… doing intruding into my nocturnal rambles? All kinds of people from my past have played some kind of supporting role in them, but quite recently there have been some people roaming by in the night who certainly wouldn’t ever have given me the time of day in the day, if you see what I mean.
And so it was last night too.
There was such a lot to last night’s voyage but unfortunately I can’t remember all of it. But the part that I do remember concerns a company called British Salt, a company for whom my father worked for many years until about 20-odd years ago. Last night the company was based not in Middlewich, Cheshire, but somewhere along the Waterloo Road between Cobridge and Tunstall, and I’d received “the call” to go there. The factory had five entrances, which from north towards the south were two before the first roundabout, one on that roundabout, a fourth between that roundabout and the next, a fifth on the second roundabout and another one south of the second roundabout (which of course does not make five but since when has logic played any part in my nocturnal rambles?). Of all of these entrances, the second was the tallest and that was the way that I went in. I wandered around to the transport yard and into the office where my first task was to respond to “does anyone here understand French?”. It turned out that the woodstove in the garage had all of its instructions and makers’ plates in French. So I translated them, showed them how to light the fire and work the automatic log dispenser (and I’m going to patent this design when I wake up because it was superb). Then, they slid a fork-lift truck underneath the stove and carted it off somewhere else, right through the garage, right past where my father was working.
It had been 14:00 when I arrived but it was 16:00 when they finally told me what they really wanted me to do. There were two lorry-loads of stuff that needed to be delivered (lorries again after last night?), the first of which was a load of metal plates that had to go somewhere beginning with M (I forget where) up by Stretton near Warrington. The man in charge asked me if I knew by which gate I had to leave so I phoned up the lodge at gate two. The lodge-keeper told me that the height was 4m 01 and so I told the man in charge that I’ll go out that way and that I was sure that I remember it being 12’3″ (such is the logic of my nocturnal rambles) back in the old days. He showed me which lorry to take and so I walked around it to check the wheel nuts and the lights, and then off I set – totally forgetting about the height limit on the gates, but luckily going out of Gate Two all the same. Arriving safely at Stretton or wherever (the first time that I’ve driven an HGV for 20 or more years by the way) I had to unstrap my load and then they craned it off. I gathered up the straps but they were all entangled so I needed to sort them out. This ended up by me having to undo the hooks from the straps but that still didn’t work. It appeared that the people in this factory had hooked up my straps to the ceiling so that they could sweep the floor. They needed to be unhooked and rolled up neatly but by this time I was going to be horribly late for my second load so I just threw them any old how into the cab – a cardinal sin in the HGV world.
But anyway, enough of that. In my “taking it easy” mode these days I had my injection, then my breakfast, and spent a leisurely morning watching Ben Stokes and John Bairstow take apart the South African bowling in the Second Test in Cape Town. I felt sorry for the South Africans actually. Ravaged by injury and giving two young bowlers their test debuts, it must have been very soul-destroying for them, watching their best balls disappear out of the stadium. I can’t remember the last time that England scored over 600 runs with 5 wickets still to fall. In fact, I can’t remember the last time England scored over 600 runs in any circumstances.
Another thing that I turned my hand to in the afternoon was something that I ought to have done a while ago. It’s my custom to write a small web page at the end of each year to talk about the work that I had done on the farm in that particular year. And when I was thinking about what I was going to write for 2015 I suddenly realised that I hadn’t done it for 2014 either.
That needed to be dealt with so I cracked on and I reckon that I’ve done about 75% of it already.
I didn’t finish it off though because by 20:00 I was drifting off into the arms of Morpheus and so I was ready for an early night. I really can’t keep going these days – not the 02:00 and 03:00 finishes that we used to have only a few months ago. All of this is depressing me.
