Facing up to Reality

There comes a time when you have to face facts.  What's gone is gone ... lost and gone forever!  Such a time came for me this week.  It's over two and a half years now since that memorable Friday in December, when I had great difficulty starting my van after I'd fuelled up for two deliveries in Norfolk.  As I carried out those final duties, it became apparent that the end had come.  My friendly garage confirmed my suspicions that, if I wanted to use it any more, that van would need considerable investment.  It was time to stop work and enter full-time retirement.

As I've responded to friends enquiring about my coping with not driving, I miss it.  I don't miss the actual work: kneeling in the van, neatly packing boxes of print to get another job on with them, dropping something heavy on my finger as I try to unload it, or scouring Google maps before going to bed so I would be able to find a faraway factory at 6.0 in the morning.  What I miss is the good bits: eating a meal at a truck-stop amidst other drivers after a long day on the road, the excitement of getting on or off a ferry, and the midnight magnificence of topping a rise of an up-and-down road and coming face to face with the full moon to show me the way home.

When I learned last spring that my former boss had started a new company that basically re-kindled the business he had sold three years before, I wondered about driving for him again.  After briefly discussing it with friends, I did nothing about it, but it's a thought that has haunted me ever since, until last weekend, when I decided it was time to 'kill or cure' the ghost of the past.  With the general idea of dedicating a day a week to the project, I e-mailed Dave asking if we could 'explore the possibility of my rejoining the team' and on Wednesday I paid him a visit in his smart new office ... which stands on the site of a factory where, some ten years before, I had collected plastic mouldings for delivery.

After the anticipated greetings from all around, we talked seriously about my requirements and it quickly became clear that, while I would be most welcome to return on the same basis as before - i.e. as an owner-driver - there was no opening for a one-day-a-week driver, and the expense of hiring a van, or buying and insuring my own, for that level of activity would result in a negative rather than positive impact on my financial situation.

So where does this leave me?  Certainly with no resentment; it's financial common sense.  To spend more than I earn would be folly, and I couldn't expect any favourable guarantee of the most profitable jobs to cut my loss, but should have to take my chances alongside the regular drivers.  I still yearn to travel and see familiar if distant places, but these appetites will have to be confined to holidays and kept within the mileage limit that applies to my new car.

As to the use of that 'spare' day that I would have offered to Dave, I feel that I'm being nudged towards following up possibilities of other voluntary work in addition to my support for the weekly drop-in where I help on Thursday mornings.