'no route possible', so I had to resort to the pre-SatNav technique of exploration and find my own diversion.

On Thursday there was double excitement.  First, I took some fencing material to a film set on a disused airfield on the Herts/Bucks border; then came the delivery of a variety of some quite realistic mock-up body parts to the School of Medical Science at Brighton University.  Then the day really took off.  After leaving the university about 3.45 pm, it took me until gone 8.0 to get home.  Navigating the M25 was worse than stirring treacle!

I was glad on Friday, therefore, after the early delivery of a tender to the council offices in King's Lynn, to be sent north again.  Loaded with goods from Royston and Biggleswade, I set off mid-afternoon for an easy delivery in Northamptonshire, followed by a visit to Rolls Royce in Derby.  With Friday's M1 resembling the treacle of Thursday's M25, I'm pleased to report that SatNav redeemed itself by finding me a wonderfully rural route by-passing the worst of the jams.  Once I'd delivered at about 6.30, I didn't even consider the motorway, and asked for the shortest route, rather than the 'quickest' route to the truck-stop where I'd planned to have a meal.  Amazingly, it was actually quicker than the projected time for the quickest route!  When I emerged at around 8.30 I thought the motorway would have cleared.  To be fair, it had, but there was a further minor delay in actually getting onto it, because of an accident virtually at the top of the slip road.  However, the ambulance was on its way, and this acted as an ice-breaker, relieving the jam on the main carriageway, and releasing those of us trapped on the slip road.

I've been thinking this week about houses.  One of my deliveries on Tuesday was to a business centre near Cambridge.  Built on the grounds of a former manor house, it has retained some of the pre-existing cottages, and the contrast between these - which are used as offices - and the adjacent purpose-built modern units is quite striking.  Some of these modern units have reception-cum-meeting areas that are clearly bigger than the floor area of my flat, and could probably contain both floors of one of the nearby cottages.  I was reminded of a time, almost forty years ago, when I worked in an office that had been converted from a one-time 'comfortable residence' on the outskirts of a Norfolk market town.

Typical of such houses, the front door led into a hallway between two reception rooms each with a front bay window, with a matching lay-out on the first floor.  Our room occupied part of a 'lesser' bedroom at the side of the property.  Since the front of the house looked onto the garden, from the windows of our office there were views of the road, and of the car-park that separated us from the factory and main office block.  Our room was L-shaped, and had space for three desks; mine faced the wall at the apex of the 'L', my colleague sat behind me facing the door, and back to the window that looked onto the car park, and my assistant, the front of whose desk butted up to the end of mine, sat beside the other window and back to the ladies' toilet, which occupied the 'cut-out-corner' of the original rectangular bedroom.  I will just say that it was 'cosy', and leave the reader to consider whether or not this would meet today's regulatory requirements.

My mind was drawn back to dwellings as I left King's Lynn yesterday. Passing through a street of Victorian terraced houses, I noticed one where the light was on, although it was almost lunchtime.  It occurred to me that, given the size of the windows in a average house of that period, to do anything of importance at any distance from the window would indeed require additional light all day, and not just during the hours of darkness.  With the increasing cost of energy being in the news this week, it's easy to imagine that the likely occupants of such houses are likely, too, to be those whose incomes are least able to afford an increase in the cost of the lighting that's so essential to normal life there.  How lucky I am to have in my modest flat a lounge window that is probably twice the size of these Victorian counterparts.

And, as a footnote, I passed on Tuesday the neglected property of which I wrote last week.  I'm not for one moment saying that my comments carried any weight in this regard, but there is now no need for further worry about its future.  The site is flattened, the fences removed and, so far as I could tell in one swift passing, a neat vehicle-proof ditch has been created between the foundations and the road.