All up One End

I may have used that title before ... if so, I apologise, but that's how this week feels from where I'm sitting now.  Let's dispense with the statistical evidence first.  The week involved thirteen jobs, seven of which filled the last two days, with only one job in the first three days exceeding 70 miles; and by the end of that third evening, I had achieved less than two days' expected income.

It's been a strange week for where I've been, too.  The one job I did on Monday, from a customer in Letchworth to one of their regular deliveries in Bedford, was exactly repeated on Tuesday, but an even stranger occurance happened later in the week.  Crawley isn't a place I get sent to often; just thirty-eight times in the whole period up to Christmas 2014, i.e. in the nearly thirteen years that I've been doing this work.  Already in 2015, I've been there four times.  The second of these was on Wednesday morning, when I took some steelwork to a building site in the town centre.  The next afternoon, I was asked to collect a CD from an office near my home to go to a large defence establishment there: a routine sort of job, with a simple hand-over in the security office at the gate.

Yesterday afternoon, I was sent to a different customer in Bedford, who had something to be taken to the very same location - three visits in three days, compared to an average of about three in a year normally.  On the way back I refuelled at the same filling station, and was served by the same cashier ... to whom I was just another face, of course, so he didn't recognise me second time around.

As regards visiting the same destination for different customers ... it does happen occasionally.  There was one a few months ago, although I don't recall the details, simply having the thought that it was a delivery point that I'd been to for someone else fairly recently.   I think the strangest incidence like that was several years ago, when I collected something in Hitchin for Canary Wharf (London E16).  Just as I got there, I had a phone call saying that another customer in the same road also had something for Canary Wharf.  When I made the second collection, not only was it for the same road, but for the same man at the same building!

The 'all up one end' feeling was also true in respect of the location of the week's deliveries,  Only one job took me north rather than south from my home area, when I went to Redditch on Thursday.  My resentment of an 'overdose of M25' was exacerbated by the fact that my Friday visit to Crawley came hot on the heels of an early start that morning.  I had been asked on my way home on Thursday to divert to Houghton Regis, to collect some display material for a location in Carshalton.  This was to be delivered by 7.30 am next day, and I was determined that it wouldn't overshadow the day by getting me caught in the rush-hour traffic in either direction. Consequently, I limited my Thursday evening activities to the bare essentials, had an early night, and set off just before 5.0 am.  I had expected an hour or so to 'chill out' (in more ways than one!) upon my arrival but, to my amazement, there was already someone there, so by 6.40 I was on my return journey, and looking for breakfast on the way!

Life for me now takes on a slightly different, and hopefully more relaxed, aspect; this weekend sees the start of my much-heralded plan of tapered retirement.  I fully expect that it will feel just like any other week of holiday from work, but it will carry with it many thoughts of how these non-working weeks will begin to form a pattern in the coming months, and I shall endeavour to sow some seeds of a new routine to life.  Time alone will reveal how successful this plan will prove.