I sometimes get round to thinking about why I bother to write. I had always thought that I could write something that people would enjoy reading, so I toyed with all sorts of ideas about disaster scenarios, ghostly tales, heroic deeds etc. and none of them inspired to the point of actually making me sit down and write. Then my best mate got his leg caught up in the rope around the dinghy he was trying to get into and we laughed about him floundering about all day. It occurred to me that we were real life versions of the characters in Last of the Summer Wine and that I should write about things that I know best - my friends, family, and yours truly. After all I had no shortage of silly happenings to wrie about! So I wrote the first book and the publisher said, "It looks like you have a book, but..............have you used anyone's real name?" After I had answered in the affirmative I was shot down in flames. "You can't do it!", she said.
OK, I thought, so if I couldn't use real names, how can I think of names for everyone without them sounding silly? Terry Wogan's breakfast show was on the radio, and the names that his correspondents used gave me the answer, Thank you everyone, the Seymore Butt's, Ophelia Legge's of this world, you gave me a book I could actually publish!
Monday 19 April 2010
Thursday 15 April 2010
Chapter 1 of my second book
1
Friday the Thirteenth
I have been lucky that for most of my working life I have lived within easy driving distance of my place of work. Some of my journeys have been as short as fifteen or so minutes, door to door, which I consider to be a real luxury. A journey this short is however, by no means a guarantee that everything will go smoothly, indeed, with the way my luck normally runs, I count myself lucky if a week goes by without a crisis of one sort or another. I am not superstitious, but my journey to work on one particular Friday the thirteenth stands out by a mile as being a bad trip.
At that time we ran a Cortina Estate, a great big American looking box of a car, not exactly the tidiest example of the type, but nevertheless a serviceable family motor. On this particular morning I set off on an epic journey to travel the six miles to work, this was to be one of the last trips the Cortina ever made.
I got into the car and looked at the fuel gauge. As it often was, desperate! Not even enough to travel the five miles to the nearest garage on the route to work. I decided that the safe option was to go into town first, get a couple of litres in, and then backtrack to work, much further but safer than running out of fuel. In the event I travelled about three quarters of a mile and spluttered to a halt. A quick look in the boot confirmed my fear that I hadn’t put the petrol container in, so I set off back home at a run.
One serious rummage in the shed at the back of heaps of decrepit garden tools, push bikes and spiders revealed a decent petrol can. Leaving the devastation behind me I ran over to the bus stop and waited. The bus was suitably late but I had not even got on board before the driver stopped my progress.
“’Scuse me sir”, he started in a brilliant imitation of a traffic cop, “you can’t come on here with that!”
“But there is nothing in it” I protested
“Could be fumes” he continued
“It’s never been used!” In frustration I removed the cap to reveal a smell of plastic. “Here have a smell”
“You can’t come in here with that! It’s against Company rules, sorry sir I have a timetable to keep to.”
The doors closed in my face, and off the bus trundled off, devoid of paying passengers. “Timetable to keep indeed!” I set off back down the road at a jog, carrying my plastic container. As I passed the car I took a moment to growl at it for using far too much fuel, and continued on my way.
Having by now covered a mile and a half, I passed through the Bus Station, which was by now starting to fill up with unruly school kids. There at the far side was the bus, parked up with the jobs-worth driver relaxing on board. I was so incensed that I couldn’t resist the temptation to give the recumbent bus driver a single finger salute, he didn’t notice, he was too busy reading the morning paper before he did his next circuit, which would of course be suitably late and just in time to bring people into town to miss all the connections to Leeds and Bradford. Leaving behind the assembled throng, I legged it up Crossgate and along Bondgate to the petrol station. Filling the tub and paying for it gave me a chance to catch my breath, just enough to give me strength to jog back as far as the Bus Station, but petrol is amazingly heavy and it didn’t take long before I was down to a walking pace. I didn’t bother with the finger at the bus driver, now waiting at the stand. I continued walking a bit, jogging a bit, stopping to swap hands. The bus came by, blew his horn and attracted my attention, whereupon he returned my one fingered salute, perhaps the guy was more observant than I had been giving him credit for.
The bits of jogging between walks were becoming shorter, the changes of arms more frequent, but eventually, almost exhausted, I was back at the Cortina, and in seconds the container was in use.
The bus came past and gave another toot, this time the driver seemed to be pointing at the car, rather than outer space. I finished the filling job before going to the driver’s side to see what the fuss was about. Someone had taken a great side swipe at the rear door of the car, continuing forward until they had hit the doorpost between front and rear door. There was a split at the base of the post where the metal had torn. A great swathe of blue paint down the side of the car clearly indicated the colour of the vehicle that had done the damage. In frustration I kicked the tyre of the car. With a loud ‘plock’ the sole of my shoe came off almost to the heel. By now, almost at boiling point, I jumped in the drivers seat, put the key in the ignition and turned. Nothing! Worse than that I was now sitting holding half the ignition key in my hand, the other half was in the ignition, and it didn’t take long to determine that this was going to resist all attempts at being extracted using my fingernails.
I spent a few minutes collecting my thoughts, I had a pair of long nose pliers up at home which might just remove the stump of the key. No longer able to run I adopted a sort of an uneven skip in an attempt to keep the sole of my shoe from folding up on itself and causing me to fall flat on my face.
Once home, I quickly got together a set of suitable equipment: a pair of long nose pliers, the tweezers out of Jackie’s make up case and a steak knife out of a wooden block in the kitchen. Armed with this motley collection and a pair of fresh shoes, I ran back down to the car, the day was warming up nicely and I was getting a bit hot and uncomfortable by now, but I was beginning to get desperate, pining for the office, and this spurred me on. A considerable amount of teasing later I had the offending part of the key in the palm of my hand.
A disappointed kind of realisation came overcame me very, very slowly, so slowly that the grinding of cranial cogs was given time to gather speed and rusty pennies were beginning to drop into a virtual bottomless pit of the mind. I sat back in the driver’s seat, and wondered what on earth had possessed me when I failed to pick up the spare keys from by the wooden knife block.
I began to feel a little drained as I walked slowly back to the house. I had time to figure out that I would have been at work by now if I had left the car at home and walked, I would not have had to pay for petrol or carry the ridiculously heavy stuff a mile an a half, and furthermore the chances of the car being side swiped by a hit and run driver were almost nil whilst it was in the drive. After yet another round trip of one and a half miles I was in the car and it was running.
I had not run out of bad luck yet.
By now I was very, very late for work and I have to say that now that I had got rolling, I hammered it a bit on the way to the office. As I went over the hump back bridge near Denton Hall, I was sure that I saw the car bonnet twitch, but before I had even had chance to stop and check, The bonnet lifted and completely blocked my field of vision. I was still travelling at about fifty miles an hour on a narrow road with deep ditches at either side, but using a combination of peering through the gap between the bonnet and the engine compartment, and looking through the driver’s side window to see my position on the road and an awful lot of good luck [which, to be honest considering the way the morning had gone to press, it was about time I had some], I managed to bring the car to a halt without hitting anything or disappearing into one of the ditches. I was out of the car very quickly, I needed to check my position on the road, and look at the damage and in any case, by now the inside of the car smelt really badly of farts.
The bonnet had lifted and continued until about two thirds of the way up its length it had made contact with the roof of the car above the windscreen. The upper end of the bonnet had continued to rotate around the hinge, and had folded flat against the roof. When I say flat this is a relative term because nothing was anywhere near being flat anymore. The roof had a huge dent in it. Amazingly the windscreen was intact, this was probably due to the fact that my insurance would cover the screen without me losing my no claims.
After a struggle I managed to lower the bonnet back down to somewhere near it’s allotted position. With it forced down as far as I could manage by tying a rope to it, it had a front end which was several inches higher than it should have been. It was also sporting a nice pair of ailerons which would have looked good on a fighter plane, but at the hinge end of a Cortina bonnet looked frankly bizarre.
The Cortina limped wearily to the office, it gave me time to ponder on how I was going to explain that it had taken over three and a half hours to travel the six miles to work, and also time to ponder over the fact that I had set off in the family car and was now driving around in what could only be considered utter wreckage. Sadly the most valuable thing remaining about the car was just under five litres of petrol.
I apologised for my lateness to Roger Priest, the drawing office manager, but part way through my explanation, he appeared to develop an involuntary shudder of enormous proportions, like hiccoughs delivered from a machine gun. He walked off and I saw him remove his handkerchief from his pocket to wipe his eyes as he disappeared into his office. I had only seen the shudder once before, when he overheard me telling Colin Byrds that I thought the Thorn Birds was a story about an ‘orny theologist, so I knew it was Roger’s silent laugh. He never questioned my explanation, nor was there any suggestion that I would have to make the time up, he must have thought that I had suffered enough.
Saturday morning, I travelled down to the police station to report the fact that my car had been side swiped. Surely there was something that could be done, after all the paint colour was very distinctive and clearly visible, and somewhere there would be a blue car, sporting a similar amount of yellow paint, forensics would easily be able to match the two, and I might just get something from the insurance.
I have to say the reaction that I got from the police was a little disappointing. Having explained what had happened and filled in the appropriate forms, we walked out into the car park to look at the damaged door and doorpost. A frown overtook the policeman’s entire visage. He stopped walking.
“Can I suggest, sir”, he began in a surly voice, “that you remove your vehicle from this car park, before a policeman sees it!” He tucked the papers under his arm and rotated around on one of his heels.
“Do you not think that you would be able to help?” I asked naively
“I could organise a tow truck if you like, sir, but as for finding out who has scratched your erm, vehicle, I really think that we may put it quite low on our list. Do you see what I mean?”
“I think I understand.” I groaned. I got in the car and made my way home.
Back at home and one cup of tea down my neck, I came to the decision that I needed to cut my losses, visit the scrap yard, and invest the proceeds in another motor.
I rattled into ‘Head’s’ scrap yard and was soon parked up, and heading down to the steel container that served as the office. Shaun emerged, I was relieved, he was a bit more generous and far easier to deal with than his brother.
“Nah then!” he grunted, “I’m on wi summat. Tha’l atta see ar lad”. My heart sank, Dick was much harder to deal with than Shaun. I saw the surprise on Dick’s face as we approached the car.
“Write off then?” he questioned
“No it’s still a runner” I protested
“Gerrit fired up then, I’ll ‘av a listen”
The engine behaved and fired up straight away.
“Turn’t bloody thing off”, shouted Dick, “I’ve ‘erd enough! Nah then lad, I’ll tek it off yer ands”
“’ow much?” I asked in a slightly broader than normal accent in order to fit in.
“Nay lad, tha wonnt expectin’ owt wo tha?”
My broad accent started to fade, “Well I thought maybe a few quid” I whimpered.
“Worth bugger all ter me, tek it away!”
I pondered for several nanoseconds on the prospect of running out of fuel before reaching the petrol station and handed over the keys. Dick produced an enormous wad of notes from his pocket and peeled off a spectacularly manky fiver.
“’Ere a’ some bus fare.”
“Got a lift thanks.” As the words came out I wondered if I could possibly be more stupid. Dick stretched the rubber band to allow his precious fiver to be added back into the wad. “I need a beer though!”, I quipped, thinking quickly in an attempt to rescue the situation.
I left with the fiver feeling somewhat deflated.
Friday the Thirteenth
I have been lucky that for most of my working life I have lived within easy driving distance of my place of work. Some of my journeys have been as short as fifteen or so minutes, door to door, which I consider to be a real luxury. A journey this short is however, by no means a guarantee that everything will go smoothly, indeed, with the way my luck normally runs, I count myself lucky if a week goes by without a crisis of one sort or another. I am not superstitious, but my journey to work on one particular Friday the thirteenth stands out by a mile as being a bad trip.
At that time we ran a Cortina Estate, a great big American looking box of a car, not exactly the tidiest example of the type, but nevertheless a serviceable family motor. On this particular morning I set off on an epic journey to travel the six miles to work, this was to be one of the last trips the Cortina ever made.
I got into the car and looked at the fuel gauge. As it often was, desperate! Not even enough to travel the five miles to the nearest garage on the route to work. I decided that the safe option was to go into town first, get a couple of litres in, and then backtrack to work, much further but safer than running out of fuel. In the event I travelled about three quarters of a mile and spluttered to a halt. A quick look in the boot confirmed my fear that I hadn’t put the petrol container in, so I set off back home at a run.
One serious rummage in the shed at the back of heaps of decrepit garden tools, push bikes and spiders revealed a decent petrol can. Leaving the devastation behind me I ran over to the bus stop and waited. The bus was suitably late but I had not even got on board before the driver stopped my progress.
“’Scuse me sir”, he started in a brilliant imitation of a traffic cop, “you can’t come on here with that!”
“But there is nothing in it” I protested
“Could be fumes” he continued
“It’s never been used!” In frustration I removed the cap to reveal a smell of plastic. “Here have a smell”
“You can’t come in here with that! It’s against Company rules, sorry sir I have a timetable to keep to.”
The doors closed in my face, and off the bus trundled off, devoid of paying passengers. “Timetable to keep indeed!” I set off back down the road at a jog, carrying my plastic container. As I passed the car I took a moment to growl at it for using far too much fuel, and continued on my way.
Having by now covered a mile and a half, I passed through the Bus Station, which was by now starting to fill up with unruly school kids. There at the far side was the bus, parked up with the jobs-worth driver relaxing on board. I was so incensed that I couldn’t resist the temptation to give the recumbent bus driver a single finger salute, he didn’t notice, he was too busy reading the morning paper before he did his next circuit, which would of course be suitably late and just in time to bring people into town to miss all the connections to Leeds and Bradford. Leaving behind the assembled throng, I legged it up Crossgate and along Bondgate to the petrol station. Filling the tub and paying for it gave me a chance to catch my breath, just enough to give me strength to jog back as far as the Bus Station, but petrol is amazingly heavy and it didn’t take long before I was down to a walking pace. I didn’t bother with the finger at the bus driver, now waiting at the stand. I continued walking a bit, jogging a bit, stopping to swap hands. The bus came by, blew his horn and attracted my attention, whereupon he returned my one fingered salute, perhaps the guy was more observant than I had been giving him credit for.
The bits of jogging between walks were becoming shorter, the changes of arms more frequent, but eventually, almost exhausted, I was back at the Cortina, and in seconds the container was in use.
The bus came past and gave another toot, this time the driver seemed to be pointing at the car, rather than outer space. I finished the filling job before going to the driver’s side to see what the fuss was about. Someone had taken a great side swipe at the rear door of the car, continuing forward until they had hit the doorpost between front and rear door. There was a split at the base of the post where the metal had torn. A great swathe of blue paint down the side of the car clearly indicated the colour of the vehicle that had done the damage. In frustration I kicked the tyre of the car. With a loud ‘plock’ the sole of my shoe came off almost to the heel. By now, almost at boiling point, I jumped in the drivers seat, put the key in the ignition and turned. Nothing! Worse than that I was now sitting holding half the ignition key in my hand, the other half was in the ignition, and it didn’t take long to determine that this was going to resist all attempts at being extracted using my fingernails.
I spent a few minutes collecting my thoughts, I had a pair of long nose pliers up at home which might just remove the stump of the key. No longer able to run I adopted a sort of an uneven skip in an attempt to keep the sole of my shoe from folding up on itself and causing me to fall flat on my face.
Once home, I quickly got together a set of suitable equipment: a pair of long nose pliers, the tweezers out of Jackie’s make up case and a steak knife out of a wooden block in the kitchen. Armed with this motley collection and a pair of fresh shoes, I ran back down to the car, the day was warming up nicely and I was getting a bit hot and uncomfortable by now, but I was beginning to get desperate, pining for the office, and this spurred me on. A considerable amount of teasing later I had the offending part of the key in the palm of my hand.
A disappointed kind of realisation came overcame me very, very slowly, so slowly that the grinding of cranial cogs was given time to gather speed and rusty pennies were beginning to drop into a virtual bottomless pit of the mind. I sat back in the driver’s seat, and wondered what on earth had possessed me when I failed to pick up the spare keys from by the wooden knife block.
I began to feel a little drained as I walked slowly back to the house. I had time to figure out that I would have been at work by now if I had left the car at home and walked, I would not have had to pay for petrol or carry the ridiculously heavy stuff a mile an a half, and furthermore the chances of the car being side swiped by a hit and run driver were almost nil whilst it was in the drive. After yet another round trip of one and a half miles I was in the car and it was running.
I had not run out of bad luck yet.
By now I was very, very late for work and I have to say that now that I had got rolling, I hammered it a bit on the way to the office. As I went over the hump back bridge near Denton Hall, I was sure that I saw the car bonnet twitch, but before I had even had chance to stop and check, The bonnet lifted and completely blocked my field of vision. I was still travelling at about fifty miles an hour on a narrow road with deep ditches at either side, but using a combination of peering through the gap between the bonnet and the engine compartment, and looking through the driver’s side window to see my position on the road and an awful lot of good luck [which, to be honest considering the way the morning had gone to press, it was about time I had some], I managed to bring the car to a halt without hitting anything or disappearing into one of the ditches. I was out of the car very quickly, I needed to check my position on the road, and look at the damage and in any case, by now the inside of the car smelt really badly of farts.
The bonnet had lifted and continued until about two thirds of the way up its length it had made contact with the roof of the car above the windscreen. The upper end of the bonnet had continued to rotate around the hinge, and had folded flat against the roof. When I say flat this is a relative term because nothing was anywhere near being flat anymore. The roof had a huge dent in it. Amazingly the windscreen was intact, this was probably due to the fact that my insurance would cover the screen without me losing my no claims.
After a struggle I managed to lower the bonnet back down to somewhere near it’s allotted position. With it forced down as far as I could manage by tying a rope to it, it had a front end which was several inches higher than it should have been. It was also sporting a nice pair of ailerons which would have looked good on a fighter plane, but at the hinge end of a Cortina bonnet looked frankly bizarre.
The Cortina limped wearily to the office, it gave me time to ponder on how I was going to explain that it had taken over three and a half hours to travel the six miles to work, and also time to ponder over the fact that I had set off in the family car and was now driving around in what could only be considered utter wreckage. Sadly the most valuable thing remaining about the car was just under five litres of petrol.
I apologised for my lateness to Roger Priest, the drawing office manager, but part way through my explanation, he appeared to develop an involuntary shudder of enormous proportions, like hiccoughs delivered from a machine gun. He walked off and I saw him remove his handkerchief from his pocket to wipe his eyes as he disappeared into his office. I had only seen the shudder once before, when he overheard me telling Colin Byrds that I thought the Thorn Birds was a story about an ‘orny theologist, so I knew it was Roger’s silent laugh. He never questioned my explanation, nor was there any suggestion that I would have to make the time up, he must have thought that I had suffered enough.
Saturday morning, I travelled down to the police station to report the fact that my car had been side swiped. Surely there was something that could be done, after all the paint colour was very distinctive and clearly visible, and somewhere there would be a blue car, sporting a similar amount of yellow paint, forensics would easily be able to match the two, and I might just get something from the insurance.
I have to say the reaction that I got from the police was a little disappointing. Having explained what had happened and filled in the appropriate forms, we walked out into the car park to look at the damaged door and doorpost. A frown overtook the policeman’s entire visage. He stopped walking.
“Can I suggest, sir”, he began in a surly voice, “that you remove your vehicle from this car park, before a policeman sees it!” He tucked the papers under his arm and rotated around on one of his heels.
“Do you not think that you would be able to help?” I asked naively
“I could organise a tow truck if you like, sir, but as for finding out who has scratched your erm, vehicle, I really think that we may put it quite low on our list. Do you see what I mean?”
“I think I understand.” I groaned. I got in the car and made my way home.
Back at home and one cup of tea down my neck, I came to the decision that I needed to cut my losses, visit the scrap yard, and invest the proceeds in another motor.
I rattled into ‘Head’s’ scrap yard and was soon parked up, and heading down to the steel container that served as the office. Shaun emerged, I was relieved, he was a bit more generous and far easier to deal with than his brother.
“Nah then!” he grunted, “I’m on wi summat. Tha’l atta see ar lad”. My heart sank, Dick was much harder to deal with than Shaun. I saw the surprise on Dick’s face as we approached the car.
“Write off then?” he questioned
“No it’s still a runner” I protested
“Gerrit fired up then, I’ll ‘av a listen”
The engine behaved and fired up straight away.
“Turn’t bloody thing off”, shouted Dick, “I’ve ‘erd enough! Nah then lad, I’ll tek it off yer ands”
“’ow much?” I asked in a slightly broader than normal accent in order to fit in.
“Nay lad, tha wonnt expectin’ owt wo tha?”
My broad accent started to fade, “Well I thought maybe a few quid” I whimpered.
“Worth bugger all ter me, tek it away!”
I pondered for several nanoseconds on the prospect of running out of fuel before reaching the petrol station and handed over the keys. Dick produced an enormous wad of notes from his pocket and peeled off a spectacularly manky fiver.
“’Ere a’ some bus fare.”
“Got a lift thanks.” As the words came out I wondered if I could possibly be more stupid. Dick stretched the rubber band to allow his precious fiver to be added back into the wad. “I need a beer though!”, I quipped, thinking quickly in an attempt to rescue the situation.
I left with the fiver feeling somewhat deflated.
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