Category: Life

I need to enter some races or something. I had four nights work last week and I’m supposed to have another five next week. This left me with this weekend to get everything done. I’ve done nothing. The work thing is good, mind. Not the best money as it’s quite short shifts, starting at 1700 finish around 0200 hrs. Once you’ve taken off the 45 minute break that’s not a lot of hours. For a lorry driver. At Stobarts you were lucky to finish before 13 hours. However, it’s was the same run (to Aspitaria, in Cumbria) each time. Same company as before. Just run an empty trailer up there, drop it, pick up a full trailer and run back to Irlam (outskirts of Manchester.) Once I’d got over the trauma of the first night (blindly following the satnav off the motorway two junctions before the written notes, and consequently having to drive a 13 metre trailer-ed truck right across the Lake District on B roads!) I was OK. That first run was terrifying though. Pitch black B roads, twisty and hilly as buggery, so your headlights are not showing you where the road is going, no passing spaces, over a single track, right angled bridge… I was shaking by the time I got there. Anyway, my point was; I should have seized the weekend off and made hay. Tons of cycling, sort the garden, more cycling, get to the gym and cancel my membership now it’s warm enough to train outside… Done jack.   I went for one ride last week. Just a quick 28 miles, twice up Frodsham hill. I was thinking that that was somewhere I could really pick up the pace this year, maybe knock an hour off my time by putting some effort into it and not cruising. To this end I went out with my heart rate monitor on. For Winter training they recommend you keep your Beats Per Minute (BPM) at 60-75% of your maximum. As you move closer to the race you can up it to the peak band of 75-90% of maximum. (max for my age is 160 bpm.) As I say, I thought I could pick the pace up this year, so I thought I’d try and keep it at about 140 bpm. I set off up the gentle but insistent incline of Walton Drag and my bpm was in the 150’s. Oh. Going up Frodsham hill I peaked at 176 bpm. The only time I was not tempting a heart attack was when I was free-wheeling downhill, hanging off the brakes. So the heart rate monitor was a bit of a waste of money. It tells me I’m about to die when I run and now the same when I’m riding. I thought I could use it as a clinical motivator; ‘only at 60% max bpm, shake the lead out lard-arse’. Instead it just tells me I need to take up knitting. Bugger.   On the bright side I […]

As you know, I love Twitter. You get to follow just the people who interest and entertain you. Facebook is a shite site for people you’ve actually met, in my opinion. Just because I once did a course with you doesn’t mean I want to hear you bang on about little Johnny’s bowel movements. Screw little Johnny, and screw you. You were a boring offensive fuckwit then and nothing’s changed. Unless your Facebook status update currently reads ‘Goodbye cruel world’ I have no interest.   Well, that was an unexpected diversion. I only started out to say that I love Twitter. Moving swiftly on; (which I think is a split infinitive, sorry) the joy of Twitter is you can follow really clever and witty people. This makes for fun conversations. However, occasionally you stray over to the dark side. The Sunday they launched the Sun On Sunday (SOS), was one such time. I won’t have anything to do with Murdoch or his evil empire. He embodies the corruption at the heart of politics to me. Vetting successive prime ministers (at his evil lair) before putting his media empire behind them. It was your Sun wot won it. Feck right off! Lying and distorting every news story to his own Machiavellian ends. More annoyingly, people believing the disgusting lies they are spoon fed. The EU demanding straight bananas was a Sun story that sank into the collective subconscious before the issued a tiny little apology saying ‘oops, that was totally groundless lies.’ Does anyone remember the apology? I don’t. I read about it elsewhere. Big lie, spun and spun, tiny, un-noticed retraction.   Again with the digression. I was just saying I don’t like Murdoch, therefore would never buy his vile products. Papers, Sky, none of it. So when a freelance journalist I follow said he was getting some stick for buying the SOS I replied; ‘For shame.’ That was it.’For shame.’  then I went out to start on my allotment.   I came back and he’d replied ‘Seriously? Get to fuck’. Ho ho. Challenge accepted.   Me ‘I think I touched a nerve there. Sun readers, huh?’ Him ‘I buy one copy to write about it and suddenly I’m a ‘Sun reader’? It touched a nerve because it’s culture war bollocks!’   There then followed about five hours of lively debate. By the end of which the lad was frothing at the mouth and apoplectic with rage. His followers got in on the act, a friend of mine jumped in and ripped him to shreds, he and his lot attacked her. I ended up summarising my position by saying ‘Apparently buying the Sun, like kiddie porn, is OK if it’s only for “research”’.’ And ‘He’s gone off to punch some kittens in the face, but don’t worry it’s for research so it’s OK’. By which I was showing by analogy that if something is too objectionable to own, calling it research doesn’t make owning it any less so. Given the […]

It’s been a milestone couple of weeks. As I said last time we were getting a tad worried about my lack of work and, in retrospect, I was freaking out over driving in general. The mighty Micra had kiffed it and really we had no money to replace it. I’d seen a Ford Ka for £790 with 12 months MOT, which I was quite excited about. The next day I went to view it and immediately became wary. The guy who was selling it to me was the boss of a hand car wash place. This was my first alarm, as I know of people who know people who set up a just such an operation to launder the profits of their drug dealing. Then the guy started giving me patter. That put my back up a bit, it’s like saying to someone “I’m going to talk shit at you now, but you’re so stupid you won’t understand anyway.” “We have loads of people just waiting to buy this…, I’m not here to sell this, I just valet them… tell you what why don’t I knock £50 off the price…” Yet still I liked the look of the car, it sounded a good engine. There was a disconcerting 2 inch circle missing out of the paint in the door frame. It had obviously rusted a few millimetres away, then been repainted. He reassured me that it was a touch up job, but by then he’d already convinced me he was a bullshitter. Still, it was the best one I’d seen. I was going to get it. 12 months MOT, at least I’d get a year out of it, and I needed a car for work. Then he said he couldn’t take my card as his machine was down. He tried to ring all of his mates to use theirs. The more desperate he got the more unsure I became. Finally he said I should draw it as cash, on a credit card, and he’s knock the 2% cash fee off the price! I rang the card people, they said it would be £22 handling fee, if the cash machine would dispense it, then something like 27% interest. I said I’d try him again when he got his card machine fixed. I got home and tried the interweb again, this time I widened my search to 60 miles. There was another Ford Ka, 12  months ticket, £550! It was way the other side of Manchester, past Leeds, I think. Anyway, I tried to get someone to give me a lift out to it and my dad came to my rescue. Dropped everything and ran me straight over. And lent me some cash as apparently I’m only allowed to draw £250 per day from hole-in-the-wall machines.  Cheers dad. I’m going to be screwed when they bugger off to Bulgaria. We tootled over there, it was a straight talking private seller, bloody spiffy little car, bish, bash, bosh, job’s a good ‘un.   […]

Things were just about becoming serious. I was getting a bit stir crazy being at home all the time. I was getting more and more nervous about the thought of driving. I needed work to get over it, but just applying for it was freaking me out with nerves.The money was running out, the car needed M.O.T.–ing, Wendy was starting to get worried. Things were, as I say, getting serious. I’d only had one day’s work in about five weeks. No other income. So not good. I had started looking at warehouse work, advertised at £6.08 per hour for shift work! Robbing bastards. I applied to about six or seven agencies for driving work without getting any work. Wendy got me to ring up about signing on the dole on Wednesday. I wasn’t keen for lots of reasons; the hassle, the contempt in which they hold you, the bullying to take a minimum wage job or lose benefits, etc. (*looks at Beth, accusingly*) (By the way, Beth is a relative who the dole made work for them.) I rang them Wednesday afternoon and arranged an interview for Friday morning, and booked the car in for an MOT Thursday morning. Obviously that sounded the irony klaxon, so early Thursday morning the agency rang with work for that day and Friday. Had to rush straight from the MOT to the job. I rang the dole and cancelled my Friday appointment while the car was being MOT’d. It was a straightforward job, pick up a truck and trailer in Irlam (outskirts of Manchester), drive to Bracknell (sort of level with London) get the trailer emptied and reloaded and drive back. Easy. Except not so. Virtually everywhere I’ve been there have been reams of prissy health and safety rules and procedures. All of which I have despised and ignored. Stuff about one way systems in the yard, always parking the trailers in one area, pointing one way, units (trucks) in another, rights of way, all sorts of bollocks. At this place there is none of that. It is organized chaos. Without the organization. Yesterday I had to pick up a unit and trailer. The unit was locked, no-one could find the keys. The trailer hadn’t been backed into the parking slot, so the bit I was supposed to drive the unit under was inaccessible. And they’d left a different unit under it. In other words someone had finished with the truck and trailer, thought ‘screw that’ and just driven into a slot and left it there. Not even reversed it in. Bastards. This meant before I could start my job I had to find the keys to my unit, do the pre-op checks, then go back and get the keys for the other unit, then reverse out, blind, into a yard full of dickheads going in all directions, spin it around, do a blind side reverse back into the slot, uncouple the trailer from the unit, move the unit somewhere else, couple my unit […]

Bleeding typical. The job I didn’t want I passed the assessment, the job I desperately wanted they said I was ‘borderline’ and needed to get another month’s experience and try again. He said it was not a ‘don’t call us, we’ll call you’ sort of deal, and that he wanted me to come back and drive for them, just with a little more experience. *sigh* Stuff like me not knowing where anywhere was, being rusty with a manual gearbox (I think that was my second go of a truck that wasn’t automatic since I passed my test, 2½ years ago! I’d have soon got fluid at it again.) and being ‘nervous’ (on an assessment for a job I was desperate to get, FFS!) particularly on the reverse. Bloody right I was. They said the assessment was all about safety. I thought it would be better to be slow and sure. That is too nervous. Screw that! I’m not risking crashing.  The only faults on the road were that he reckoned I turned the wrong way at an offset, blind junction. As I couldn’t see the road to my left I turned the cab to the right, so I could see out of the left hand wide-angle mirror. It’s a small mirror, but sufficient. He reckons I should have turned the cab to the left, which would have blocked the traffic from the right, so I could physically see the road.  I’ll do that next time. The only other thing was approaching junctions carrying too much speed, he reckoned. I don’t agree, but he’s the assessor. If I’d have had a good knowledge of the roads and not been nervous, I think I could have swung that. As it was he just saw me as a quivering wreck who had no idea. Balls! I was gutted.   I pulled myself together and emailed an application off to another agency the same morning. The next day I got all the class 1 trunking jobs off the jobcentre and applied for them all. All agencies. All desperate for drivers. Until you apply. I got one outright ‘no’, one ‘maybe’ and two ‘we’ll get back to you as soon as we get work in’. Real jobs my arse!  Agencies! *spits*   That’s two weeks with no work now. Things are starting to get worrying. We’ve got enough in the bank to last another month or so before we have to really fret, but it’s surprising how quickly you start to lose your self confidence. And self worth, for that matter. Work is a strange master. I think it’s some perverse form of Stockholm syndrome.   On the bright side I’ve had plenty of time for other things, such as getting back into training and my instruments. I’ve been for a few swims whilst I rest my knackered leg up. I’m struggling with that bilateral breathing, not my fave. Still,. all that chlorinated water I’m drinking must be doing my teeth the world of good. […]