I have no idea why I found myself thinking about this event, whilst soaking in the bath after tai chi last night, but, sometimes things just, ‘spring’ to mind. So I’m gonna share. Because that’s what I do.

It must have been the summer of 1974, possibly 75 and I found myself a job for the summer holidays. Driving vans round the country delivering consignments of watches to jewellery stores. My dad’s mate was a director of this importers in Clerkenwell and they needed help in the ‘despatch department’. What those pretentious fuckers would now call ‘logistics’. We spent all day posting shit around the country but then, every couple of weeks, there’d be ‘a run!!!!’ Like that. With exclamation marks. It meant that the sales people had sold sufficient quantities of stuff to justify getting someone into a big white van to deliver it all. And it would load up with maybe 15 or 20 big packages, in each being a load of watches, a stand, display stuff, all the paraphernalia. I can’t even remember the name of the watches. But they did work. I think.

So we’d map it out. ‘Ok, you leave home at 5.30, be in Manchester by 9.30 (it was a van, remember, and in 1975), first drop. Second in Stockport, then onto Liverpool, the Wirral, back up to Carlisle… and so it went. As near to a loop as you could arrange. Overnight in Burton-upon-Trent, then Derby, Nottingham… and so on. And I loved doing them. Despite the damage I managed to perpetrate on both the vans. It’s a contact sport, driving. But it allowed me to finally understand what ‘up north’ meant and also to add the word ‘squalid’ to my vocabulary.

We also used to send lots of things by ‘red star’. Ooooh. This was popular and meant taking a package to the station and, almost literally, putting it on a train. To be collected by the recipient at his train station. In the ‘red star office’ because all stations had them back then. And yeah, you had to go to a station but Amazon make all that fuss about NEXT DAY DELIVERY!!!! and we did it SAME DAY. So fuck you, Bezos.

One day my dad’s mate came rushing into our office. “You gotta get this to Waterloo red star for the 3.10 train to… somewhere!!!” It was 2.45 and we were in Clerkenwell. “Ok, Ivor, no problem (ever the optimist)”. “The van’s too slow”, take my car, he said, throwing me the keys to his BMW 2002 Tii, super-bollocks, mega-testosterone, ultra racer, penis-extension thing. “And take Eddie”.

Eddie had a cab-drivers head for roads and short-cuts, quite amazingly so. Thus, with images in my mind from ‘The Sweeney’ and ‘The Professionals’ of precisely how to ‘get a car somewhere really quickly, we fired up the Beemer. Following Eddie’s directions I was flying through Smithfield’s meat market (afternoon, so shut and pretty empty), at some ridiculous 1970s speed (45 on a 30mph road was NOT ‘fast’ in 1974) when there was a long and loud screech. A van. White. Just avoided hitting me. But like ‘just’. As I slowed I noticed the sign on the side said ‘POLICE’ at precisely the same time my mouth said FU-U-U-UCKKKKK.

I would never get out of prison. The twelve occupants of the van all came over to me. And in their lovely navy blue uniforms, they didn’t look particularly ‘happy’.

Basically, I’d gone through a ‘give way’ sign at a junction. They had right of way, I ignored that, at probably about 60. Holy shit. But… but…

There was no ‘give way’ sign. And, more importantly, the double lines at the junction to show me to do so were not there. Smithfield was old (still is) and too busy to maintain. So the dozen of the Met’s finest plodded over to investigate. And found, unanimously, that the give way lines had in fact disappeared completely. Probably about 1953 and no-one had re-drawn them. No signpost either. Thus, they let me go. I would not face the gallows. And they were actually nice about at that point. Something I’ve never understood, considering I was basically an obnoxious boy-racer in a flashy car.

But I learned a valuable lesson that day. Though, even with that delay, still made it to Waterloo in time to get the package on the train. Thanks to Steve McQueen in Bullit.

Happy Friday, drive carefully

A xxxx