Since moving into this house we have had a few visitors, mainly direct family but some of Alison's and Claire's friends too. Just over a week ago I was out on my bike, struggling up a small hill from the next village, and frankly looking for an excuse to pull up, when I felt what appeared to be a restless humming hamster in my rucksack. For a moment I was confused by this noisy fidgeting and stopped to investigate. As I removed the bag from my back it finally dawned on me what the disturbance was and I unzipped the offending pocket of the rucksack and answered the phone.
Despite the slightly crackly line I recognised the voice immediately as that of one of my old colleagues, Richard, with whom I had worked in several stores in our past lives as Managers in the hairy scary Supermarket world. For the most part the only environment that I and Richard used to converse in was always one of constant noise, pressure, and an ambiance of hub-bub and hullabaloo. However here I was in a small lane in the quietest of North Norfolk's countryside, in the sunshine with not a single cloud in the sky and the only noise to disturb this idyll was the sounds of the swifts as they darted above my head, so it took a second or two to place the voice that I instantly recognised and I was then delighted to hear from my old friend.
Richard is the ONLY Manager in my 33 years of working in Supermarkets that actually retired from the business. I have worked, in that time, in 40 different stores and knew many more Managers than that but can only remember one Manager that retired a 'normal' albeit, I believe, an early retirement (carefully planned by him in all fairness).
I know of several managers that retired through ill health and quite a lot that were 'retired' and one or two that God retired, but Richard was the only one that played the game and survived to retirement and that makes him a legend as far as I am concerned.
"Hi, Mike, we're coming up to Norfolk for a few days, any chance of meeting up?" "Absolutely" I welcomed the chance to catch up with such a legend in my own bath time!
And so it was a week later Richard and Deborah (his wife) came to visit me. Now to some degree this was quite big of Richard as by his own admission he feels that I can half talk and that I could talk the back legs off a Donkey, which is undeniable but I only do that with people that I am relaxed around and so really he should take it as a compliment that I gabble on for hours.
After tea & coffee in the garden I then insisted that they had the obligatory tour of the house with the tour guide explaining all the future plans for the place. Then we went to The Kings Head in Reepham and had some pub grub, catching up on old friends and about each other. Returning back to the Old Bakery we sat in the garden and reflected upon our past years in the Supermarketing fraternity. Our careers bumped into each other every now and again and both of us worked at many of the same stores but at different times and so we knew many of the same people.
We worked the longest together at the Tunbridge Wells store which sits in the centre of the town, now as a white elephant, its former glory unrecognised by all who walk past it's shuttered doors. This sad store is akin to the life of a silent movie star a few years after the talkies arrived or one of those massive Cruise Liners in the wake of the arrival of the aeroplane. In her hay day she was the QE2 and now lies redundant, her past glories counting for nothing in this ever more savage commercial world in which we live. When Richard and I worked there, in the late 80's it was the busiest store in Safeway and took the equivalent of what the massive superstores take now but it was just a quarter of the size of the large stores of today.
He jogged many memories from the dusty shelf in my mind upon which they have sat over the years. We recalled the countless numbers of Hop pickers that came in and stole from us. I can remember one guy that the Manager and I stopped and we had seen him stuff a can of Special Brew and a multi-pack of crisps down his trousers. He adamantly denied everything and made it clear that he hadn't even touched any crisps let alone stuff them down his trousers. How dare we accuse him of being a thief and did he look the kind of guy that needed to steal? "Yes" we answered in unison, "You do and you have!"
At this point he tried to move around us and ........ with a damning CRUNCH CRUNCH CRUNCH noise coming from the man's crotch as the crisps were crushed by each and every step he had to admit his guilt. He then unzipped his fly and opened his trousers up to reveal a can of Special Brew a big pack of crisps and his man parts for he had no underpants on. ewww...
We then used our standard method of ejecting such reprobates which was to push open the nearest fire exit, shove him out, down a few steps and slam it shut again just as they started to attempt to come back in again climbing the steps like a reawakened Zombie.
Life was full of such incidents and I really don't know how we got anything else done each day!
We sat for several hours in my garden soaking up the sun and reminiscing whilst I didn't place a single tile or pick up one paint brush, it was simply a very enjoyable day.
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