At long last the wait was over. In the early afternoon of a Wednesday Gladys went into labour with no warning a week before her due date when the road into Bearthwaite was flooded such that it would have taken the pumps half a day to drop the water level sufficiently to enable even a high four by four fitted with snorkels for the air intake and the exhaust to take her to hospital and ensure she arrived there dry. There was a brief discussion as to whether it would be best to ring for an ambulance to meet the boat at the far side of the mile and a half of flood waters, but Pete and Gladys agreed with Elle when she said, “There is too high a chance of delays. If something goes wrong due engine problems, road works or serious traffic congestion when folk finish work delay is almost certain. Too, the rain is deluging down and an open boat is not the best place for Gladys to be in this weather. Maybe we need to put a cabin on it or buy a boat with one ready fitted for future emergencies. Anyway, right now more heavy rain is forecast, so that could be problematic if it takes roads out of service.

“Gladys has telt us that the OG(1) folk said all was well on her last hospital appointment which was a fortnight ago. Susanna says all is well right now, and has pointed out that despite Gladys’ miscarriages she did carry Delia to term and delivered with no problems, so she is not a first time mother, and all should be working, relaxed and ready for a second childbirth. What I’m saying is I think it is far better to have Gladys here comfortable in the warm in the care of Susanna, whose midwifery qualifications are up to date. Like all the rural midwives those two bags of hers have virtually got an entire hospital delivery facility in them. In addition, there are at least six nurses or ex-nurses in the village to assist her if she needs anyone. I don’t want Gladys out in the cold even with Sasha’s overcoat on risking delays. The idea of her giving birth under those conditions when she could be here is recklessly stupid.”

Sasha’s overcoat, like all his other outer cold weather wear, was made of real fur in Siberia. One could not obtain warmer or better cold weather wear from anywhere on the planet, as warm yes, warmer no. That his furs were the real deal was a fact the village kept quiet to avoid him being harassed by the ‘Friends of the Earth’ and their like; all of whom Sasha referred to as ‘bloody squirrel picklers’.(2)

Six hours later, after Gloria had made her appearance and met her father, Sasha declared an extra Saturday and had word sent round the village that there was an extra meeting of the Grumpy Old Men’ Society in the taproom of the Green Dragon taking place immediately. He’d added that it was likely to be an extended affair. Pete was dragged off for a celebratory drink and was helped to bed several hours later by Harriet and Gustav.

~o~O~o~

As expected Harriet and Aggie took over all of Gladys’ work, and by the time Gloria was a fortnight old all at the inn was running smoothly again, despite Gladys’ insistence that her presence in the room for gossip with Gloria in attendance for part of the evenings was necessary. Harriet and Aggie didn’t like it, for they considered Gladys should be resting, but they were overruled by the other women who supported a cantankerous Gladys. “I’ve had a baby,” Gladys insisted. “I’m not ill. I’ve had enough damned rest to last me a long time, unless,” she snickered at Harriet, “Your dad gives me another present to be opened in nine months.”

~o~O~o~

Sasha met with Elle, his wife, Gladys and Pete, and Harriet and Gustav to discuss financing the proposed brewery extension and concomitant ability to brew four or even more different beers simultaneously. He proposed terminating the mortgages he held on the Green Dragon immediately and that the repayments be used to finance the brewery’s extension and buy the extra equipment that Clarence, Gustav’s master brewer required.

Harriet started the discussion by saying, “The planners have already agreed in principle to the extension and said it would probably be better to use all the available space rather than just half of it and end up applying again in a few years. We instructed Jacqueline the architect to that effect and she’s already measured up the site and we should have outline plans some time next week. She wasn’t born here, but has close family living here. Godfrey one of her cousins was in Freddy’s gang of brickies that did the brickwork last time. It wasn’t discussed, but I’m sure her fee will be very reasonable, as she made a point of mentioning that not just her cousin but other family members too will appreciate what ever work they can get without having to spend hours a day travelling. Gustav?”

“I’ve spoken to Freddy, and he said he could have the same gang of men do the work for us at the same rate as last time. He added that if there were any others in the village wanting work he could use them all. I’ve asked Godfrey, the architect’s cousin if he would like to work in the brewery as soon as a job is available. He said yes, so Harriet’s is probably right about the architect’s fee. Freddy is already looking for recycled brick, and at the moment he has a small gang of men demolishing a house over Waverbridge way for the materials. The developer is paying for the demolition, and I’m adding to the men’s wages to make it more than worth their while to ensure the brick doesn’t get damaged. The men are loading the brick and other stuff onto pallets, so Harry and Jake can sneak a quick load in after their contracted work. Mostly they’re working evenings and week ends, but the job will be finished by the middle of next week. They wouldn’t even take diesel money off me, so I asked what would they take. They’re taking all the wood from the house which is all firewood quality at best and selling it locally for firewood. Actually I think they’re virtually giving it away at ten pounds a ton to the elderly. Some of the younger men are cutting and delivering it for free. Jake reckons it’s worth it, as it means he can get a free mug of tea anywhere in the village and at any time of day. Harry borrowed Alf’s stacker truck to load with at the house, and Alex Peabody is offloading the pallets at this end with his big tractor. It’s all being offloaded behind the brewery.”

Sasha looked thoughtful as he said, “If there’s any masonry of no use for building with that you want to clear I suggest you take my crusher, and bring the crush back to maintain farm lonnings. The farmers will be glad to provide tractors with front loaders and trailers though it may just be easier to get hold of a conveyor. Push the feed end under the crusher, and drop the crush straight into the trailers. I’ll ask about and if I can’t find one I’ll buy one. I’ve seen loads of them in this country for sale second hand at less than a grand on Ebay. I’ll get Alf to look into it. It makes sense that we should have one. I should have bought one years ago. Some of those younger men could possibly make a least a part time income from the job. My crusher stands idle for all but a few days a year which is daft really. Sorry for the interruption, Gustav.”

“No need, Sasha. That’s the sort of ideas we should all be coming up with. However, I’ve got a price for a prefabricated building to cover the entire site which Bill has said he’ll over see the construction of like last time. He’s telt me what it’s likely going to cost for ready mix concrete from DA,(3) so I have a good estimate of the cost of the building and the labour to put it up. That’s going to be no problem for me to pay for, but Bernhard has had no luck yet sourcing brewing equipment. He says he still has any number of leads to follow up on, but maybe we’d better get some prices on new equipment from over here.”

Sasha nodded and said, “Okay, but keep me informed. If your brother can get the equipment at a reasonable price in Bavaria maybe we don’t need to do anything for a while. However, if it looks like serious money for equipment I want to know about it so we can minimise costs. Bottom line is I want those mortgages wrapped up. If the money’s not needed for the brewery equipment good, but it needs investing in something, so maybe you should be looking at buying farm land farther afield. I’ll have a think about what other employment options we could start round here.”

“Well, that was a lot quicker and easier than I thought it was going to be, Sasha,” Gladys said with Pete nodding in agreement.

Elle nodded and said,“I’ll see what the local women consider to be good employment opportunities for women and girls. We need something to keep the girls here when they’ve left school. Most don’t mind living at home with their parents, but they don’t like having to rely on them for every penny in their pockets. It’s a real issue because if the girls leave to find work the boys follow them very quickly. Most Bearthwaite youngsters settle down and marry younger than outsiders, so understandably the boys are not going to stay where there are no girls. We need to provide work for them both, but especially the girls. All the kids will stay if they can. None of them wish to leave, but there has to be something here to keep them that provides self respect.” All nodded in agreement with Elle. She continued, “We need to talk to Alf and Bertie, Sarah and Tommy, Alice and Phil, Rosie and Vince, Gillian and Simon, Samantha and Gee, and every other self employed person in the village. A lot of them are already employing others due to Covid, but not especially kids, and mostly it’s seen as a temporary thing. We all need to be thinking more about kids in particular and long term, by which I mean permanent. If some of that mortgage repayment money is used to develop their businesses to enable them to employ kids, even if it means we pay the kids directly for a while, that has got to be a good use of the money. We need to resurrect the long dead proper apprentice system, and if that means starting with fourteen year olds at weekends and school holidays so be it.”

Pete smiled and said, “Alf is going to love that, Elle. He’s been saying college trained kids on two year apprenticeship schemes are completely useless for years. He taught Samantha Graham as is now Samantha Shaw how to weld starting when she was maybe six, and he reckons she’s one of the best. Not just because she was clever and paid attention, but because she had the time to take it all in and enjoy it without any sense of pressure. I reckon he’d jump at the chance of a couple of youngsters to train.”

“I reckon we could kick the process off by employing a couple of girls over the weekends. What do you think, Pete?”

Pete replied, “Aye. We could do that, Gladys Love. Only problem is it’s sixteen year olds that need the work, because the older girls have already left, and at sixteen they’re not legal to serve behind the bar. Just collecting glasses and waiting on may not provide enough interest. I know it’s money, but they’re just kids, and all kids want a bit of excitement. If we got caught employing anyone under eighteen behind the bar we could lose the licence. Maybe we need to be thinking of something to bring our older teenagers and young adults back. At the very least we need their families to make them aware we’re working on it.”

Gustav asked, “When was the last time a police officer other than Michael came into the Dragon?”

“Maybe fifteen years ago, if you mean another policeman unaccompanied by Michael, Gustav. Because he’s from here, Michael always takes anything going on here personally, and all the other police officers automatically let him know about any incidents here, so he can deal with whatever it is because they know Bearthwaite is different from anywhere else and he’s the only one who’ll get enough coöperation to be able to deal with issues here without anything escalating. It took us a while and a lot of effort to make sure they perceived matters that way.” replied Gladys with an attempt at a guileless smile.

Gustav nodded and asked, “And how often do some of the underage boys coming in with their fathers or grandfathers pull a pint in the taproom? Agreed they’re not working here for money, but maybe we could look into that?”

It was Pete who provided the solution, “Okay, how does this sound? Say one of Alf’s grandsons works behind the bar in the tap. “We don’t pay him, so technically he isn’t working. The moment anyone we don’t know walks through the door Alf’s grandson disappears and goes home. It’s no problem for us to make sure he ultimately gets paid for the complete shift. We pay Alf for some imaginary job we say he’s done for us, so the books are right if we’re asked to produce them which isn’t going to happen, and Alf passes the money on as a bit of pocket money for helping him out at the workshop. I’m sure you can come up with something similar for the girls, Love. Making soft furnishings or maintaining them, the bar cloths and tea towels that were woven by Beatrice and her girls. If they weave some for Tommy and Sarah to sell in the post office to tourists that will hide any problems. They’ve been selling some of Simon’s artisan smith-craft for Gillian for years, so maybe there are other things they could sell too, maybe enough to pay one of the girls to help out in the summer time. However, we need to be selective in the Dragon and only chose kids who have a relative we deal with, but it’s a start. You know I wouldn’t wish Covid on any one, but it is indeed an ill wind indeed that blows nobody any good, and mind if the road’s flooded there’s nothing to worry about, for outsiders will not be able to surprise us.”

There were smiles all round, and the beginnings of the Bearthwaite economic and social recovery plan was under way.

~o~O~o~

In the taproom that Saturday a complete stranger in conversation with Pete who served him with a drink asked, “I have been led to believe this is a place where stories are told on Saturdays. Is that so? And who tells them?”

“Aye,” replied Pete. “You have the right of it. The story telling will start in maybe quarter of an hour when all the regulars have arrived. Most of the folk in here who come from outside of Bearthwaite are regular Saturday night customers who come for the tales.” Seeing a blank look on the stranger’s face who sounded foreign, Pete added, “Stories that is. Sasha, the Siberian bloke over in the corner started it years ago, and he tells more stories than anyone, but tales are telt by all the locals and many of the outsiders too. All are welcome, for we appreciate a change. Why? You interested in telling a tale or two? If you are you’re welcome to do so.”

“I like to tell stories, but mostly the only opportunity I have is to my grandchildren. I was surprised to hear that here is a place where adults gather to tell and listen to stories.”

“Aye well, there’s many a tale telt in here that would not be suitable for children to listen to. You could say some are definitely adult in nature.”

Gladys had heard what Pete had just said and added, “Some are definitely top shelf if not triple x-rated and probably not suitable for the ears of grown women never mind children, but boys will be boys even if they have turned eighty, and it’s a traditional barmaid’s obligation to keep the boys under control.”

Pete grinned and said, “My wife, as you probably gathered. What’s your name stranger? And where do you hail from?”

“I am Aesir. I am a mix of Svensk, that’s Swedish, and Scots, but I live in Finland now. I am over here visiting my daughter and her family. Her man told me of this place. So I came to listen.”

Sasha had just come to the bar to collect a couple of bottles of Genever. On hearing Pete’s conversation with Aesir he chatted with him for a few minutes before saying, “We’d be happy to hear a tale from you, Aesir. Tell us whatever you wish, and we shall all listen, for that is what we are all about here. Good, bad or indifferent, we shall listen with interest, and whatever the outcome you shall be welcome to return.”

The outsider looked flustered and said, “I only know stories that I have told my children and theirs. I think they are not suitable for grown men.”

Gladys said, “The only difference between children and grown men is the size of shoes they wear. I wouldn’t worry about it, Aesir. Most of the men in here spend hours every week telling stories to children. A lot of those stories are telt in here and appreciated too. Even the færie tales, as every dad and granddad appreciates widening his repertoire for the little ones to listen to.”

There was a crowd of men round the bar all agreeing with Gladys and saying things like, “Kid’s tales, real life events, pure fantasy, dirty stories, funny stories, jokes, whatever. It’s all free entertainment, Lad. It’s better than the TV. If you tell a tale the drink and supper is free. That’s the rule.”

Aesir looked puzzled, so Sasha explained. “We,” he indicated the company with a wave of his hand, “are the Grumpy Old Men’s Society. Grumpy Old Man is a humorous reference known to all in the UK indicating the way men become as they age. We are an organisation that meets here every Saturday evening to tell tales, enjoy a drink and then play dominoes. All the tales that have been telt in here have been video recorded and are available for future generations on DVD. The quality of the earlier ones is not as good as the more recent ones, but they are available. If you tell a tale, Lad, like the rest of us, you’ll be recorded for posterity too.”

Stan said, “Looks like we’re all here, Sasha,” before banging a pint pot on the bar for attention and announcing, “Okay, Gentlemen. We’re starting in a few minutes as soon as everyone has sorted out their drink situation, so get yourselves ready please.” As a crowd of men converged on the bar Stan added, “I’ll help pull them, Pete. Ah, good girl, Harriet. Thanks.” Pete said the last as Harriet started taking the money leaving them to concentrate on providing beer.

Sasha asked, “You want to start, Aesir? If you do tell the lads who you are and where you’re from, so it’s recorded.” Aesir nodded and Sasha added, “Bill, pour the man a goodly dose of that Genever.”

Aesir looked around before saying for the second time that night, “I am Aesir. I am a mix of Svensk, that’s Swedish, and Scots, but I live in Finland now. I am over here visiting my daughter and her family who live at Bothel. Her man, who is Cumbrian, told me of this place, so I came to listen. I didn’t expect to be telling a story. In the past I have only told stories to children, so I only have children’s stories to tell. However, this is not strictly a children’s story, but a story about a child. Me as a child.”

“Good lad, Aesir. We tell a lot of tales from when we were kids. You’re in the right place.” That had been said by Freddy, but similar comments were aired by a number of the men and Aesir was considerably less nervous as a result. Though that may have been in part due to the Genever, for he’d dropped the level in his glass sufficiently for Bill to consider it was in urgent need of topping up.

“This story is a matter of my ancestry and goes thus. I suppose I was nine, yes nine I’m sure. I was born and grew up in the high arctic of Norway, which was where Pappa came from though he was Swedish, and right then according to Cousin Lykke it was -35 ℃ back home; Mamma had been speaking to Tant(4) Alice, Pappa’s sister, on the phone the night before, and I had a few minutes talking with Lykke at the end. She was nine too, and we liked each other enough to sit together in school classes. After nine years of it I should have been used to the cold.

“We were at Mamma’s parents in Scotland for Christmas, which was a week away. Morfar(5) was by trade a stone mason, but he worked as a self employed builder, so he worked every day, no matter what the weather. I always went to work with him because I enjoyed it. At that time he was re-fronting a corner shop which was being turned into a private house. He told me he’d worked on the estate of houses when they were built when he was an apprentice forty-odd years before.

“Morfar?” Someone asked.

“My apologies, morfar means mother’s father. It was cold, bitterly cold, the ground was frozen solid down to half a metre, [twenty inches] and all my winter clothes were back at home. All that I had to wear was hopelessly inadequate. My teeth chattered, my knees knocked and my fingers and toes were blue and desperately sore. With fingers stupid from the numbing cold, I was chopping up an Edwardian oak fire surround to burn to make the tea on. Well you did in those days. Nowadays they are worth a considerable amount of money, but back then they were just firewood. You couldn’t use the cast iron ones because they didn’t burn, so they were just smashed up with a hammer and weighed in as scrap. They are worth even more than the wooden ones now.

Stan whispered to Alf, “The lad speaks better bloody English than any of us, Alf.”

“Excepting Sasha.” Alf whispered back.

“The tea was a revolting looking mahogany brew, but Morfar and his six men thought it wonderful. The recipe was simple. A big jerry can, or a large, burnt out, cast iron paint kettle which was what I was using, containing a gallon and a half [7litres, 15 US pints] of boiling water, four ounces [114g] of loose tea leaves, a pint [0.7litres, 1¼ US pints] of milk, the bottle was tall and thin and had a beer bottle type crown cap. It was called sterilised or UHT(6) milk by most people, but Morfar and his men called it tall milk, for the bottles were taller and narrower than the bottles pasteurised milk was sold in. A lot of persons referred to tall milk as ‘sterri’. All boiled up together with a couple of mugs full of sugar. Morfar and his men considered the use of teabags to be effeminate, all right for when their wives made tea at home, but they said no real man would consider using them! Using tea bags was in the same category as using an umbrella, carrying flowers or drinking half pints, something only effete southerners engaged in.”

“It was just the same here, Lad. Come to that it still is. We refer to them as talcum knackered southern jessies,” Alf informed him.

Aesir smiled obviously understanding the not so subtle implications of Alf’s remark. “ ‘How long do I boil it for?’ I asked.

“ ‘Till the leaves don’t come to the top any more, Son. Then it’ll be a good brew.’ In those days I didn’t speak English, which is why I liked being with Morfar, who was from Càirinis on North Uist and spoke Gaelic as his first language. Mormor,(7) my mother’s mother, unlike my parents who both spoke Gaelic and Swedish, our family languages, only spoke English. Pappa didn’t get on with Mormor, which made for embarrassing silences in the house, so I was glad to get out during the day with Morfar. I think the reason Pappa didn’t get on with her was because when he met Mamma he learnt Gaelic, and Mormor, who came from Edinburgh and was a terrible snob, considered it to be an inferior language and had never bothered.

“After twenty minutes of boiling the tea looked revolting, but it tasted like nectar. My enamelled metal mug just about warmed my hands, and the scalding tea re-fired my internal furnace. I’ve never been as cold before nor since, but that wonderfully disgusting brew has never been called for since either. I was never as glad to get back home, and to Lykke too, whom ten years later I married, where at least I had the clothes for the weather, and Sasha has told me to inform you that like him I had a full set of arctic furs and I still do.”

“And that’s one in the eye for all the PC, green peacing, whale and squirrel pickling, tree hugging, Earth befriending types,”(8) Sasha added. “I’m not the only bugger that likes to stay warm.”

There was a lot of laughter at Sasha’s remark, but even more approval of Aesir’s tale.

~o~O~o~

Sasha looked around and said “I thought I’d inject a bit of culture into this evening. Now, I’ve read that Shakespeare invented anything from four hundred and twenty to seventeen hundred words, though I’ve also read that many of them were probably in common usage in his day and he was merely the first person to document their usage. I’m not claiming to be in the same class in a literary sense as the Bard of Avon, but I’ve done my share of inventing words in a goodly few languages, so I thought I’d tell you about a few of my offerings in English. I’m sure a number of other folk would argue that I didn’t create all of these words and phrases, but to the best of my knowledge all were at the very least coined independently by me except of course the ones I don’t lay claim to. Some were created out of my ignorance of English, others for obvious reasons and some because I have a dirty mind, or so at least Pete’s good lady assures me. Some and I’ll explain as I go were as a result of me over hearing the likes of Hyacinth Bucket who insisted her name was pronounced Bouquet.(9)

“First off a definite Vetrov word, though it could have been coined by Elle. I’m not sure now. Higgers are work clothes, and higging is any activity that gets one filthy. The word derives from H,I,G, a Hole In the Ground. We were digging out a cellar at the time these words and their derivatives were coined. A snurge is not a word I coined though I did give it a new and extra definition as a joke to describe a compulsive bicycle seat sniffer. I was having a go at someone I wasn’t too fond of at the time. Perhaps my most contentious claim is that I coined the expression ‘brain dead’ as an insult during a vitriolic argument. The expression had only recently been adopted by the medical profession as a result of new technology, and certainly I had never heard the expression used thus when I first did. Another, but one that never caught on, was a ‘sea bed job’ meaning the lowest of the low. I have no intention of describing the circumstances, suffice it to say the conversation was with Elle when I coined the phrase ‘butterfly panties’ on seeing the shape a pair of split crutch knickers made when flattened out on a market stall. The expression is used in various ways by manufacturers of lingerie, but not thus.

“Squirrel picklers and whale picklers as I’m sure you are aware are terms of contempt I coined for the intolerant bastards who think it a legitimate political ploy to contaminate food stuffs. I mind some of them claiming to have put ground glass into jars of baby food back in the eighties some time. Funny thing is the thick bastards didn’t know ground glass is just sand and kids eat the stuff by the ton every year in kiddies’ sand pit play areas. In addition I believe their claim was never substantiated by investigations. Now powfagged, that means knackered or extremely tired, is not one of mine but it’s a word used by few other than myself. There’s a song about that called ‘I’m powfagged’ by The Five Penny Piece on Youtube, look it up for a laugh. Wuss is another I can’t lay claim to, but few use the word these days, pity really.

“Now we get to some of the things I’ve heard folk say over the years which I use in jest. Man get outs, was something I heard a woman say to her friend on a bus many years ago. She was talking about mange tout peas. Another woman I heard was trying to avoid using her rather broad Lancastrian accent. She was talking about demolition of some houses which would have been described in her native accent as ‘pooin tharses darn’. Pulling the houses down. She almost made it, but it came out as ‘pooing the houses down’ said with a decided plum in her mouth. It didn’t quite work. I’ve heard about folk drinking mine strone soup rather than minestrone, and even seen someone read out loud some dodgy hand writing as ‘John-John le Bleu’ which was supposed to be ‘Jam jar label’.

“While I’m at it I may as well relate the few expressions in my head at the moment. Expressions some use for folk in neighbouring towns. Folk in Leigh Lancashire, Leithers, which although it is pronounced Lay thers is spelt L,E,I,T,H E,R,S, refer to folk from Wigan, Wigginers, as ‘Pie aters’. The Pie aters, which in ‘English is Pie eaters’ refer to the Leithers as ‘Lobby goblers’ or ‘Pettydoorrappers’. By repute Wigginers eat a lot of savoury pies, many of them meat and potato pies which for obvious legal reasons these days have to be described as potato and meat pies, and Leithers eat a lot of a dish called Lobby which is a casserole born out of poverty in which the star attraction is also the humble potato. A petty is an outside lavatory, of the type that was common in the earlier half of the last century. A Pettydoorrapper was some one who rapped or knocked on a petty door. It is not clear why Leithers became known by this soubriquet.

“Jam eater is a term used by various folks to describe others as poverty stricken. Men who could only afford to take jam sandwiches for lunch to work. In Cumbria, Workington folk describe folk from Whitehaven as ‘jam eaters’. Interestingly Whitehaven folk describe Workington folk as ‘jam eaters’ too. However, I’ve heard that folk in other parts of the country use the expression to describe their neighbours too.

~o~O~o~

“I’ve got some bits and pieces that’ll keep us going for a few minutes,” Alf said as he emptied his glass and went behind the bar to pull himself another.

“Good man, Alf,” said Stan. “While you’re there pull me one too, Lad. Anybody else want one whilst Alf’s on the job?” Several of the men passed glasses over for refilling.

After all had a glass back in front of them Alf said, “It’ll be a goodly few years back this, cos I couldn’t have been thirty, but I must have close to it because I was still working for Bamford’s Agricultural Engineering. I’d gone out in the van to look at a Massey with knackered hydraulics. The farm was somewhere near Ulverston. Ulverston had been in Cumbria since the county reorganisation of seventy-six, but folk down there still got upset if you didn’t call it Ulverston Lancashire. I was having a cup of tea after having sorted the tractor, and was watching a battery technician sorting a big battery out on an Aveling Marshall crawler. By today’s standards it wasn’t particularly big, but at the time it was the biggest piece of kit I’d ever seen on a farm. The battery was made up of twelve separate lead acid two volt cells. Actually they’re two point two volts, but that arrangement is referred to as a twenty-four volt system. Technically a twelve volt car battery is thirteen point two volts. Each cell was in its own glass case, and they were sealed at the top with stuff that looked like hard tar. The entire assembly of twelve cells was housed in a fibre board box.

“The old bloke doing the job had cut the lead alloy cell connectors off the cell that had gone down and he replaced it with a fresh cell. He telt me they’d repair and recondition the dodgy cell back at the factory. He said the black stuff was pitch of some sort that set like rock, but it was easy enough to melt off. To seal a cell it was poured back on atop of a piece of cardboard filler around a breather tube for any excess gases to escape. He said the pitch set so fast that the cardboard was all that was required to stop it going down in to the cells. Batteries can produce oxygen and hydrogen from electrolysis of the water they contain which is why they need a drop of distilled water to top them up with sometimes. They need a breather tube to prevent an explosion from any pressure due to gas build up. What he did next scared the shit out of me. Why the hell he was bothered about a gas build up explosion is beyond me.

“He had an oxy set(10) on the back of his pick up to melt the battery posts and solder the cell connections back with, which is a dangerous enough procedure where there inevitably are oxygen and hydrogen in the perfect proportion for a gas explosion. I’ve seen it done many a time and though the worst I’ve ever seen was a small ‘pop’ from a bit of hydrogen burning off the potential for a bigger explosion blowing a battery up and covering anyone nearby in sulphuric acid exists. Hydrogen is a lot lighter than oxygen and the theory is because of that it disperses much faster than the oxygen thus rendering the process safe. I’ve been telt that hydrogen is so much lighter than air it disperses upwards, and gravity isn’t enough to keep it in the atmosphere so it’s lost to space. Oxygen is actually heavier than air which is about four fifths nitrogen which is a bit lighter than oxygen, so in theory oxygen disperses downwards away from the hydrogen. Which may or may not be true. I wouldn’t know. However, what is true is that batteries have exploded from the process, so it’s sensible to wear full protective gear if you insist on doing it at all. Personally I would only do it if I had to, and I’d empty all the acid out of the cells first, and wear appropriate protective clothing and gear. Then do the job, and finally replace the acid. The sulphuric acid in batteries is not stuff to treat with contempt.

“Battery terminals, or posts, are a soft lead alloy and they get damaged easily in service. The procedure for the battery post renewal is an appropriate mould is put round them, the post melted in the mould and a bit more lead is run in till the mould is full. Then a gadget that works like a pencil sharpener is used on the post to bring it down to size. The mould is the same for both posts but the pencil sharpeners are different sizes, cos positive posts are bigger than negative posts. Like I said I’ve seen it done many a time, but what I’ve never seen done was lighting the torch by holding the near end of the torch on one post and shorting the nozzle out on the other to spark the acetylene. Mental. The entire process is banned these days and with nutters like that about for good reason. Just thinking about it make my blood run cold, so I think I’ll try a drop of something to warm me up.”

“Calvados, Alf?” asked Pete.

“Aye. That’ll do the trick before I tell you about my next hair raising experience.” A few others joined Alf in a drop of something warming before he resumed. “I was only a bit of a kid, not long started my apprenticeship. We had a big cage outside the workshop made of at least inch and a half solid steel bars set maybe four inch apart in a square pattern. We used it for putting tractor tyres and the like in for inflating. We also used it for inflating all split rim wheels. Split rims are a type of wheel where you dropped the tyre over the big part of the wheel, which was a piece of cake and then the second part that effectively formed the other rim, called the locking ring, had to be slid back in to place which often wasn’t so easy because the bastards were made of spring steel and too big to go in. The idea was after you pushed the ring down past the lip they would sit snugly in the groove which was the right size for them and the inflated tyre would hold everything in place.

“To service one the best procedure is to jack the vehicle, let the air out, remove the valve, go for a cup of tea to ensure all the air is out when you return to the job. Then and only then lower the vehicle so that the wheel nuts can be removed. The damn things are bloody dangerous and very unforgiving. God alone knows how many folk they’ve killed. If there is any trace of air in the tyre after you loosen the ring with pry bars the air pressure, just a few pounds of pressure will do it, will cause the locking ring to fly off like a projectile. I don’t know what a typical ring weighs but I imagine twenty-five kilos [56 pounds] wouldn’t be far off the mark for a small one. Most waggon tyres operate at tyre pressures of anything from sixty psi(11) [400kPa] to a hundred and twenty psi [800kPa] inflation pressure, though I have heard of truck tyres that use two hundred psi [1400 kPa]. Even at only sixty psi nearly twelve tons of force pushes on the locking ring on the rim all the time. If the tyres ever become underinflated the rims can just fly of without warning because they need the properly inflated tyre to hold them in place.

“As apprentices we were all a bit pissed off that we had to roll a wheel outside to inflate them. It was particularly irritating when it was pissing down. Some were massively heavy and required a few of us to push them suspended by a hoist. Quarry vehicles usually had cast wheel centres rather than ones made from thick stamped steel sheet and were water ballasted too. That’s three-quarters of the tyre volume was water. It’s a lot of weight in a big tractor wheel. Some of the bigger ones must have been over two tons. [2000Kg, 4480 pounds] Then we had to man handle the wheels into the cage again using a puller to get the bigger ones in. Then lock the cage door before finally inflating the tyre. The tyre would be left at least an hour before it could be inspected from outside the cage and finally extracted. We apprentices all did it to the letter of the correct procedure because any mechanic who saw us doing other wise would kick our arses with no fear of recriminations from the management.

“It was a sunny afternoon and we were all having our afternoon break outside and enjoying a kickabout.(12) Telling you, Lads, what a fucking bang. A not particularly big split rim wheel had been inflated just before we went for our brew. The rim had bent some of the bars of the cage when it flew off. I think some of the younger apprentices turned green. I’m damned sure I did. Cool as a cucumber Old Arnie the shop foreman was as he said, ‘Never mind, Lads, you can get a bit of practice with the oxy when you’re heating and straightening those bars.’ If it were up to me I’d outlaw split rims because it used to happen at least twice a year. There is however another type of wheel referred to as a split rim where the parts of the wheels are bolted together, most appear to be smaller mag-alloy(13) wheels, but never having had any dealings with them I don’t have an opinion concerning them one way or the other.”

“A drop more Calvados, Alf?”

“Aye, why not?”

“I’d better fetch a few more bottles of the rare stuff from the cellar, Lads. Any requests?”

“Fetch half a dozen of mine,” said a familiar voice from the far end of the room.

“Michael, it’s good to see you. What are you doing here?”

“I’m under orders, Pete. Out on the arm.(14) Mavis is next door catching up on what’s going on.” Michael Graham was the local police sergeant and was born and reared in Bearthwaite as was his good lady, Mavis. We’re stopping the night, so Mavis doesn’t miss anything. That’s why I’m here, as to what I’m doing here. I’m listen to Alf telling tales at the moment. Ah! Stan’s back with a dozen bottles. I’ve been drinking that Genever at home, so I’ll try the Calvados for a change, Stan.”

A few minutes later Alf said, “This is the last one from me for a while, Lads. Again it’s from when I was working at Bamford’s, but when I’d nearly finished my apprenticeship. We had a special test bench in an enclosed small workshop for any work on diesel fuel systems. Any work on fuel pumps or anything else had to be done in there. The entire area was spotlessly clean to avoid any shit getting in to damage components, some of which are matched to a tenth of a thou. [0.0001 inch, 0.00254mm]. Now stuff couldn’t be machined to tolerances that fine in those days, so they used the finest and most sensitive measuring equipment available, women’s fingers. The procedure for in line fuel pumps was the blocks were reamed to as fine a finish as possible and the plungers that went in them were likewise produced. The whole assembly was done under paraffin, I heard some producers used diesel. The women wore nitrile rubber gloves, the acid in a finger print was said to completely ruin a component, and tried plungers in turn in each cylinder till by moving them side to side they found a perfect fit. Any plunger that wouldn’t go in was put to one side till they found a cylinder big enough to match it. I don’t know if it’s done that way now, but that was the best that could be done then.

“Any engine that had had fuel system work done on it was tested in there. If the engine was still in a vehicle it was fitted with a snorkel powered by a fan over the exhaust to remove the smoke and the whole area was under a slight pressure to ensure air left the area rather than entered it. The fuel to supply the diesel pump was provided by a small tank of less than a gallon in capacity. The fuel line was entirely visible and it ran over a bench to which was chained a pair of bolt croppers to cut the line with in case of emergency. The croppers were chained down, so they could not be removed. They weren’t even removed when they were fitted with new jaws, though I believe that had only been necessary once. All this was necessary to be able to shut a diesel engine down as rapidly as possible if it started to ‘run away’. Run away happens when the engine is not being governed correctly which is not always due to a faulty governor as this tale will demonstrate. When a diesel engine is working properly it tends to run faster which draws more fuel which makes it run faster. It’s a positive feedback system, so something has to control, or govern, the engine. If allowed to run away with itself, eventually, and it doesn’t take long, the engine will self destruct, often explosively.

“There are a couple of ways a diesel engine can be stopped, one is to cut off its air supply and the other is to cut off its fuel supply, hence the bolt croppers. Diesel engines operate at much higher compression ratios than petrol engines. Petrol engines typically compress an air petrol vapour mixture together which then requires a spark to make it ignite in the cylinders and cause the engine to run. Diesel engines compress the air much tighter and it becomes hot enough to ignite the diesel which is injected in via an atomising jet referred to as an injector. You can demonstrate the principle easily enough. If you pump a bicycle pump with your finger over the outlet it gets hot from the compression. There is thus no possibility of stopping a diesel engine by disconnecting the sparking mechanism because it doesn’t have one. That’s not the entire story, but it’ll serve to get the fundamentals of the idea across.

“That morning we had an engine on test and it had been running nicely for twenty minutes or so when we heard the sound of an engine run away. It was a sound few of us had ever heard for real but we’d all heard and seen videos of it happening at college. It’s been described differently by different folk, but to me it’s like the high pitched sound effect they use for bombs dropping in the movies, not the explosion, but the sound as the bombs are falling before they reach terminal velocity which only happens when the air resistance counter balances the effect of gravity. Till that point the noise rapidly gets higher and higher pitched. The two lads working in there had tried to stop it. The rag one put over the air intake had been sucked in without any noticeable effect. The other lad had cut the fuel line just before it entered the pump, with again no effect. At that point the pair of them left as rapidly as they could run. The engine blew up and metal shrapnel came through the four inch cement block wall. Some of the pieces of metal hit three of the lads working in the main workshop. They were all taken to hospital, but fortunately none had serious injuries.

“Then came the issue of the health and safety at work inspectorate investigation. Bastards were desperate to pin it on the two lads working in there insisting they must have been incompetent. It was the two from the inspectorate that were incompetent. One of our lads, Bert, had been working on diesels for over forty years, and he was the one we youngsters wanted to be like eventually. It was Bert who finally worked out what had happened. The oil in the sump was pretty degraded, so it vaporised more easily than it should have done. Once the engine started to run away it had created a relative vacuum in the sump which enabled the oil to evaporate more easily still, and the engine was burning the vapour as fuel. The engine ran faster creating more vacuum hence more fuel for the engine and so on. A positive feedback that the governor had no effect on. After that any engine on test had an oil change before starting it up. That’s me, Lads.”

“Good tales, Alf. Tales of the best sort, ones that remind someone else of another tale. I’ll let those dogs out and pick up the next one if that’s agreeable, Lads? It’ll keep if someone else wants to follow Alf.”

“Looks like you’re up next, Harry.” Pete looked around and added, “I’ll just pull a few pints and let any that need the back(15) have a few minutes.”

Eventually Harry who was an owner driver of an artic [US eighteen wheeler] said, “The events in this tale took place round Darwen Lancashire somewhere. It happened a long time ago, and I just can’t remember where. I was picking up a load of weirdly shaped pipes for the refinery at Ellesmere Port from a spot that specialised in fabricating that kind of stuff. You couldn’t get a decent load on in terms of weight because there were bits sticking out all over the place. I’d picked up there once before. It would have been lunch time when I arrived, and I settled down to wait for a crane operator. I was in no rush. I’d got some bait(16) and a flask of tea with me. I’d just finished eating, and was on my second mug of tea when a bloke came up and said, ‘I’ll load you, Mate.’ I thought he was the crane operator, so I nodded and unloaded my ratchet straps, chains, and load binders. [US chain binders] I think the load binders were referred to as Silvesters, but that could have been the make, or then again I could be talking rubbish due to my faulty memory. I do remember they were lever not ratchet types.

“I knew something was wrong when I saw that bloke slew the crane boom over in my direction far to fast. The pulley block, which must have had a weight of going on quarter of a ton, [250Kg, 560 pounds] was far too low and swinging completely out of control. He was clearly no more a crane operator than I was. Not far away was a loading bay with a load of oxygen and acetylene cylinder upright next to the edge. It was the oxy in your battery tale that reminded me of this one, Alf. I dived down on the ground on the far side of my waggon from the loading bay and I heard the pulley block take the cylinders out like a cluster of pins at a bowling alley. Looking underneath the waggon I watched as the cylinders headed for the ground. The whole event seemed to be in slow motion and to take forever. The acetylene cylinders being at the front hit the ground on their rounded shoulders, and then the bottom of the cylinders fell to the ground too, and they just stayed there. The oxy cylinders being farther back hit the edge of the loading bay first. That upended them so they hit the ground perfectly to knock the valves off. Now, a full BOC(17) oxy welding cylinder is at 2540 psi, [17500 kPa] and those bastards took off like torpedos going upwards and towards the factory wall. Straight through a nine inch block wall, through the factory and straight through the nine inch block wall on the far side. Not long after that they must have run out of propellant and as they dropped out of the sky they ended up in a field at least a quarter of a mile away.”

“What happened then,” asked a clearly fascinated Alf.

“Not a lot for a while. A bloke came out and loaded me. He obviously was a crane operator. I kind of secured the load, and was about to get the hell out of there when some bloke in a suit wanted me to give him the details of what happened. I telt him I didn’t know. I said I was eating my bait and not looking in that direction at the time. I wasn’t for getting involved. If their organisation was so piss poor that could happen I wanted no part of cleaning up the bloody fall out. I was out of there as soon as I could be with an inadequately secured load which I sorted out properly on a service station forecourt a quarter of a mile away. I reckon I got lucky to survive it, and I never took a load from there again. I’ve another just come to me if any want to hear it? Not dangerous, but just as crazy.

Pete said, “Keep going, Harry Lad. You ready for another drop of hard stuff?”

Harry replied with a question, “You got any of that Highland Park left, Sasha?”

“No. Some coming next week I think. I got a couple of cases of Lagavulin and a couple of Dalwhinnie if you’ve a mind to either.”

“I’ll try the Lagavulin, Please.” Harry looked at the clock over the bar and said, “This next one isn’t long should just about get us to supper time.”

“Hellfire, tonight’s flown away, Lads,” remarked Stan.

“It’s what happens on a good night,” Phil said philosophically.

“I’d not been driving long. That trip I was running Aberdeen Angus and Highland cattle down from the highlands destined for Smithfield market in the city of London for some organisation that specialised in complex delivery schedules. I took the loaded livestock trailer down to Scratchwood services on the M1 just outside London, dropped it for another waggon to hitch up to and take into the city. He was already there waiting; he said he’d been there twenty minutes. I waited nearly an hour for a bloke to drop a thirty-three foot flat bed trailer for me to go in to Chelsea with. I was picking up a load of bacon and hams from what I remember as Brown and Knight’s curing house, but again I could be remembering it wrongly. I do remember the trailer must have used for picking up coils of wire from Irlam steel works which is now long gone to take to what was Rylands nail works in Warrington. The coils of wire were still damned hot when they were loaded and before they cooled they burnt characteristic groves in the wooden trailer beds. The wire settled in the grooves and the load was more stable as a result.

“I picked up the cured pork and prepared to dogleg back and forth across the country on a long and slow route back north. The only compensation was the money was damned good. Salted pork is slimy, and it is said to sweat, hence the expression sweating like a pig. Pigs don’t start to sweat till they’ve been slaughtered and brined for a while. A side of bacon is referred to as a flitch and four flitches or four hams were wrapped up in hessian and roughly stitched with sisal twine. I say roughly stitched because the stitches were four to six inches apart. The hessian wasn’t a sack it was just a big square of stuff and after it was folded in half over the bacon or hams it was stitched top, side and bottom purely to stop the meat falling out. They had to wrap the stuff up like that or it would have been unhandleable due to the slime. I think I had seven or eight drops, all at upper class spots like Littlewoods or M & S(18).

“The entire trip was pretty unremarkable really except at Derby. I’d been telt that the approach to wherever it was I was dropping at Derby was impossible without a copper stopping the traffic for you. You had to reverse in off the main road round a pair of tight S bends and avoid knocking down the corrugated iron shanty that was owned by the cantankerous old man who selt newspapers out of it, and you needed the entire road, both sides, to do it. Apparently the store had offered him huge amounts of money for what was no more than a six by eight metal shed that was falling apart, but he wouldn’t have any of it. I heard when he died his grandkids took the money fast enough. After negotiating the shed and the S bends it was a tight fit to get the trailer reversed up to the loading bay. Well I found a copper easily enough, and he grinned and said, ‘You a waggon driver wanting to back off the road round Ernie’s shed?’ It would have been about half five in the morning and once I was backed up to the loading bay I couldn’t find anyone about, so I knocked on till an old bloke arrived. I telt him I’d a load of bacon. He said, ‘Just put it down there, Driver. The day lads will take in in after they’ve had a brew. We don’t have keys to the doors and there’s not enough room to put it on the bay and then open the doors. They open outwards because it’s tight for space inside.’ Christ above, they’d obviously never heard of roller doors.

“All over the place were big signs saying, ‘NO SPITTING’. The old man had a cold and was hawking up big green lumps of phlegm like he was trying to get rid of his lungs. In addition, the yard where he’d suggested I threw the load was crushed hardcore, like temporary car parks are after the houses have been knocked down and they’ve just levelled the site with a dozer. Like a car park of that type that’s been in use for a while there were potholes full of water, and every one was slicked with a film of oil. You could tell from the metallic sheen that constantly changed colour. I must have looked horrified at his suggestion, and I said, ‘I can’t do that.’ He took that to mean I was saying ‘I’m a driver. I don’t load or unload anything,’ which was becoming more commonplace then. ‘Sorry, Mate,’ he said. ‘I’ll get some of the lads.’ I watched his mates threw the load on the floor into the oil slicked potholes, phegm and all. I asked one of the lads, ‘What happens to that before it gets selt?’ He shrugged and said, ‘Pressure washer will cure that.’ I thought that was bad, but I’ve heard a lot worse since concerning food and the places that prepare and sell it.’

“Supper in five or ten, Gentlemen. Chicken and mushroom pies with penne pasta and mushroom sauce tonight. The pies are a bit on the small side, cos we misplaced the big pie press and had to use the small one, so it’s two apiece. We’ve found the big one now. I’d be obliged if you cleared one of the smaller tables, so I can leave an oven tray on it with the spare pies.”

“I’ll sort it for you, Harriet Love.”

“Thanks, Dad.”

~o~O~o~

After supper all looked round to see if there were any more tales forthcoming. Denis said, “Harry talking about that bacon reminded me of a tale a mate of mine telt me years ago. It was when his lad was at university and had come home for the holidays. He’d got a holiday job at a frozen food place that made burgers. He did tell me who owned the spot, but I forget now. I do recall it was a supposedly decent make, like Findus or Birds Eye. I recall my mate telling me after his first shift at work his lad never ate a burger again.”

~o~O~o~

“Aye,” agreed Charlie, “there’s a gey(19) load of bullshit in the food industry. I mind when I drove lettuce to London every now and again we’d take a load down to Mac Fisheries; in Farnworth I think they were. Mac Fisheries had disappeared by nineteen eighty, but they insisted that every lettuce was packed in a plastic bag on the farm to ensure ‘farm freshness’ and quality. The pickers worked in pairs. One wore a belt with a couple of hundred plastic bags on it. The belt had two wires pointing forward and the bags had two small holes in to match. The picker with the bags walked backwards down the rows holding each bag out for the other picker who had the knife to cut the lettuce stem and pushed the lettuce into the bag with enough force to rip the bag off the wires. The lettuce dropped to the ground to be picked up and put in a cardboard box with eleven others by a follow up team. The boxes were then loaded onto a waggon.

So far, so good. A waggon stacked up to the sky with cardboard boxes is not the best load, and nothing used pallets in those days, so we used use corner boards which are two six by one pieces of timber laid may be half a foot apart and connected by three webbing straps. They’d be maybe six foot long. One goes on the top of the boxes, the other drops down over the side. You use them all the way down each side of the load. You brace the outside of the bottom of the load with eight by four sheets of shuttering ply long edge down. The load is roped down by placing the ropes between a pair of boxes and the rope is prevented from going anywhere by the corner boards. I always used a waggoner’s hitch with a double half hitch half sheep shank as the upper loop. [US a particular version of a trucker’s hitch] This of course was before ratchet straps were widely used. After that the entire load was sheeted and roped again. The problem is someone has to be on top of the load before the sheeting to manage the ropes and the corner boards, and those cardboard boxes aren’t designed to take even a kid’s weight. So the bloke on top is regularly putting his boots through a box. Which wouldn’t be so bad if he hadn’t just been milking and got his wellington boots covered in cow shit. Which was a frequent occurrence. All of which meant those plastic bags were pretty point less really, but the shit would have been full of ‘farm freshness’, or maybe it was the ‘farm freshness that was full of shit.

“I mind once on that run a quarter of a load dropped off the back end of the waggon as I went round Banbury cross. I never saw Lady Godiva,(20) but then I was too busy to look. I threw an extra waggon sheet over the load, roped it down and just got out of there as fast as I could. I worried for a bit because the boxes had the farm they came from all over them, but I never heard about the incident again.”

Charlie’s tale caused a ripple of mirth to go round the audience, most had had some sort of similar experience with food at some point in their lives.

~o~O~o~

John added, “Trouble is unless you hear the tale from someone you trust it’s hard to know how much of that kind of story is true and how much is urban myth. There were always tales going round the Manchester area of workers at the Lucozade factory in Little Hulton, known as LH, pissing into the stuff. It was widely known that LH was a den of iniquity. It was run by gangs who had sex with bits of kids not old enough for secondary school,(21) controlled all the drugs and who drove all decent folk out. You simply couldn’t sell a house there. Fire engines and ambulances wouldn’t go there without a full police escort because they’d be firebombed with Molotov cocktails. It had happened a few times. The police couldn’t provide the escort, so the fire and ambulance services simply didn’t go there. Their employers knew the staff would leave before putting their lives on the line. The police said it wasn’t a no go area, but everyone knew they only went in in force and with full riot equipment. The bus companies had withdrawn all services, and all the shops including the pubs had closed and been burnt out. There were areas in parts of the world where civil wars raged that were in better condition.

“After some druggies raped a midwife when they discovered her black bag was mostly full of dressings and contained no drugs there was no health service there either. Even the medical centre closed. And the inhabitants who’d never made any attempt to control their kids never stopped whining that nobody ever did anything for them. The schools were like fortresses and had high staff turnovers when they could get staff at all. Even the lucozade factory shut in nineteen ninety-three. I suspect nobody pissed in the lucozade, but it was what folk from elsewhere thought the workers there would do. They wanted to believe the worst of them, and it’s really hard to get a job with an LH address. Look it up on Youtube. Sure there are plenty of houses advertised as model properties, but look at the bleaker stuff too. Try searching Youtube for ‘Little Hulton inbreeding louts’. You’ll need to turn any net nanny you’ve got installed for the kids off. Don’t forget to turn it back on again. The place isn’t two miles across in any direction, so living there you can’t be far away from hell.”

“Aye you’re right, John. What with urban myths and fake news you just don’t know what to believe these days. You hear youngsters talking about how many friends they’ve got on the internet, but I doubt that it is possible to have internet friends, for in the internet there lies no reality. You can never even know who you’re really talking to. All these kiddie grooming scandals confirm that. I do accept it is possible to have internet folk who say they think well of one, though they’re not friends as I understand the word.” Pete looked around and continued, “These are my friends. Folk I can see, folk I can trust, folk I can tell are full of it with out causing any offence and perhaps more importantly folk who know that when they tell me I’m full of it know that I won’t be offended either.”

There was a murmur of agreement with Pete, and more than a few comments to the effect of, “Aye you hit that nail on the head, Pete.”

Stan asked, “Any more tales? Or is it time to get the dominoes out?”

“Well it’s not exactly a tale, so much as a query tacked on to the end of a bit of a tale,” Sasha stated. “Elle and I have both had our two Covid jabs. When the text came through for the flu jab it only mentioned me. So I went on my own and queued for nearly an hour. The queue was right across the surgery car park and half way back again. Eventually I was jabbed, and I asked about Elle. They gave me some nonsense about a bureaucratic mix up with the phone numbers. I didn’t say anything. As you know I don’t have a mobile. It was Elle’s phone they’d texted for the Covid jabs and my flu jab. They said to bring Elle down and they’d do her. I did, but she wasn’t too good on her pins that day, so she waited in the rover while I queued for nearly an hour again. I’d seen them going out to cars to jab others who weren’t too clever on their legs, and that’s what they did. The quack jabbed her in the rover. I’m still waiting for supplies of the pneumonia vaccine to come in for that. Elle had it last year, but I was somewhere else at the time. My query is has any one heard anything about the Covid booster jab? Because it’s been in the media for days that it’s supposedly available, but I got the same old nonsense when I rang the surgery. The pre-recorded voice said to hang up and they’ll tell us when to go down for it.”

Charlie replied, “Susanna said she’s heard the texts are going out next Wednesday. I think she’s getting cynical in her old age. She reckoned they were sending them out on Wednesday because the surgery is shut all day every Wednesday for staff training, so they get an extra day with no phone calls to deal with. She doesn’t know when we can go down to get jabbed, or even if they are operating a drop in any time system rather than making appointments, but the texts on Wednesday will inform us what we’ve to do. The two Covid jabs were appointments, but the flu jab was a drop in any time. The reason Susanna doesn’t know any more is because the lass that let her know that didn’t know any more herself. She said the doctors were saying it hadn’t been decided yet. Which she didn’t believe, but couldn’t really do anything about because she’s a nurse just helping them out on a temporary basis.”

~o~O~o

“I think that’s it for the tales, Lads. I’ll start pulling pints, if someone will take the money, and the rest of you can set the dominoes up.

.

1 OG, UK version of Ob/Gyn. Obstetrics and Gynaecology.
2 Squirrel pickler, pejorative term for conservationists and their like. It comes from the concept of preserving squirrels by pickling them.
3 DA, a reference to D. A. Harrison, the largest Ready-Mix concrete supplier in Cumbria. Known to most in the area as simply DA [dee ay] they operate plants at numerous sites in Cumbria.
4 Tant, Auntie.
5 Morfar, mother’s father.
6 Ultra-high temperature, or UHT milk comes in sterilized containers. It has a shelf life of several months. UHT milk is heated to a higher than usual pasteurization temperature for a few seconds.
7 Mormor, mother’s mother.
8 PC, green peacing, whale and squirrel pickling, tree hugging, Earth befriending types. Sasha is on a comprehensive rant against some but by no means all that he despises. The references are, PC – politically correct, green peacing – Green Peace, Whale and squirrel pickling – reference being to those stupid enough to think that pickling is a type of conservation, tree hugging – reference obvious or perhaps to Prince Charles, earth befriending – reference to Friends of the Earth. Sasha is not against most of the aims of those organisations, but his is avowedly against fanatics and those organisations contain a goodly few, too many in his opinion.
9 Hyacinth Bucket, née Walton, who insists her last name is pronounced as “Bouquet”, is the main character in the BBC sitcom Keeping Up Appearances. She is the epitome of a snob, perpetually but hopelessly trying to climb the social ladder and forever trying to impress her neighbours and friends.
10 Oxy set, an oxy acetylene torch.
11 Psi, pounds per square inch.
12 Kickabout, an impromptu game of soccer, often using coats to mark the goal posts.
13 Mag-alloy, magnesium aluminium alloy.
14 To be out on the arm is to be escorting ones wife or girlfriend. It implies shaved and dressed up.
15 The back, vernacular for the Gents’. US men’s restroom or bathroom.
16 Bait colloquial usage for a working man’s meal when at work.
17 BOC, British Oxygen Company.
18 M & S, Marks and Spencer.
19 Gey, usually means very, but here the meaning of a ‘gey load’ is ‘a great deal’.
20 Lady Godiva, the reference is to the nursery rhyme. Ride a cock horse to Banbury Cross, To see a fine lady upon a white horse, With rings on her fingers and bells on her toes, She shall have music wherever she goes. It is not known who the white lady refers to, but one of the many explanations put forward is that it was Lady Godiva Countess of Mercia who was reputed to have ridden naked through nearby Coventry.
21 Not old enough for secondary school, children in the UK go to secondary school when they are eleven.