Thursday 1st March 2007:
Spring is here and with it will come the arrival of various wildlife and other nature related material which come out of hibernation at this time of the year. I was exceptionally
privileged this morning to witness a rare sighting of the Lesser Spotted Somerset Standard Early On A Thursday Morning creature! These rare animals had gathered inside our side door and were there to greet me this morning when I arrived for the
first time in ages. I shared this welcome sight with many of our customers, most of whom were equally thrilled to see these black and white things which haven't been seen for around six weeks. Bill Oddie would have loved it! (Sarcastic hat off now!)
Friday 2nd March 2007: Back to winter today as it's actually pretty cold out there this morning. Some of the kids are off school today so they are
coming in a bit later than usual, although I daresay at homes around the area
various parents are having to wrench their offspring out of bed with a crowbar. Our local daily paper (Western Daily Press) has a free catalogue inside it which made stacking them interesting this morning and we were close to a collapse more than once. Our magazines have been drastically mis-packed this morning with a number of mags missing and some sent in error that we don't need. Indeed we have seven copies of a certain magazine that we rarely even sell one of!
Saturday 3rd March 2007: The walk to work today gave more insights to the lifestyles of the drunk and shameless! I didn't even
spot the woman who was tapping numbers into her mobile, however when she started to talk (shout) you could barely fail to hear. She
told the person on the other end of the phone that she was, "On the steps." There was then a pause before, "You know where they are.
The steps!" - another pause before, "Well these steps. The ones that I'm stood on!" Tommy Cooper in his prime could not have done much
better! As for the papers, no major problems to report. Everything in on time, only one DVD/CD and that was actually a decent film
for a change (The Killing Fields) thanks to the Times.
Sunday 4th March 2007: With my usual Sunday sidekick away for the weekend, my wife said she'd help me out so I drove to work
and I think she was enlightened as to the `other world` that exists between us going to bed and getting
up. Among those getting their knuckles
stood on as they walked home from the pubs and clubs were two youngish girls with mini-skirts up to their armpits walking (presumably home?) alone
and two young lads sat on the pavement at the top of a road having a chat. This was at 3:30am so I'm sure the owners of whatever
house they were outsider were extremely grateful. Paper wise, a bit of a mix-match with all papers and rounds out on time but a few
Mail mags in their slippery wrapping went adrift with some customers not receiving them. One paper was left on a doorstep as requested, however
whilst it was dry when our lad delivered it, it began raining heavily between then and the customer getting up, resulting in a
paper Mache
version of the Sunday Times! These trials and tribulations are sent to try us.
Tuesday 6th March 2007: A deliverers nightmare today as regards the weather with strong winds and heavy rain to greet us in the early hours. Papers were nicely on time so that helped. One of our lads is
away for the next three days which means a bit of extra work for one of our early adults. All this week we have roadworks literally right outside our office window which in turn means the road is closed which in turn means there are Road Closed and Diversion signs everywhere (although the `diversion` sends traffic down arguably the
narrowest street in the town!). Unfortunately the strong winds blew half the signs over throughout the night so when we arrived, we were faced with what looked like a giant metal 3D jigsaw!
Wednesday 7th March 2007: A true miracle was witnessed around South Parade over the last 24 hours. The roadworks which were due to close the road for a week have mysteriously disappeared! Of course, it could be that aliens have abducted the workmen to clog up the motorway between Saturn and Jupiter (always a pain at rush hour anyway!) or it could be that they've finished ahead of schedule. I'm stuck as to which is the more unlikely. I had a `gross out` moment earlier when I glanced at the front of Garden News to see they were giving away free SALIVA seeds! Now I'm not a gardener but thoughts of seeds covered in some kind of organic spit didn't do much for me over my corned beef sandwich, However when I looked closer, I saw that they are actually SALVIA seeds! I still don't know what they are but it makes me feel a bit better. Oh yes, papers later today (almost 5am) but everything in. I blame Liverpool for beating poor Barcelona.
Thursday 8th March 2007: There's a lot I could say about the Standards today and a lot I'd like to say, however it's a family site
so I'll just say that they were late again (10:15am - about two and a half hours AFTER our last round went out) and that if the words `Standard` and `free coffee` are ever mentioned in the same
sentence again, it'll be too soon! Indeed Denise has drained Boots of valium this morning I think! Anyway, that aside everything seemed
to have gone okay-ish. Papers were on time apart from the great unmentionables and all the deliverers were on the ball and in with
no problems which in truth is the case most of the time. One of the (only) benefits of starting so early is that we are all done
by early afternoon. Just as well after today I think.
Friday 9th March 2007: I reckon that our working area out the back where we do the papers up in the morning is an extension of the Burmuda Triangle as things tend to go missing on a regular basis. One of our early adults lost his knife today (he calls it Mack - ask someone older if you don't understand!) and we've lost two pairs of scissors in recent weeks (Scissor sisters maybe??). However, every cloud has a silver lining and to temporarily replace his lost knife, our man brought in a bigger one, nicknamed yes, you've guessed it, Big Mac(k) (with apologies to a certain fast food establishment if I've infringed copyright. Equally, when we bought a replacement pair of scissors, it had the warning on the back, "May have sharp edges!" I should hope so to! Work wise, all was well after yesterday's fun and games although the Mail have pre-warned us for tomorrow that there is a free DVD of Alice In Wonderland with the paper. I can't wait.
Saturday 10th March 2007: Wow, these papers are heavy today! The Tele and Mail both have polybagged inserts which contain all sorts of additional stuff and the Indy are giving away another free book! This time it's `Improve Your English In Seven Days!` It seems to be aimed at grammar and punctuation rather than anything else but it cannot be targetted at us poor West Country folk as we all talk proper and dont make no mistakes. Whilst the papers were a little later (nothing drastic though) one of our Saturday helpers asked if I'd mind looking on the Net for a Blackburn Rovers away shirt! As a Leeds fan this goes straight against my prinicpals, however I bowed down to pressure (she is bigger than me!) and we found some on the official club web site. I've done a few strange things at 4:30am but never bought a Blackburn away shirt online I must admit. In the confirmation email, it was called a large SS away shirt so we're now trying to work out what the` SS` stands for. My suggestion was `s**t shirt` but it could be wrong!
Sunday 11th March 2007: One of our deliverers was away today having
managed to get tickets to the rugby and as he does an awful lot of papers
for us on a Sunday, I hoped for an early arrival to get a flyer. I'd just finished doing the NotW and Times
inserts when I heard a van outside at 4am. Unfortunately whilst it was the main batch of papers, our driver also brought bad news as
the Mail on Sunday was on a re-run. Whilst I did managed to get started on the round before 5:30am, it meant breaking off for almost
an hour when the Mail eventually arrived at 6:30am. It's situations like this that makes me wonder how we ever managed before the
widespread arrival of mobile phones as mine was absolutely invaluable today. Around a month ago, we got ourselves a car to do deliveries
and general run-around stuff in. It's 10 years old but it does what we need it to do. The one downside is that the reverse gear
is in a different place (bottom right) on the gear stick to the car I usually drive (top left). This was never more evident today when I
went to reverse outside our entrance and forgot which car I was driving and shot forward instead of back, narrowly missing a German
Sheppard dog! It could have been worse, if it had been the other way around and I meant to go forward and went back instead, I'd have
gone straight through the window of the fabric shop next door. I'll not live this down though and each time I came back after the
incident, my colleague insisted on waving his arms and yelling, "Reverse is that way!"
Tuesday 13th March 2007: It's the 13th today and, true to form, it was unlucky as we had our biggest local daily - Western Daily Press - on a re-run. They arrived just after 7am, however this meant all of the early adults coming back and effectively going round twice, whilst some of the kids had already been and gone and couldn't come back due to school commitments. With the better part of 200 WDP to deliver, we battled through and despite getting caught up with school traffic, the majority were done by 8:30am. It got no better at home in truth later in the day when I thought I'd closed the oven door when it had actually slowly swung back open again. Subsequently I walked straight into it yet somehow managed to keep the plate of food in my hands despite looking like Bambi on ice! Roll on April 13th!
Wednesday 14th March 2007: All papers in today which helped hugely and raised spirits among the pre-breakfast club to the point that one of our early ladies came in from helping unload the van with a box of magazines asking frantically if I could take it from her as it was heavy. Now, these things
are solid and you have no idea what's inside until you open the lid, so in an attempt to aid the damsel in distress, I braced myself to grab the box with all it's weight only to become the victim of a practical joke as the darn thing was no heavier than a tin of beans! I didn't topple backwards but it was close and would probably have put yesterday's oven incident totally in the shade. I'll get my own back. Maybe not this week or this month, but I will get my own back...
Thursday 15th March 2007: Standards were in on time today, in fact they were here when I arrived! Do not adjust your monitors,
you did read that correctly. So, we could say that they've on time for 66% of the time in March or for just 25% in the last two months.
Is your glass half full or half empty? Either way they are here today and that's all we ask. Did anyone else see in the papers that
Heather Mills-McCartney saw fit to raid a farm in the dead of night to make a protest about the treatment of pigs? The farmer is
furious as his two kids are now terrified that people are wandering around their land in the middle of the night. There is a right
way and wrong way to make a protest and just because you are rich and famous (albeit through divorce) it doesn't give anyone the
right to willingly break the law. My wife mentioned that the farmer should press charges against Ms Mills-McCartney and then added,
without thinking, "She wouldn't have a leg to stand on!"
Friday 16th March 2007: Papers were unusually late today, arriving at 5am. Still everything was in and it's rare to be that late so no complaints really. As I type, it's getting light and the sun is desperately trying
to pierce through the clouds. Unfortunately, this wasn't the case three hours ago when I got up and walked the dog before coming into work when it was absolutely pi... - raining very hard. Things weren't helped when I got back in home after the early morning canine wander, took his lead off and then waited for the traditional shake as he dried himself in the only way dogs know. Oddly it never came until the second that I took my already wet coat off and then he went for it and showered my dry clothes with a mixture of rain and dog hair and you would be surprised at how much rain these
golden retrievers can hold in their fur!
Saturday 17th March 2007: No free DVD/CDs with the papers today which made a nice change although the Tele have made up for it with an extra insert, giving us five sections to put together again. One of our adults was away today so I did a couple of rounds with help from my daughter who wanted to come along for the ride. Credit to her, she did do a few deliveries herself which helped, however in a typical `teenage lack of tact moment`, she came away from one house and stated at the top of her voice that they hadn't cleaned their porch out since she last delivered their last summer! Perhaps I'll remind her of that the next time I ask her to tidy her room!
Sunday 18th March 2007: Some early morning excitement today as there were blue flashing light illuminating the street as I
walked to work. When I got to the office door, there was a police car parked on the patch of tarmac outside the fabric shop next door
and a breakdown truck just hoisting a car onto it. As it was still dark I couldn't really see what had happened, however when daylight
came there has obviously been a smash of some kind as there is loads of pieces of glass, wing mirror fragments and various other
bits of car(s) in the parking area and in the gutter. My first thought would be someone going too fast down our straight stretch of
road but this is sadly the way of the world now. Only yesterday whilst doing papers in the town, I noticed an established local cafe
had had their window smashed overnight. Such a shame that these nocturnal pillocks insist of inflicting misery on everyone else.
Tuesday 20th March 2007: Stroll on it's cold today as winter has returned. We even had a brief snow flurry around 5:30am! Some more bad news today as another locally owned Frome shop is closing this week. Whether it's to do with the mass influx of all in one supermarkets to the the area, then who knows but the days of having to go to a newsagent to buy a paper are long gone when you can easily pick one up at Asda or Sainsburys. We have the advantage of doing the one thing (deliveries) that supermarkets wouldn't touch with a ten foot barge pole but it is sadlt rapdily getting to the stage when you can count the number of Independantly run stores on the fingers of one hand.
Wednesday 21st March 2007: Another cold one today but at least the wind has dropped. One of our early adults has been taking his dog on his rounds since he started with us a couple of years back and until recently, he's sat quietly and patiently in the car waiting for his master to return with his stack of papers. This is still the case now until he takes the first bundle of papers back to his car when said dog starts to howl at the top of his canine voice whilst his master returns back and forth between car and sorting room to get the rest of the papers. We're thinking of asking the theatre down the road if they want to do a production of Hound of the Baskervilles as we have the perfect one for the title role!
Thursday 22nd March 2007: And so it came to pass that on this, the 81st day of this year of 2007 that we witnessed rain, hail, snow, floods, plagues of frogs and bats (not all the aforementioned is strictly true!) and the second coming! Yes, the Standards are in on time again for the second in a row and the third in four weeks. Hopefully this is the start of the revival. After yesterday's budget, irony of ironies as the Financial Times were late arriving as was the Telegraph business inserts although our driver had us all going when he pulled up and told us that the Tele were late. Thankfully the main paper was in and we are left to celebrate the momentous occasion of the Standard arriving for two weeks on the bounce! Oh Happy Day....!
Saturday 24th March 2007: Sorry about the lack of an entry yesterday. No good excuse except for being very busy! Today we had
a new driver or actually an old one from donkey's years ago who has returned. He was the bearer of bad news though as we had
Indy's, Racing Post and Daily Record all on re-run. Thankfully there's not a massive
amount of these, even on a Saturday, so rather
than get everyone to come back for the sake of one or two, I decided to do the lot myself with the aid of my daughter. Her job was
easy. Sit in the passenger seat and do her best to decipher my writing which was a list of addresses needing any of the above papers,
scribbled under three different headings on a sheet of A4. As I was writing them as I came to them on each round sheet, I'll admit
my writing perhaps wasn't crystal clear but I was subjected to some shocking abuse, arguably the worst of which came when she asked
why my writing gets worse the older I get! Still, we got them done with the time-restricted Racing Post all done by 8am (not bad
when the paper didn't arrive until 7:30am) and the rest sorted by 9am. It would have been quicker still if I could just get used
to reverse gear being bottom right on the gear-stick, especially as the car that I normally drive has it top left!
Sunday 25th March 2007: Most mornings I actually look forward to coming in to work despite the ridiculously early start, however
today is the one day of the year that I dread. Why? Because British summer time officially starts and the clocks went forward
overnight. Now, losing an hour's sleep isn't so bad as we never start quite so early when the clocks go on, however our wholesalers
understandably work on the `old` time until the papers are delivered so whilst they arrived at 4:20am (old time) it was actually
5:20am for us. Still, we battled through as two of our deliverers also rang in sick and we were all done and sorted by 8am. I had
to deliver to an old people's block on one of the rounds and the entire block is split into four sections - downstairs North and
South and upstairs North and South. We deliver to four different customers there and each one is in each of the four blocks! Funniest
sight of the day though came at around 5am (new time) when we could hear a distant thumping from outside. As it got nearer, we opened the door
and were confronted with the sight of three grown men who had clearly had too much falling down liquid overnight, playing football
slap bang in the middle of the road! Quite how they managed to avoid the ball hitting any windows is beyond me but they were still
kicking the ball around as they went out of sight further up. England could have used them yesterday!
Tuesday 27th March 2007: Bit of a dodgy start as some of our Racing papers went missing, as did a full box of magazines and, had we not been as alert as we were, our WDP and Express would also have been left on the van. Thankfully we noticed before he drove off. One of the TV mags has the return of Jim'll Fix It advertised on the front cover. That's a blast from the past as this was
essential Saturday night for me in my youth, far better than Skating On Thin Ice that we have to cope with these days. The problem is that I've had the theme tune stuck in my head ever since! Altogether now, "Your Letter Was Only The Start Of It..."
Wednesday 28th March 2007: Quite uneventful fare today which is not always a bad thing. The nearest we came to anything newsworthy
was our driver leaving our Express in the back of the van again. Once again though, us
hawk eye's spotted it in double quick time.
Thursday 29th March 2007: Late night's and early mornings do not mix and thanks to struggling to cope with another
inept England display as they struggled to beat the might of Andorra (population 71,000 and probably growing by the second as it has the
highest life expectancy of any nation on earth! You see, we aim to educate), I channel hopped and ended up watching the end of the cricket
world cup game between Sri Lanka and South Africa which included a superb finale and, so I discovered
later, history being made by one
certain bowler who took four wickets in four successive deliveries.
Unfortunately I was made to suffer when the alarm jolted me into action although I was brightened somewhat by the
arrival of the Standards again! Three weeks in a row now, although I need to clarify that rumours that I would
Morris dance through
the streets of Frome if they made it four in a row are totally unfounded. After the last two mornings, I was equally pleased to see
our bundle of Express off the van first! Sadly it didn't last as our Star, Sport and Fin Times went walkies
instead. These are harder to spot as they aren't in a full bundle on their
own. Our driver spotted them when unloading at a nearby supermarket and
brought them back.
Friday 30th March 2007: Not a good start today when I got to work usual time and, after a few minutes, realised that I'd left something important at home that we needed first thing! Luckily I don't live that far away, although once back indoors our dogs looked totally flumoxed as to why I'd suddenly returned a few hours earlier than usual and then confusion turned to disappointment when they realised that I hadn't returned to give them an extra walk! Things did improve after that as we had papers in as early as we've had them all week and no missing bundles to go chasing after either! The main schools are off today ahead of Easter so inevitably the lads are coming in later for their rounds. As long as they are in within our cutoff time then fine.
Saturday 31st March 2007: I was a bit weary this morning, not so much down to a late night as it wasn't later than a normal
bedtime after watching football, however the problem was that my Leeds team won thanks to a last minute goal against Preston andI
was on such a high afterwards that I couldn't drop off to sleep! Luckily enough the papers were all on time with no problems. One of our
early adults was away but we had the rounds covered in advance so no real concerns there. I helped one of our other early adults
load his car up with papers and got quite an odd look from his dog who seemed to wonder just what I was doing near the boot of the car. The look
didn't worry me too much but when he started licking his lips then I began to fear for my body parts!
