Looking Back

After commenting - some readers might suggest I was complaining, but I did say that slackness was typical of early January - that there wasn't much work last week, this week has brought much more in terms of both variety and overall activity.

I have often said over the last twelve years that I could never go back to an office job.  The excitement of not knowing until the last minute what I'm going to do next, and yet being confident in my basic ability to deal with whatever it might be, was the very thing that evoked my delight in the first place, and has maintained it ever since.  This wouldn't suit everyone ... and doesn't!  Some try it for a week or two and are not seen again; others hear of certain regular jobs and negotiate to be allocated to them, or else have already made it plain that this would suit them better, should such an opportunity arise.

For example, one of my colleagues a few years ago, whose family circumstances it suited, liked to start work every morning from about 6.0 knowing that he would be home most days from about 3.30, or at least by then he'd know for certain what time he would return.  From time to time, customers ask for someone to perform a specific run early each morning, and Peter was often assigned to these tasks.  Once he went on a fortnight's holiday and I was asked to stand in for him.  The particular job he was doing at the time involved collecting boxes from an office in Welwyn Garden City at 6.30 am, taking them to a similar office in Wokingham, and bringing back the empties from previous days.  The task was simple and straightforward, but by the end of the first week, I was yearning for his return, even though I was back home by mid-morning and that the rest of the day brought the variety I craved.

Another such regular job, which has been performed daily since long before I joined the team, consists of providing an internal mail service between the many sites operated by our local college.  There were always a small number of drivers who knew this run, and I was invited to become one of them soon after I arrived on the scene, although I was clearly a 'reserve', since records indicate that I performed it only 34 times in just over two years.  I hadn't been asked to do it for almost ten years ... until this week, when one of the current 'regulars' was in France, another was already committed, and the third had pressing family business that required his absence from work for a day.  Who, then, could the controller turn to but ...?  I was asked to undergo a verbal update via a phone call to the one who would be away, and learned of a couple of new twists to the routine, but in some ways it was just like turning the clock back.

Talking of clocks in reverse gear, three other things have happened this week that fall into that category.  First was the appearance on facebook of the school photo from 1969.  This was the year after I'd left the establishment, but naturally most of the faces were familiar, and it was interesting - and not a little embarrassing - to discover that some of those names that I ascribed to unlabelled faces, I then found had been correctly applied to a different face on another page!

Then the local paper published a picture from five years earlier of the pupils at one of the primary schools in the town.  Although this wasn't the school I had attended, I did recognise some of the faces as belonging to children from my own street, or who had appeared later at the high school when I was there.

Full credit for the final ocurrence of 'historic' significance should go to my 'number one cousin', who spotted the remarkable coincidence of two sur-names from our family history appearing in the same obituary column.  I have identified one of them as being the widow of our fourth cousin, and in so doing I discovered a number of details in my records that still require verification, along with more recent relatives from the newspaper announce-ment who can now be added to the family tree.  As to the other lady, further investigation is required to link her family - whom I have now traced back to the late 19th century - to that of our great-great-grandfather.