yen_powell

Vandal and the sex toy. We had two new staff, one was a buyer who was told he had to get hands on experience before going to work in the office (Steve, recently failed SAS selection apparently), the other was someone from Suffolk who got the job of looking after the yard stock records (Dave). They got on well and liked playing jokes on each other. One day Steve had a letter brought down to him by one of the girls in the office, she looked a bit red faced. It was a dirty video and sex aids catalogue. Someone had snipped out an advert in the back of the paper and filled his name and the firm's address as a joke to embarrass him. It worked and he thought he knew who had done it, Dave the new stock bloke. A week or so goes by and a parcel arrives, addressed to Dave. This one contains a few of the cheaper toys advertised. Once again one of the girls brought it down. There were a few cheap things, one was some sort of vibrating anal toy, batteries were taken from a desk calculator and great delight was expressed by all when the thing buzzed across the table like a mad thing and shot off the other end. Steve had probably done it as a way of getting back at Dave. Things settled down for a little while. A week later, I came back from lunch and there was a trail of blood running the length of the yard and an ambulance just leaving. My young boss, Vandal had walked (or more likely run like a loon, knowing him) past a pallet of sheet steel and it had cut across his leg just above the foot. It later turned out it had severed some tendons. Vandal was operated on and plastered up to the mid thigh and off sick for ages. Another week passed and I got a phone call from Big Frank, the yard foreman asking if I could come up to the office to see him without making a fuss. I went up the stairs and found him in a back office with a large parcel, he looked worried and was crossing himself. Silently he showed me the address label, it had Vandal's real name on it. Inside was another catalogue and a large pink drum like object. It had an orifice lined with what I can only described as latex type bubble wrap. Attached by an air line was a hand pump for tightening said orifice and a cable leading to an on/off switch and a battery holder to make thing buzz. Big Frank was a good catholic, the object was obviously sinful, the Pope wouldn't like it, but Vandal was the reason the firm made lots of money and he too was a fellow Catholic, religion was thicker than water. We consulted the catalogue that was in the box, this item was extremely pricey, too much to be a joke present. Big Frank said we had to ring Vandal, then he said I had to do it. I picked up the phone and dialled. Vandal, was the sort of hyperactive person who ran everywhere and his speech patterns were the same, fast and machine gun like. He rattled off a hello, jabbered on for ages then asked what I wanted. I informed him he had post here. It didn't click, and he jabbered some more before asking what it was. I told him it was a large parcel and the line went silent for a second. "It's not mine!" he squeaked down the phone. I said I would put it in our office loft and he could collect it when he returned to work. "I don't know what you're talking about!!" he shouted and put the phone down. Someone had obviously blabbed. Before I could hide it away, a long procession of oily and grubby men walked into our sorting room demanding to see the already famous object. Every time they had finished looking the thing was getting more and more dirty finger prints all over it. I gave it a quick wipe with a damp cloth and poked it up into the little loft above our room. Vandal was off for nearly 3 or 4 months and when his plaster was removed he had one very strong leg and a sort of thin stringy leg, because even with a leg out of action he just hopped everywhere at speed. He had to have physio for a year after coming back to work. The object that he denied knowing about was not in the loft the day after he returned to work.

Took these one day whilst having something dug up with extreme prejudice round the corner. Best not to hang about in a yellow vest when people's china is vibrating across the table and they can't hear their tv, they tend to get a bit narky. Hertford Union Canal with Victoria Park in the background behind the towpath.

Heard on Snatch, but only when the subtitles were on, 'Save your breath to cool your porridge.'

We had Big Bill, Little Bill, Big Frank, Little Frank (Vandal), Ted (Eddie), Wally, Tony and Mark. Little Bill was a small Liverpudlian with a flat cap. he was a very proud man who left after his stepson, who came to work with us for a few weeks, was caught stealing when a trap was set. After trying to say I had been the thief he left rather than stay and have the police called. Little Bill was so ashamed he handed in his notice and avoided everyone if they saw him in the street. Wally (actually his name was something else but his last name was Walpole) was the fitter/mechanic. One day he had to climb into the mechanical chipper to do some welding, a giant funnel like machine that chopped up metal. He came and got me, handed me a heavy steel bar and said if anyone came near the controls I was to bash their brains in with it. Big Bill, was a wanker, a huge man, ex merchant navy, who drove the grab and did as little work as possible. He used to call me 'Fuck Features'. I didn't like him! Big Frank was the Irish manager. He called me a 'noisy cant' most of the time. He suffered mockery on the day we discovered he didn't know how to start a JCB, we thought they taught that in Irish schools. Ted (Eddie) was our lorry driver. His lorry was super slow, but when I saw him at lunchtime he had sometimes already been to Sheffield (our other yard) and back and was getting ready to go again the same day. Ted could not speak without swearing every second word. He had lots of advice on the subject of romance, like ' Take her to the pictures, and then slap it in her hand half way through the film, you'll soon find out if she likes you or not.' If anyone left their sandwiches on the table he liked to smash them flat when they weren't looking. Tony was yard foreman and Wally's son. He was all muscles and good looks, very intelligent, but struggled with reading. He called his dad 'Bald Eagle' during casual conversation. He had a theory that if you said things in the right tone of voice you could say anything you wanted to people and they wouldn't notice. He once spent a lunch hour with a photograph of himself wandering up and down Barking town centre. He would go up to someone and say, 'Excuse me bald eagle, could you look at this picture, we're looking for this bloke, have you seen him?' Time after time they would look hard at it and say sorry, no not seen him.

Same here.

He reckons they only had this from 2004. My story happened in about 1984.

I was lent to another scrap yard for a week as a favour to the owner. I was shown a large empty building which contained a big pile of assorted stainless steel items, a parked Rolls Royce and now my Yamaha XS250 which I parked indoors where I could keep an eye on it. It was a big building, mostly clean and empty and me and one of their staff, another young lad, were the only people in there. Someone from my place had delivered my Feusse and I set it up. Me and the other lad started bringing pieces over. We would turn them until we could get a bit touching the carbon wheel, I would hit the single trigger whilst looking down the eyepiece and would tell him if it was 316, 304 or 321 stainless. He would then chuck the pieces into various labelled skips. I say single trigger because there should have been two, so you would use both hands and not touch the metal you were testing. One switch was bridged instead so we could do the job single handed with larger items despite the zillion volts flowing through the machine. Health and safety was not a big thing in those days. Anyway, after the first few days I noticed that this Rolls never moved and no one ever came in apart from us two. Around that time there had been problems with people stealing the silver lady emblem from the bonnet/radiator. I had heard that Rolls Royce to combat this had made the newer models with a silver lady that retracted if you tried to steal it. All week, I kept looking at this silver lady and resisting the urge to see if it was true. Eventually I cracked and walking up to it, I grabbed hold of it and pulled gently. Sure enough, the base opened up and the thing pivoted down inside. Ahaaa thought I, how clever......But the poxy thing didn't spring back up like I thought it would. The bonnet, now missing its silver lady stared at me. Fuck I thought, I'm in trouble now. 10 minutes later just as I'm wondering if I can get another job easily there was a click and the bloody thing opened and up it came again. Some sort of time delay built in.

In our scrap yard there were three of us who were Sorters. There was Frank, known as Vandal or Little Frank, who was only in his early 20s but was a wizard on the Fuesse (the spectroscope) and was the man in charge of us and who had to try and teach me his trade. He was also the responsible adult who tried to stop us being stupid or injuring ourselves There was also Mark, a tall teenager who had worked there since he left school, who's hobbies included making slingshots, spear and bows and arrows from the scrap. To help us identify obscure stuff we had a large cabinet full of drawers containing metal samples which you could bung on the back burner of the spectroscope for comparison. I still remember being fascinated to see that Chrome looks the same in mineral form as it does when coating your motorcycle parts. Whilst looking at some samples one day I noticed we had a drawer full of Magnesium swarf. I had a memory of a science teacher burning some during a lesson and it was pretty spectacular. Mark was in the lock up sorting through some tool steel bits, a proper cushy job because you could do it sitting down indoors, just pulling out any that had solder on them and he had a little gas fire with a large gas bottle attached. I took a pinch of Magnesium swarf and walked into where he was working. 'Oi, Mark', says I, 'Hubble Bubble Toil and Trouble', and then threw my swarf into the flames of his gas fire. There was a blinding flash, the fire fell backwards and went out, Mark fell off of his seat in the opposite direction. All I could see were blue spots in front of my eyes. 'What the fuck did you just do?' he asked. I told him, thinking he'd be angry, instead he demanded that we try again. After a few goes I said why don't we make something we could put in the fire at the end of the yard where a colleague was burning old pallets and the dead rats found on the traps. I cut out a cross shaped piece of cardboard (O level technical drawing don't ya know) and made a box which we filled with more Mg swarf. We casually walked up to the river end of the yard and I dropped it into the fire, we walked away just far enough to watch the effects. NOTHING, not a thing, 5 minutes later and we gave up. Walking back we decided to have another go and set light to it ourselves. I made another cube and filled it. Indoors this time I placed it on a sheet of metal and set light to the sellotape and cardboard cube. It started slowly but soon it was fizzing away like a proper firework, flames bright white and about a foot high. Then I looked up the yard and saw the owner Reg walking our way. I panicked, ran into our little lab and filled a cup with water. I don't think water is a good thing for a magnesium fire, I now suspect they use them in marine flares precisely because water does not put them out. If anything the flames got higher. Reg was now a few yards away and I had a flaring white flame in the middle of one of his buildings. In desperation I decided if I couldn't put it out with water, maybe I could starve it of oxygen. I shoved a very small metal drum over it and then sat down on top of it just as Reg walked through the plastic hangers that lined the opening to the yard. We greeted each other and I was frightened he would stop to chat, I was worried that my arse would catch fire, but luckily he carried on through to the offices. I lifted the drum and the fire had gone out, the metal it had been sitting on had gone a lovely blue colour.

I think there was mention of a Kennedy being done. I used to know a lady, the mother of my then girlfriend, who would constantly talk, mostly moaning at me for wasting her daughter's time, moan about her husband, get violent occasionally. She once told me in a quieter moment that she had worked at the Daily Mirror as a young teenager and had some sort of break down and they had carried out an operation on her brain and she hadn't shut up since. Thinking back I always wondered if that's what they did to her.

I think I had a matchbox car with a clip on wing and you used to let it fly off the loopy loopy track track and the thing would glide for quite a way.

I'm glad for the rest of that sentence or I was going to have to google what an orbitoclast was.

Yup, just the pair of us here!

Just things found whilst backing up today.

The River Brain

The link at the bottom of the link above. https://spitalfieldslife.com/2013/02/14/allen-hanburys-surgical-appliances/

I check the site Spitalfields Life out every day, there are some fascinating stories about local people, excellent old photographs, a real weird mix. He occasionally does a few stories about his poxy cat which I am not so keen on. Anyway, today's post was about Matchbox cars, which were made locally to the area I believe. Takes me back to see the catalogue. https://spitalfieldslife.com/2021/04/09/matchbox-models-by-lesney-company/

Heard this on the television, said by a bloke who drives a three wheeled van, "We'll be in an out quicker than a sour plum."

I might try and get to the Brain tomorrow lunchtime in between estimates.

See also, "A sandwich short of a picnic". "Lost his marbles." "A screw loose." "Away with the fairies."

My dad used to comment on drivers ahead of him who were dawdling or indecisive, "Fer Christ sake, he's driving like a fart in a trance." When a person of the younger generation stops in the street and stands close to my main paving mason and starts a loud mobile phone conversation he turns to one of his labourers and says, "Bradley......Start the saw."

The Blackwater, looking at a map, it joins with the Chelmer just before it pops out at Maldon.Heybridge Basin. There is a river Brain as well and a Pod's Brook.

Already put a picture of this from the same position a few weeks ago, but this I took yesterday and I like it more.