Where Were You?

It's become something of a cliché in the last fifty years.  Where were you when Kennedy was shot/Elvis died/war was declared/whatever?  Until quite recently, there were only two of those questions to which I could provide an answer.  I remember where I was when I heard the first news of the Seven Day War in 1967 - sitting in the school library, talking to about five others, of whom I can remember only one by name.  And I remember where I was when I heard the first news of the 9/11 bombings - sitting in my office in Royston, when a colleague returned from lunch, having seen the live newsreel on TV.

I realised this week that I can add a third momentous event to that catalogue.

It's funny, isn't it, how one thought leads to another and that one to another and so on until, as a friend said after reading one of my magazine articles, "I had to go back and read it all again because I just couldn't believe how you'd got from the opening comment to the final conclusion!"

Yesterday morning, I had to make a collection from an industrial unit in Walsall.  It was one of those estates that is divided into blocks, presumably according to the original stages in the development of the site.  The address I had was 'Unit 2A' so, quite reasonably, I thought, I'd look for unit 2, and would find it divided into two or more parts.  There was no sign of unit 2. Eventually I came upon a map: an essential component of every industrial estate in my experience.  Here I discovered that there were five parts of the estate - A, B, C, D and E.  I had already passed the entrance to part A, assuming incorrectly that it was all one large premises, and noticing that it didn't bear the name of the firm I was looking for.  By the time I'd back-tracked and located unit 2 in this area, I was about five minutes behind my scheduled arrival time.

As I approached, two men were wrapping a pallet of goods more thoroughly than I think I've ever seen before, not only horizontally, but vertically too, with the pallet perched on the tines of the fork truck, and the men passing the roll of wrapping film from one to the other over and under it.  Having confirmed that it was this pallet that I had arrived to collect, one of them promptly loaded it into my van, and ushered me inside to wait for the paperwork.  As he did so, I commented on their thoroughness, referring to a very badly wrapped consignment I'd carried earlier in the week.  In this case, the wrapping was applied very skimpily, once the goods had been piled on the pallet inside the van.  "You're not going far," said the man, "you won't be braking suddenly, will you?"  I had agreed that I shouldn't, but it wasn't the braking or not that was important.  As I steered around the first roundabout, at only 8 mph, a 'whoosh, clunk' came from the rear of the van: the goods had already slipped off the pallet!

I stood in this Walsall unit, and looked around me.  The whole place exuded that same care that those men had shown in their wrapping.  The floor was clean, and the walls, too, apart from a few cobwebs far too high to be either reachable or any threat to what was going on beneath.  The operator at the far end of the workshop, carrying on his task oblivious to my studious eye, seemed to be applying the full attention to detail to meet the requirements of the most fussy customer.

As I waited, taking in all around me, I considered just what management skills might be required to run a business in these difficult times, provide work for and appropriate rewards to at least two employees - perhaps more - and make a profit at the end of it all.  Still the paperwork hadn't appeared, and my attention turned to the radio that was playing in the background.  It was tuned to BBC Radio 2; by then it was coming up to 9.30 am, and Sara Cox, sitting in for Chris Evans this week, was handing over to Ken Bruce. Suddenly something flashed in my mind, and I remembered clearly where I was at 9.30 am on December 18th 2009.

I had just come to the end of one of those tricky, overnight jobs where you pick up the goods during the evening, and you know it's not really worth going home, because you'll only get a couple of hours' sleep before you need to be up to leave to drive across the country in order to make your delivery time.  So you drive, slowly at first until it seems ridiculous, then normally; and you stop at an amazing number of services in order to get coffee, use the toilet or choose an attractive chocolate bar.  You find a lay-by where you can grab a few minutes' sleep to keep safe for the rest of the night, and by 7.0 you get to your destination when there's no one about.  You run the engine to keep warm, hoping that you don't disturb nearby residents.  In between dozing, you see people going about their business as the town wakes up. Eventually someone comes and opens the shop ...

That morning I made my one and only ever delivery to a chemist's shop in Caernarfon, having purposely driven all the way up the A5 from Milton Keynes, knowing that it would take far longer than any normal route.  And I listened to Radio 2 as I began the next leg of my 565-mile assignment, to collect from Liverpool for the same customer.  I think that was the last morning I listened to Radio 2 - it just had no more appeal without that soft Limerick voice.

So, where were you when Sir Terry Wogan signed off for the last time?