Broithe

We had a few country gentlemen in the factory and a steady supply of free-range non-domestic victuals. One chap was a legitimate gamekeeper and was able to supply wildfowl, etc. One day, as I entered the foremen's office, I heard a conversation that i understood, but would have sounded a bit odd to anybody who wasn't aware of all the underworld stuff that went on. We used a lot of epoxy resin and had a dedicated cold storage arrangement for it. Without looking at each other, one of the foremen, filling in the day's attendance sheet, asked the other "Is Jim Cook in today?" the answer would have seemed enigmatic to anyone who didn't know - "I haven't seen him, but there's a duck in the fridge". - the sheet was duly ticked and they carried on with other stuff. We had another chap who was very much less official in his activities. Fred would supply anything to order, wild or otherwise. He was the slinger in the fabrication shop and had a 'cabin', a small steel shed in the centre of the shop, to hang his slings, chains, etc. This also served as a bonded store for stuff that he had brought in for people. The foreman of the shop was a rather gruff character, that it was generally best to avoid, I found. One day, at a time when Fred was going to 'find' some brass sheet for me, I heard some soft noises from the shed, so I stuck my head in to ask how he was getting on on that score. He had about thirty rabbits hanging up and was gutting them into a bucket. Having ascertained that my needs would be fulfilled later that day, I left the scene. I was then apprehended by the foreman - "Have you just been in Fred's shed?" - expecting some admonishment, I had no choice but to answer "Yes". He just looked at me and said "I've never been in there" and walked away, shaking his head. We had a chap who was a trendy, cravat-wearing, finger-in-the-ear folk-singing aficionado. He had a fondness for all things 'traditional'. He asked Fred, "Could you get me any real turnips these days?' - the next day, he arrived at his desk to find, on his seat, a huge sack of turnips, and soil, freshly dug from a field a few hours before, before it got light. It took him three days to get them all home. Fred never had a car (or any form of licence!), or even a bike, and lived ten miles away. He would get to work by standing in the road and stopping any passing car. If things got difficult, he would sometimes 'borrow' a Ferguson and drive in on that. I was late more times in any week than he ever was in his whole time there. Most people in there had a 'side hustle', as the youth of today term it. Mine was selling woodscrews. I had a little display board with the various types, finishes and sizes on and would collect orders, until I had enough to get a good discount from a chap in Exchange & Mart. He would trade from the start of the tax year until he was just under the VAT threshold, then stop, so this kept prices keen and I could supply myself 'for free', with screws purchased using the discount for large orders. He would tip me off as the annual sales hiatus approached, so I could keep my customers happy.

The mention elsewhere as to veracity, or otherwise, of some writing in blue crayon, reminded me of what seemed like a great wheeze at the time, but escalated way beyond our expectations. The engineering director was based at another factory site, sixty miles away. He would come down every few weeks and annoy people in our factory. He would drive down in his Granada and, not having a designated parking spot on this site, he would just dump it in anybody else's that was vacant and 'pull rank' on them. He was a very pompous and argumentative bloke, so he usually got his way. One day, driving in, he spotted a space that was almost always occupied, by the car of a chap as awkward and obnoxious as he was himself. This absence of a vehicle was taken to mean that Harry was not in work that day, so Pete abandoned the Granada in the spot and went off to annoy people. However, Harry was only at the dentist and came back after half an hour, to find Pete's cat there, he parked an inch from the bumper, leaving no possibility of getting the Granada out without negotiating its release. He had had run-ins with Pete about parking before, so he went inside, wrote a note and put it under Pete's wiper. The note said, in blue crayon and block letters "DO NOT PARK HERE AGAIN". Harry was not under Pete's auspices in any way, working for a completely different organisation, so he was well up for arguing with him, on the few previous occasions that it happened. Someone came in the office and said "Harry's put a note on Pete's car, this could get interesting", so we went down to look at it - Harry had only used to top half of the A4 sheet. After some effort, I managed to locate another blue pencil and we added "YOU BASTARD" in the bottom half - then went off to wait. The effect was rather greater than we expected - down the corridor, we heard "Did you put this on my car?" - Harry shouted back "Yes!", which, whilst true, was taken to mean the whole text, including the added part that Harry knew nothing about - they were both well into their sixties and we had to separate them from the scuffle that erupted... They are both dead now and neither of them ever spoke to each other again - or knew the full context of the Rumble in the Corridor.

Do Faller do a combine..?

They'll have the chips out of his locos...

There can be a surprising amount of dead, and dry, matter from last year, especially in areas protected from outside interference. I took this picture in April three years ago - it was at 400+ metres, so the new growth hadn't got above the remaining 'tinder' in the local climate. The 'snow' is just last year's used grass. You felt that, if you sneezed, the whole place might go up...

The sellers must think you're a bit gullible.

I saw them three times. The Burton one was weird, as the stage was halfway along the long side of the room, rather than at one end. I also saw them in Oakengates Town Hall, a bit of a posh place and the manager was utterly horrified when he saw the queue lined up outside. He clearly thought he'd booked something like the Clancy Brothers and expected a few people in Aran sweaters to turn up, not several hundred degenerates. He actually locked the doors again, whilst he deliberated about whether to let them in or not. After about thirty seconds, he realised it might be worse if he tried to keep them out... The chap in front of me in the queue was wearing an old army blanket and had a Mohican in the style of a TV aerial.

I went to see The Pogues play in Burton on Trent, in a converted bowling alley, around the early 80s. For logistical reasons, we arrived quite early and waited in a fairly reasonable pub. After a few minutes, we became aware that the jukebox had no consistent theme and played stuff from every possible musical genre. As this went on, we started to think that everything had been covered, heavy metal, pop, bubble gum, progressive rock, light classical, country & western, musicals, folk, skiffle, rock and roll, blues, jazz - everything... There had been about twenty completely unrelated records when I said, "That must be it, the only thing missing is Slim Whitman". The next record was "Rose Marie"... I was then accused of having set this up somehow.

Kids have sandboxes now? Actually, that's a great idea - it will give them better traction on frosty mornings, as they walk to school. Just make sure to keep topping them up weekly from October to March.

Trying to explain Horslips to someone, I spotted the nice train in the background from about 1:20 in.

Steady! He's been missing for five hours now...

You need to sign out now, assuming she doesn't have access to your password - then sign back in hourly and report on your wellbeing...

It's up on blocks now, someone pinched the wheels a few weeks back.

Not if he keeps working at this pace.

. This reminded me of an event with one of the circuit breakers described above. Actually the one where the scalpel was dropped on my head. The bloke who dropped it was called Jack and worked for the CEGB, the ESB equivalent on the Big Island. He had no idea what he was doing, but also no understanding of how little he knew. He was also the dropper of the scalpel. They blew up one of the breakers in a dramatic and potentially fatal way. I know what they did, but they denied it and tried to blame us, saying it had 'just blown up', so we had to go through a pointless pretence of trying to find the "reason". The operation of these devices is fairly violent. In normal operation, though, the system stopped the mechanism from reversing until the operation had been completed, but, when hand operated, a person could defeat this delay, if they really tried, and cause the operating tube to buckle and break the pressured porcelain column that held the interrupter head up in the air. One of their chaps had blown the centre phase up, by doing this and only narrowly avoided killing himself in the process. He admitted hand-operating it and hearing a 'funny noise', then finding that it wouldn't operate again (because the loss of gas pressure had locked it out), so he got up and stepped back, falling over the ton of interrupter lying in the gravel just behind him, having caused the 'funny noise' as it fell down. So, we had to go through the process of seeing that the stresses were well within a reasonable range, when it really was operated properly. This involved sticking strain gauges all over the surviving breaker on the site and operating it in the manner in which they claimed to have done to the exploded one. Anyway, the aforesaid Jack, who had no idea of what he was supposed to be doing, spent a lot of time trying to see how we were setting up our strain gauges, so that he could copy us. The CEGB had said that they would supply a caravan to house the rather delicate electronics that we brought up with us. They had no shortage of money at all and I expected a caravan the size of a decent house, but, possibly in a further effort to stop us showing that it was not our fault, they supplied the smallest caravan that I've ever seen. My colleague, Barry, of whom more may be said at a later date, was the strain gauge king, so I left him to it in the caravan, as there was very little space. Jack, determined to see what was going on, went in there with him, but had to crouch and lean back against the door. The 'safety officer' felt the need to say something to Barry, for some reason, and grabbed the catch of the door - caravan doors open outwards - this was all that was holding Jack in place, like a coiled spring - and Jack, prestressed against the door, shot out horizontally, like a missile, taking the safety man off his feet and carrying him a yard back into a concrete pillar, winding him so violently that we considered calling an ambulance. I was nearly hyperventilating to the same degree...