Bricolage

This meant that each morning I drove by Cherry Hinton Hall. Since 1963 this had been the site of the Cambridge Folk Festival. The Hall was not actually part of my round but I was aware from the many posters that the festival would be taking place during my Cherry Hinton tour of duty. The line-up was right up my street—Arlo Guthrie, Loudon Wainwright III and Alan Stivell. I was starting to work out ways that I could do my round and still attend the festival. In the end common sense or apathy won out and I had to resign myself once again to observing gilded youth frolicking in a sylvan setting while I got my finances in order. At least I got to sleep in a comfortable bed. From Electricar Manoeuvres, Me Neither Amazon  paperback. Kindle edition  here .

On my own everything seemed to take more than twice as long. To begin with I got into a terrible muddle loading the float. The different kinds of milk were indicated by aluminium foil bottle-tops—silver for whole milk, red for homogenised, red and silver for semi-skimmed (rare in those days) and green for unpasteurised. And a few people required sterilised milk which came in a different shaped bottle with a crown cap like a beer bottle. So it was important to get the right quantities on your float. Unfortunately I had forgotten to make this calculation before arriving at the depot, so I was trying to add up quantities from my log book whilst parked up at the loading-bay much to the annoyance of my colleagues . From Electricar Manoeuvres, Me Neither Amazon  paperback. Kindle edition  here .

Image courtesy Don Reid (donreid103 on Flickr) The vehicles we had were Morrisons. The top speed of an electric milk float is nothing to write home about although its acceleration from 0-15 mph or so is considerable. There was no gear stick, just a switch for forward and reverse, an accelerator pedal, a brake pedal and a hand brake. The cab had a windscreen and a roof but was open at the sides. One of the things I had admired about Ron was the way he drove standing up with the log book in front of him and a pencil behind his ear. And I concluded one of the reasons why he got around so quickly was the way he would jump in the cab and stamp down on the accelerator whilst checking on his next delivery. My attempts to emulate this advanced technique brought me to grief on two occasions. On the first of these I was parked at the top of Station Road pointing towards the station. I had just delivered to the Station Hotel on the other side of the road. I crossed back to the float jumpe...

I began a cursory study of memoirs and was irritated to find that Gore Vidal had already bagged Palimpsest, a title I had been toying with. But as I grumpily leafed through the book I discovered that Vidal had had his own qualms about the genre. In fact he claims in the introduction that he had never previously entertained the idea of writing a memoir because he did not consider himself his own subject, but now he was not so sure. From Brought to Book, Me Neither