shifting stuff…

Meander through Tuesday with me? …I thought I’d blog about my day.  Like yer doo…try to make it sound interesting when I know it’s not. Silk purses and sows ears spring to mind.

I ‘Woke up to Money’ The BBC’s daily diet of impending doom on Radio 5 live.

Five forty am….hit the snooze button..no good…I needs a pee! Job done…start with the socks: as  the chastened tone of the financial reporting these days in stark contrast to the years of ‘good times’ which some fools thought would go on, and on. Experience suggests otherwise….and I’m an ‘umble lorry driver.

 Oi! not so much of the ‘umble. I breakfasted, as always… like a King…well, a Prince at least with grand granary toasties and a dollop of baked beans. Radio 4 delivered via digital now, upmarket cerebral radio…serious…gravitas…I smeared some jam on me last bit of toast. I still like the look of this newish kitchen…it’s a pleasure to come down to. Still need the light on…but as the year advances toward the one third gone mark it’s becoming borderline….and energy bills are an item these days. The kitchen windows face west…so  early mornings are dull affairs at the best of times. The house is seldom cold though…no need for heat.

 Out of the door at six-thirty five…like clockwork..but the automaton cursed inwardly  on seeing  bits of litter some carefree kids must have strewn… I grunted out loud as I stooped to pick ’em up. The nip in the air early doors is going on and on this year. The ‘long john’ thermals serve me well but when is Spring going to arrive? No hint of sunshine yet again  as dampness pervades…the grass verge muddied and ploughed into irregular narrow furrows with tyre tracks of kids bikes…God! I’m a moaning  sod, I mused to myself,  a rare grin cracking the default grimace.

Flipped the garage door &  fired up the Audi…I daren’t say it’s built like a Swiss watch or tomorrow it will let me down…the law of the sod….that’s two sods in quick succession.

Drove to work listening and inwardly digesting French linguistics via c.d….it’s actually sinking in well and I’m rapidly becoming versed in some vital basics. Time well spent….continued in the cab for about three hours every day.

 Gaul interrupted as I stopped for  my Daily Mail from  my daily muslim…almost a different one every day, it seems… at least no eastern music today…I mean I like it…I doo…but not at this hour…mangled wailing is all very well and diverse but   I’m torn  between  a  daily detour to an English newsagent..however,  they had sold out of stamps last week! Puh!

Arrive at work…such as it is…a faded empire that’s never really  shone. A family affair…decent enough, regular enough..an un-exciting, comfortable rut.

Still, I’m not there for long..the big DAF snarls into life in that latterly  sophisticated,  hushed and highly engineered  diesel kind of way that always induces a sense of triumph. There have been occasions…not many..when the turn of the key has brought no response whatsoever …often when hundreds of miles away from home…so when it works, it’s worth celebrating with  a mental smile. Four hundred and twenty horses…and one mug.

Destination close…a cockstride really…there were times when I’d clock up a couple of hundred miles before breakfast but no longer…not these six years.

Thirty minutes tops and I’m there. A down at heel mill, almost Dickensian in nature…needs more than   a facelift. No great expectations here…none beyond next month’s pay-packet anyway  I’d wager.  A dishevelled army of men in grubby hi-viz shuffle about.  Twenty, thirty years many of them have worked here….those six years suddenly do not look quite so bad…quite so futile.

One visit I could gloss over…two might be a chore…I was to ‘tip’ my load here three times today ! Seventy five tonnes of stuff . Dirty, used stuff…the detritus of a consumer society cubed up into big, heavy square cubes of….stuff.

Take some time out to climb  a flight of concrete steps a regulation twenty times…exercise…I’m told it’s good for me…my gluteus muscles , of late..seem to agree. Progress.

Dinnertime: I’m not posh….parked up and had a break from the French to tune into Radio Manchester  as I chomped a chilled  egg and bacon butty, prepared ‘with love’ I was assured last evening.  

A local curmudgeon who could even  give me lessons in the art …Allan Beswick…infuriating, and entertaining  Greater Manchester..seldom playing Devil’s Advocate for he’s his own man…good stuff. I learned what the ‘&’ sign is called…began with  an ‘A’ but I’ve already forgotten…such is life…maybe the French is squeezing other stuff out of my overburdened  head.

My loyal Mail – I agree with 80% of it’s comment grabs my attention for a while…do the thirty second maths challenge in about two minutes…not bad for an oik…can’t get six, or twelve down  in the crossword but Sue will finish it later methinks. (she did and I kicked meself with ‘bluebell’…the ‘wild, wood hyacinth’)

Later : last load done…heading for home . the kids are out of school like liberated lemmings they run across the road…taking chances…silly…lollipop lady shakes her head. Fifty yards on I stop  at a red Pelican light. Moving off half a minute later my peripheral vision just ..and I mean just catches sight of a twelvish year old lad crossing when the green man has long gone…right alongside my cab he was lucky he was tall ..lucky I was alert..at the top of my game…he skipped across the road and the driver who’d been waiting opposite me,  in  similar pole Pelican position did my remonstrating for me…frankly I couldn’t be bothered…I don’t think the kids peril registered inside his lemming like head. I wrote just the other day about folk making eye contact with drivers of big vehicles before they cross right under their noses……..take it on board please….or you might end up on one.  We can’t always see you.

 Suddenly  things took a turn for the better…the French tape  (newly recorded on an aged  cassette I’d cadged from my Mother-in-Law Muriel’s vast, and  totally neglected collection at the weekend) comes to an end…only to segue into South Pacific !! Yes, that long lost soundtrack from my childhood. Mum loved it and saw it several times at the cinema…she even dragged me along to ‘The Forum’ one night c. 1959 to be totally bored. Only now with the benefit of rose tinted hindsight, lost youth, lost Mum and a lost sense of anything remotely young and   trendy did the music elevate my spirits. And then some.

 ‘There is nothing like a Dame’….how very true…and a song about teaching kids of ‘six, seven and eight’…to ‘hate’…the things their relatives ‘hate’.. the simply lyrics made me think, although I need little encouragement these days.

It was the  the gloriously un-p.c. “broads who are broad where a broad should be broad”  made me smile… and that’s twice in one day!  Rodgers and Hammerstein in all their pre-feminist glory. Of course we’ve moved on but what  a blast from the past. I wonder how many hard pressed career women juggling life, and kids, and a career would really like to just concentrate on being a ‘broad’ Answers on a post-card to the daily male.

As I joined the M60 to the strains of Rossano Brazzi’s ‘Some Enchanted Evening’ my mind turned to Mum and my eyes moistened as I gazed skyward…only the great, grey bulk of Brinnington’s huge  railway bridge obscured my view of the dark, angry looking clouds. I remember her openly admitting she thought the Italian crooner top crumpet….albeit in slightly couched terms… I dunno where he is now but I’m now  probably older than he was in his finest hour…across a crowded room. My mind flashed back to that sparsely populated cinema in 1959…my whole life ahead…it wasn’t ‘Bali-High’ that called me…just Wythenshawe Tech ! The head my whole life depended on was called Walter…and he seemed to write me off at an early age…oh well.

Another soaking on the cards before I reloaded …for the same damn place tomorrow…and made my way home. I stopped off at Tesco to collect my free Daily Mail dvd. ‘In Which We Serve’…pure propaganda from World War Two but worth it for nowt ! Noel Coward contemplating and Naval, gracing the cardboard cover… looking every inch the heterosexual he wasn’t.

Homeward bound..even  via picking up my better half the commute is mercifully short…..waiting a few minutes I moaned under my breath as Radio 5’s newscaster delivered yet more doom and gloom …. emerging from work my Wife was  clasping a bulky bag…pour moi?  I wondered to myself in French….  Not likely ….’Val’s given me bagful of horse-muck for the Rhubarb’ …fine….from grumble to crumble in seconds. Still, I do like a good crumble.

So here we are…home before five and sat at the keyboard within minutes of arrival back in the sanctuary. My default position before tea. Wife busy preparing  home made chunky chicken soup and blueberry stroodle…a bottle of Hardy’s red putting it’s stamp on the early evening…all is well with  my world….’til I ‘wake up to money’ in t’mornin’ 😉

to be continued…tomorrow…and the day after…and the day af……………

I have to be there….count yer blessings 😉