Merry Christmas to all Blog Readers

This has sometimes been my style in the past and I have also had a fall back system when short of ideas involving a friendly local jeweller, who is always willing to exchange whatever I’ve chosen for something she would actualy like to wear – a bit like buying a gift voucher but you get something in a box, all properly wrapped up in Christmas paper with ribon and a fancy bow. Only takes about 10 minutes start to finish and it probably doesn’t matter what you pick as long as the money is about right for her to choose something nice.

I’ve seemed to be able to get into the right ball park by picking earrings or braclets or necklacey type things by turns so it’s not the same thing each year. And she always seems to say she likes what I’ve chosen for her – although of course I don’t really remember what I did buy her, so I wouldn’t know if she’s gone back to change it or not anyway.  As a fallback plan it’s always seemed to be a fairly safe bet.

This year however I’ve taken a bit of a risk and steered clear of the jewellers altogether in favour of armchair shopping with Amazon. Too late to do this on Christmas Eve of course, unless you can think of a credible excuse for having nothing wrapped up to hand over on the actual day and a printed off copy of an Amozon Order propably wouldn’t cut the mustard.  But with a bit of forward planning I’ve saved myself having to go anywhere near an actual shop this year – except when on escort duty, when I can usually contrive to escape to the coffee shop while she does the browsing.

For some reason I was able to remeber this one, more or less

Of course you do still have to choose something on Amazon – or at least I haven’t found an automatic present buying facility on their website yet.   It would be nice if there was one, i.e. you could enter a few key facts about your Significant Other and then the computer would do the rest and maybe that will come. Not bodily dimensions of course, we blokes could not reliable enter those, just the age would be nice and maybe  ……  well, ideally just the age because most blokes will at least be able to manage that.

My dear wife has a birthday near Christmas which complicates things but I had a solution to this too in the form of what I used to call her annual service kit.  I couldn’t remember for sure which brand she preferred and I got myself in difficulties one year by asking for a perfume called “Anus Anus”, which I turned out to have got slightly wrong, but I was OK doing it by brand colour scheme.  Once I learned that she liked the stuff on the stall which was always red and white  then it was justa  question of asociating the colours with a football team and then I could dive into Boots or Debenhams, march up to the red and white smellies counter and ask for a 12,000 mile service kit, job done.

Blokes choosing lingerie doesn't seem to work

The lady at the counter would usually respond to me playing dumb, because I certainly couldn’t tell her which particluar creams and potions were required, but the red and white counter always seemed to offer a service involving placing a selection of goos in a red tray which they they wrapped in cellophane with a bow round it and if I remember correctly they even supplied a matching label.  As with the jewellers, you could specify the amount of money and they more or less did the rest.  Sometimes I would have to listen to an explanation about what this or that goo was best for and why it would probably be what my wife would choose, in which case I would have to spend a bit of extra time pretending I understood what she was saying, but mostly it was a quick in-and-out job lasting ten or fifteen minutes at the most.

Then one year Management, as I refer to her in formal circumstances, changed her allegiance and stopped liking the red and white stuff.  She went off Anus Anus as well, which left me a bit snookered.  I did get her to tell me which perfume to get her instead one year but when I got to the shop I hadn’t written it down and couldn’t remember it.  I was tempted to resort to Anus Anus which for some reason had stuck in my mind but in the event bought on price, which was not a good idea because I ended up with some knock-off substitute stuff which she made politely disdaning remarks about and then presumably quietly dumped.  I’ve been pointedly discouraged from buying smelly stuff ever since so I don’t take the risk.

Apparently the most frequently returned to store of all Christmas presents is lady’s lingerie, which makes sense if the blokes have been brave enough to buy it.  I can only ever remember doing that once and of course I went for some sexy-looking french stuff which looked like it would allow me to get my hands inside without breaking any elastic and that only ever saw the light of day once on Christmas morning.  I never did get a chance to see if my theory about accessibility was sound and, since there was no indication at all of any gratitude or encouragement to repeat the exercise, I decided not to take the risk again.

Presents from the dog are not too difficult

I did once buy her a book on restoring old buses as an extra joke Christmas present but that back-fired because she spent Boxing Day looking gloomy without letting on why, as they do, because, as I was allowed to learn latter, she was convinced that an old bus in need of restoration was going to turn up the following day as her birthday present.

So this year I planned ahead and did some suruptitious browsing on t’internet, having worked out a couple of items which I could probably buy on line which I could make use of even if she didn’t like them.  We had agreed before Christmas that we wouldn’t buy each other anythig this year but at least I had enough sense to realise that this didn’t mean that I wasn’t supposed to buy her anything.

And then there’s the dog.  The dog gets a Christmas stocking in our house, which she fills with doggy treats, all wrapped up – and to be fair  the dog seems to get a lot of pleasure out of ripping open anything which is surrunded by Christmas wrapping paper, even though he obviously can’t really understand what’s going on.  He spends most of his life looking puzzled and that was certainly true of the time she bought him a set of antlers to wear.  And of course the dog has to buy her a present, which of course he’s not actually equipped to do, so that’s my unspoken duty, as is ensuring she gets a Christmas Card from him.

And that’s where I’ve fallen down this year, in my smugness at organising her presents well ahead of the deadline and sureptitiousy wrapping them when they arrived by post.  So I’m off out now to join the rush of other blokes buying last minute presents, to ensure that our dog’s not in the doghouse for neglecting his Christmas duty.

***

Dave Partridge, who over the last couple of years has established a new type of local and mobile GoldWing servicing and repair service, AwingAway, has circulated his customers and friends with this Christmas Greeting, which I thought was a nice idea and worthy of passing on.

He does his bit for the GoldWing community by volunteering as the Federation’s Technical Adviser, in which capacity he’s been answering all sorts of questions, including in foreign languages, so well done Dave.  And thank you on behalf of UK Wingers for your unfailing helpfulness.

Thankfully he hadn't yet grown this beard

Being a senior member of the Royal Family is widely seen as involving both perks and burdens of duty and although royalist supporters might be more likely to see the balance between duty and perk leaning further in favour of duty than abolitionists, even the most ardent anti-royalist will be recognise that the role isn’t all a bed of roses.

For example although Prince William and his new wife probably had a lot more freedom of choice about their partnership in life than any preceding royal couple, it would be naive to think that either of them had anything like the freedom of choice which us ordinary folk  enjoy.

I might have used “commoner” instead of “folk” in that last sentence except of course that the Duchess of Cambridge (or if you prefer Princess William of Wales) was a commoner until about 11am on April 29^th, but that doesn’t mean she was “ordinary”.  Prince William seems to have found himself (and thankfully has been allowed to marry) a really lovely young lady who, because of their long courtship, has also been given a reasonable opportunity to understand and acclimatise herself to what she has got herself into.

As my elderly Mum said, having spent the day of The Wedding absolutely glued to the telly, the Middleton family did us commoners really proud on that day; they were much more credible as royals than some of the real Royals, or at least than some of the minor Royals.  As far as I can see not one of the Middletons seems to me to have put a foot wrong throughout the time they’ve been in the public eye.

You had to earn one of these

I’m a great fan of the leading royals too of course because taken as a whole they are remarkably and consistently good at what they do.  I include in this the Duke of Edinburgh’s entertaining political incorrectness, which has always been been refreshing and never nasty and I admire the hard workers, like the Princess Royal.  It would be nice to think we could pick and choose but I suppose if you want the advantages of a constitutional monarchy, you have to take a bit of rough with the smooth.  Even the rough have their uses and the Duke and former Duchess of York have at least contributed to the Royal Family’s learning curve of how not to do things in the modern, highly exposed and media-driven world.

However I’d best not develop that theme too far; this is after all a GoldWing Blog.  I started writing this article shortly after The Royal Wedding (i.e. the latest one) with the idea of speculating whether Prince William’s new status as a married man with a job to do would impact on his motorcycling in the way which many other bikers experience.

Maybe he will be able to ride his bike to work at RAF Valley and then home again to the Missus who will have been down to the shops and got the Tea on the table, but I suspect it won’t be quite a s simple as that.  He is reported to have been able (i.e. allowed) to ride his superbike incognito in the past, accompanied only by one Personal Protection Officer following on another bike.

He should have had decent training and he might also have had privileged access to test or race track riding as part of his riding experience too.  Whether he has ever had the freedom which most of us bikers, even those who are married, enjoy as of right I somehow doubt.  Has he ever ridden the Cat & Fiddle I wonder, or toured on a bike on those wonderful roads in the Alps?

If he had any sort of opportunity to enjoy the real freedom of being an inconspicuous motorcyclist among many I would be surprised.  Not for him the joys of a bacon butty at a roadside shack; the royal equivalent of ‘elf n safety will have put paid to that.  In his family even if he can get it past the wife his grandma has the final say.  Even in the relative isolation and peace of Anglesey, riding a regular route to work, exposing himself to terrorist ambush will not be an option.  Popular though he and his young wife are at the moment, perhaps the most popular celebrity couple in the world, there will always be someone who wants to exploit that for the sake of his cause or to grab his personal fifteen minutes of fame.

I dare say that even when he was freer to sneak off for a ride there were some additional contingency arrangements in place for his safety, like an ambulance or two in the vicinity and some other police resources not too far away.  There was probably somebody surveying the route ahead too, if they knew where he was planning to go, to look for and clean up diesel spillages.  The chances of him being allowed to ride wherever his fancy took him, even then, wouldn’t have been very good.  Not that riding a GoldWing makes you inconspicuous, but relatively speaking I’m grateful for the anonymity and freedom which my motorcycle gives to me.  At least Prince William is likely to have had a decent taste of the joys of riding a motorcycle, even if he’s denied the freedom we enjoy to grab handfuls of it any time we like.

Incidentally, if you had been Prince William’s accompanying police rider, where would you have put your pistol?  It would be a very painful thing to fall on to if you came off your bike wouldn’t it?  My mate Bill gave up putting his Leatherman on his belt while riding for that reason.  Perhaps there was a clever sort of hidden holster fitted to the bike.

Anyway, I decided that this was not a fruitful direction to take the article because I don’t really know much about Prince William’s motorcycling experiences and I’d be speculating even more than I sometimes have to do when I’m writing about Honda, so I decided I’d better think again.

And I found myself writing this completely different royal story, about when I was a chance observer of Prince William’s father at close quarters, while he was having to do something which he almost certainly didn’t fancy one little bit, and when officialdom closed around him in what seemed to me to be a pretty smothering sort of way, even when it was trying to keeping things low key and informal.

I admired Prince Charles him for how he handled himself that day but I also saw enough to realise that I didn’t envy his position or his role in life one little bit – with the possible exception of his Aston Martin, which I must admit I really quite fancied.

Going down!

In the early 70s, when I was a junior medical officer in the Royal Navy, I was detailed off to be in attendance while Prince Charles did his aircrew underwater escape training.  He had been taught to fly by the RAF but the Navy was getting part of its turn (there would doubtless have been fierce competition among all three Services behind the scenes to get their hands on him at this time) by teaching him sea survival skills, including how to escape from a ditching aircraft.  He did eventually do some helicopter flying with the Royal Navy too, so he did get about a bit.

There is often a comical side to officialdom trying to get something absolutely right, as of course was inevitable with the handling of Prince Charles time in the Services, and this was certainly true of the spectator opportunity which I had to see part of it.  In the unlikely event that Prince Charles reads this Article and remembers his Dunker Training, which most people do because it’s a pretty unforgettable experience, I hope that it will trigger recollections about which he will now be able to chuckle, even though at the time he would have to have been a cross between a saint and Superman not to have found it oppressive, frustrating and perhaps even terrifying.

He might also take comfort from the fact that at least one spectator felt for him at the time – and shared what might have been his private concern at the time, though he certainly didn’t show it, that he had fallen into the hands of some real idiots.

It wouldn’t surprise me by the way if Prince William has gone through something similar, if not during his motorcycle training, which was presumably done by the police, then at some stage of his military training, when he too will have suffered from officialdom trying too hard to get things absolutely right -  when they would have done much better to let him take his chances with the standard training process, delivered by the usual people, who would probably have been very good at doing it because they do it all the time.

When Prince Charles came to Seafield Park, the Naval Establishment where I was serving at the time, it was to do sea survival, which in his case, because he was to fly fixed wing aircraft over the sea as well as helicopters, involved a specially devised blend of what was normally done as two separate courses, one which was by then more or less obsolete.

It was made very clear from the outset to everyone who worked at Seafield Park that the young Prince Charles, then a Sub Lieutenant, would be there as a junior naval officer under training and should be treated in exactly the same way as any other junior officer on a course.  In particular there must be no attempt to tip off or allow our families get line themselves up to see him, let alone meet him.  It was all to be very low key.  There was to be no publicity and no photographs.

Of course it wasn’t quite a simple as that; discrete security and other precautions would probably have been taken or at least properly considered.  It was quite a big deal for all the senior officers of any ship or military establishment to be responsible for delivering the Royal training and they would inevitably have become involved far more in planning and directing things than usual and very little would have been left to chance.  To be fair to the very senior officers of HMS Daedalus they did keep out of the way and it was the more junior and middle ranking officers, closer to the action, who went a bit OTT and got things wrong here and there; they provided the spectator value which I was fortunate enough to be able to enjoy.

Prince Charles wasn’t coming to my particular Unit, the RN Air Medical School, because his aero-medical training had already been done by the RAF elsewhere, much to my medical boss’s displeasure of course.   But he would be coming to our location,  Seafield Park in Stubbington, which is where the Fleet Air Arm’s Safety Equipment and Sea Survival School also lived at the time.  It was a lovely, quiet sort of place, not at all like a military establishment until you got round the back of the Big House, where there were some old wooden buildings of a much more military nature.  Seafield Park also had a very good cricket field.  I’ve no doubt it’s all gone now, probably sold off for housing development.

However in the early 1970s is was a great place to be working.  I was told, as was everyone who worked at Seafield Park, that Prince Charles was coming our way.  We were also told that he would be coming and going  under his own steam in his own car (the Aston Martin which I eventually eye-balled and envied) and he was to be left alone.  No hint of what was happening should be leaked to anyone outside Seafield Park and in particular no families were to given an opportunity to come “on board” to do any “goofing”.

To the credit of all concerned this side of things went well; there was no press interest at the time and I may therefore be telling a story which has never been told publicly before.  Hopefully I’m not giving any official secrets away and that, forty years on, Prince Charles won’t mind either.

As a junior officer in a different Unit all I had to do was keep out of the way and at Seafield park, even though he was there for a couple of days, I saw nothing of him at all.  I did however spot the gleaming Aston Martin parked out front one afternoon, which was too tempting to ignore.

There has always been (mostly) healthy rivalry between the three Services and also a fair measure of mickey-taking and as a recent recruit to the world of the Fleet Air Arm, of which Seafield Park was a small outstation at the time, I was enjoying learning about the Fleet Air Arm’s approach to such things.

I should explain that the Royal Navy calls the Army, fairly affectionately, “the Brown Jobs” (doubtless entirely because of the colour of their uniforms) and the Army refer to Navy people as “fish heads”.  It’s all very amicable.  The Royal Air Force is however looked down upon by the other two, more senior services, especially by the Fleet Air Arm, and their nickname is sometimes used in a less amicable way.  It stems from the colour of a medicinal ointment used in the Navy at the time (April’s Fool day, 1918) on which the RAF was formed.  This ointment was used in the Navy to treat Scabies and was therefore called, by the sailors who sometimes had to rub it into their private parts, “Crab Fat”.  By coincidence this ointment it was the same blue colour as that chosen for the newly-formed RAF’s uniforms.  Perhaps inevitably therefore, members of the Royal Air Force (including, for now, Prince William) have subsequently been referred to as The Crabs.

And at the time I’m describing the slogan “Fly Navy” was being bandied about rather a lot and various derivative slogans were being dreamed up as car stickers, such as  “Fly Navy, Crawl Army, Walk Sideways”.  In a moment of rebellious mischief, I managed to stick one of these on the back of Prince Charles’s Aston Martin while it was unattended.  It looked rather good and if he ever saw it himself, I hope he didn’t mind.  It was my way of claiming him as a member of the Fleet Air Arm.

Incidentally it was reported to be Prince Charles’s old Aston Martin which the Happy Couple used to leave Buckingham Palace on their wedding day recently, so I hope it was the same car.  I couldn’t see whether my bumper sticker was still in place under all the newly married stuff hanging on the back but I suppose that’s pretty unlikely.

However, let’s get back to aircrew sea survival training, which in Prince Charles’s case would involve parachuting into the Solent and being picked up in a rubber boat and also the dreaded “Dunker” – the underwater escape trainer, involving simulated escape from a sinking aircraft.  The water and the sinking bits were real; it was only the aircraft that was a mock up.

The idea of jumping out of a perfectly serviceable aircraft has never appealed much to me.  I would do it if the aeroplane was on fire of course, perhaps even without a parachute, but not otherwise.  I’ve done a number of risky things in my life, including riding a motorcycle too quickly, but I’ve always struggled with the courage to jump off or into something when I don’t have to, including things like jumping off high diving boards and into cold water, neither of which I’ve ever found at all appealing.

Time to get out

So Prince Charles might well have had some qualms about the parachute part of his training too, I don’t know.  But I’m quite certain he would have had qualms about The Dunker, which involves submitting to danger in a most unnatural way, i.e. keeping still while strapped in, as someone turns the “aircraft” in which you are sitting upside down as it sinks into deep water.

The idea behind this training is that helicopters which ditch in the sea don’t stay upright for long and rarely float for long either, so getting out before they sink for good can be a bit of a challenge.  Helicopters have a lot of weight in the engines, gearbox and rotors, which are up top, so when they ditch they are almost certain to capsize very quickly – and if they float at all, only the very bottom bit will be remain above the surface.  The capsizing motion and the associated loss of visibility as the hull fills rapidly with water are very, very disorientating.  It becomes impossible to know which way is out and even which way is up or down.

For this reason nowadays all military helicopter crews (and all those who travel by helicopter to work on offshore oil rigs) receive practical training in how to escape from an inverted and submerged helicopter.  Fixed wing naval aircrew are also given appropriate underwater escape training too and when Prince Charles was being trained he was to be given both, for good measure.  He was extremely unlikely to ever be allowed to do a catapult launch and we were at that time in the dying days of aircraft carrier flying of the traditional sort but that didn’t stop the Navy wanting him, whilst it has its hands on him, to have the full works.

I remember once sharing Dunker Training with a young non-swimmer recruit who was going through it for the first time.  Maybe he wasn’t the sharpest chisel in the box but anyway he just listened to what he was told to do and did it; there was no preamble explaining how the “helicopter” he was in would suddenly tip and dip in to the water and perhaps this was just as well.  He did what he was told and it worked.  He then did it again in the dark. Anyway it worked and unlike submarine escape training which is even more scary and has involved any fatalities.  I don’t think the Dunker has ever killed anyone and it has certainly saved lots of lives, including, as it happens, a few years later, mine.

Back in the early 1970s the original and fairly crude Dunker was still in use, consisting of a metal box with holes for a door and a small window, similar in size to a helicopters and some seats inside.  This box was suspended from a crane by a mechanism which also allowed it to be rotated (i.e. capsized) as it was lowered (or rather dropped from a height of six feet or so) into the thirty feet deep tank of water over which it was suspended.  The water was clean but unheated and the only way out of the tank was to swim to the side and climb a vertical ladder.

In theory Prince Charles was to be put through this training in the same way as any other junior officer or sailor would go through it – except of course that officialdom was completely incapable of actually allowing things to stay that simple.  Senior officers would have met, safety arrangements reviewed and extra contingency plans would have been made.  The very last thing anyone would have wanted to do was explain to anyone, least of all his Mum, that they’d drowned Prince Charles

It was probably also an unprecedented way for one of our Armed Services to hand over responsibility for an Heir to the Throne to another.  Prince Charles was to jump out of an RAF aircraft over the Solent and be picked up by the Navy in a rubber boat.

No doubt the RAF laid careful plans to ensure they were in the right place before they allowed the Heir to the Throne to throw himself out their aeroplane and no doubt that the Navy and Coastguard would also have been, at the very least, on their toes that day to make sure that Prince Charles had an empty bit of sea to jump into with some certainty of being picked up without delay.

Prince Charles did indeed parachute into the sea at the right time and the right place, half a mile or so off Lee on Solent, courtesy of the Royal Air Force, and the Navy did pick him up in a rubber boat and land him, as planned, at a slipway on the public foreshore close by.   Using a public foreshore wasn’t ideal but transport would however be standing by to whisk him off to Seafield Park only a couple of miles away, where the Navy could start their bit.  No one would be expecting Prince Charles to come ashore there in a rubber boat so there would be no spectators – or so officialdom thought.

What the Senior Officers didn’t budget for was that the wife of the Officer who would be in the boat which picked the Prince out of the sea, in whom he had perhaps rather foolishly confided, decided that she and her children were not going to miss an opportunity like this one.  On a weekday in school term, at the precise time when the rubber boat was due to land, she just happened to have been strolling along the foreshore in her best frock with the children also spick and span, arriving just as Prince Charles, still dripping wet from his immersion, stepped out of the rubber boat.  Ideally positioned to do so, she stepped forward and curtsied, so that her husband could then, whether he liked it or not, present her and her offspring.

The Prince’s Dunker Training was scheduled for the following day.  The Lieutenant who had been in charge of the rubber boat might well have had his horoscope read about his wife turning up uninvited or maybe not because come the following morning he was still in his job and would therefore also be supervising (and in the event also conducting) the Prince’s Dunker Training session personally.   The practicalities of Dunker Training would normally be left entirely to the Chief Petty Officer who ran the Dunker on a day-to-day basis and was therefore well practised, with his team of instructors, in its safe operation.  The Lieutenant had presumably pulled rank to step into the Chief’s shoes for this special day.

Bearing in mind that the Dunker, although scary, was considered to be low risk, there would ordinarily be no resuscitation facilities immediately on hand.  There were always rescue swimmers in the tank as the Dunker rolled and sank into it, to see that no one actually stayed inside and drowned but that was it; no medics would normally be around.   However senior officers being senior officers they had to cover all contingencies and maybe in this case my medical boss also saw his chance to get in on the act in a minor way.

The Dunker was on the other side of Portsmouth Harbour from Seafield Park in another Naval Establishment called HMS Vernon – which also no longer exists but was then a big place with its own medical centre and staff.  My place of work, the Air Medical School, was not equipped as a medical centre so the obvious source of contingency resuscitation facilities for the Dunker, should they be considered necessary, would have been HMS Vernon.  However my medical boss decided otherwise and I was detailed off, with a Medical Assistant, to get myself over there to be on standby.

Which way is up?

We had a resuscitation kit of sorts in the cupboard at Seafield Park so having received only short notice orders we grabbed it and set off.  We were taken by specially arranged naval transport to HMS Dolphin, on the west side of the Harbour, where my Boss had used his influence to arrange for the Captain’s Barge to be made a available to whisk us across to HMS Vernon, where we sneaked quietly, as ordered, into the Dunker Building.  I suspect that the Principal Medical Officer of HMS Vernon would have known nothing of these arrangements.

We were to deploy ourselves without fuss to a suitable place on the far side of the big, covered water tank to where the Prince’s training would take place and wait.  If the Prince needed resuscitating we would spring into action, otherwise when the Prince had departed we would simply sneak out again and find our way back to Seafield Park.  Everything necessary for the Prince’s training and safety was in now place, as the Senior Officers had carefully planned.

Or so they thought. When we opened the case of our resuscitation kit to check its operation, just in case, it emerged that there was a critical bit of it missing.  The oxygen bottle was full but there was no way of using it.  If Prince Charles needed resuscitation he would have to settle for the kiss of life from either me or the Medical Assistant.  I suppose that in the circumstances he wouldn’t really be in a position to complain either way and might even have been grateful if it worked.   I’d like to think I would have given the Medical Assistant something to tell his grandchildren about by sharing the Prince with him and taking turns.  CPR is quite tiring work and sooner or later unless they come round you do need a spell of rest after a while.

I decided not to trouble anyone else about our useless equipment because by this time the Prince had arrived.  I suppose it might have been better from the Prince’s viewpoint to get HMS Vernon’s medics to turn out with their kit after all, but somehow I suspected that my medical boss back at Seafield Park wouldn’t like that.  And I certainly wasn’t brave enough to shout over to the other side of the tank to tell them to hold fire on drowning the Heir to the Throne while I sorted things out.

Prince Charles had arrived slightly late and it wasn’t until a few days later that I found out why.  The Lieutenant who’d driven the rubber boat had cooked up a scheme with his boss back at Seafield Park, who otherwise wouldn’t have had much of a role, to transport HRH to HMS Dolphin (where the Captain’s Barge probably came into the picture again) in his boss’s car.  This was because naval transport services, such as the medical assistant and I had used, wasn’t either posh or reliable enough, or something of that sort.  The boss, a Lieutenant Commander, owned a Ford Zodiac which, although not in the same league as an Aston Martin, was by no means an old banger and he could at least ensure was clean and tidy for the day, which doubtless he did.  This was his big moment, giving HRH a lift in his own car.

Unfortunately he neglected to check that there was enough petrol in it, with the result that on the approach to HMS Dolphin the engine stopped.  I understand that in deference to his Royal rank rather than his junior naval status, the Heir to the Throne steered the car while the other two pushed.

If you do this over the sea, you need to have done Dunker Training

Trainees were usually dressed for Dunker Training the part in re-cycled threadbare flying overalls, a non-functioning aircrew life jacket and an ancient flying helmet – all probably still damp if not sopping wet from the previous days use.  In this case however suspiciously new-looking and completely dry kit was being used instead.

Apart from two or three safety swimmers, the Lieutenant and his Chief (presumably there in case the Lieutenant forgot his unfamiliar lines) and us two medics hiding across on the other side of the Tank, there was no one in the building.  From our little hideaway we medics could hear and see everything.

HRH’s Dunker briefing began.  The Lieutenant rambled on a bit, perhaps inevitably, and he also kept touching or fumbling with this or that part of the Prince’s kit.  Perhaps this was done out of nervousness but it was all very much in the Prince’s face and even outside the context of the scary immersion he knew was coming next, quite how the Prince managed to resist telling him to back off and stop pawing at him I simply can’t imagine.  It was almost creepy as well as unnecessary and it had me cringing at the time but Prince Charles stood there and took it like a lamb.  He was there to submit to the training and he did it, simple as that.  It was impressive self-discipline on his part but it was also enough to convince me that I wouldn’t want to swap  lives with him for all the tea in China.  Fancy having to submit meekly to the inevitable of people going OTT like that as a regular part of your working life without? It certainly wasn’t for me – and I didn’t even know at that stage that I would later in life have the privilege of becoming the owner of a GoldWing!

I watched Prince Charles first of all being strapped into a mock-up of a fighter cockpit (i.e. a small, cramped metal box with a seat and lots of holes in it and a plastic canopy fastened on top) which was then slid down a ramp into the tank, like launching a lifeboat – except that the metal box slid straight under the surface so HRH had to fight his way out of the canopy underwater and swim up to the surface before the thing all the way to the bottom and he drowned.  Then he had to do it again, to prove that his successful escape wasn’t a lucky fluke.  He sputtered and coughed as he surfaced and swam to the side of the tank and climbed out each time but he didn’t complain and he didn’t hesitate to do it again when invited.

Then, still dripping wet from his first two immersions, he did the helicopter dunker training two or perhaps three times, just for good measure.  This was after all the Lieutenant’s moment of glory, the high point of his career.

Was Prince Charles scared at any stage?  Well of course he was;  he’s Royal but he’s not Superman and I suspect that even Superman might be at least a bit on edge facing a dunking session like this one.  I’ve not seen anyone who was doing Dunker Training for the first time who wasn’t scared.  I was certainly scared the first time and more than a little anxious when I did again a few years later – and I was a strong swimmer with sub-aqua experience at the time.

Prince Charles stayed in the Navy for a few years, serving as a Seaman Officer in a Frigate and then eventually took command of a Minesweeper.  A warship is a closed community within which you can’t hide your weaknesses for long.  It was a good grounding for him and he came out well. I knew people who served with Prince Charles and they invariably liked him and spoke well of him as a shipmate.  I saw at first hand his enormous capacity for self-discipline and, let’s make no bones about it, his courage.

I’ve never been physically close to Prince Charles since and I wasn’t introduced and didn’t speak to him on that occasion.  But I became convinced by what I saw on that day and subsequently heard of his service in the Navy that he was a good egg and well worth his rations.   I dare say he might be a bit whacky or weird about some things nowadays, aren’t we all as we get older?   And what’s wrong with talking to trees anyway, I often say thank you to my GoldWing after an enjoyable ride!

Somehow there was something special about Prince Charles which showed that day which convinced me that he was made of strong and useful stuff and was utterly committed to his role in life, about which of course he has had very little choice – especially about getting married, or at least not until the second time around, when even then he would still have had to ask his Mum.

Prince William is shaping up very well and he has had a good role model in his father.  Thankfully that part of our Nation’s future is someone we probably don’t have to worry about.  I suppose Prince William’s motorcycling will be curtailed now that he’s married just like it was for the rest of us – but when he’s older and the kids are off his hands, maybe he can look forward to riding a GoldWing too.

I was with TalkTalk for some time but switched back to BT a couple of years ago. They were only a little bit more expensive and I got fed up with poor customer service from TalkTalk at the time, especially when it came to actually getting hold of someone and dealing with faults.

If a line fault was suspected they would test the line from their end and if it was within tolerance (by whatever testing means they use) they would simply say it must be your end – the alternative being for them to pass the problem on to BT (who own the lines) for you to request an engineer visit, in which case if no fault was found there would be a call out charge of £130.

There were so many uncertainties of who was responsible for which bit of things (home equipment, internal house wiring, local telephone line, exchange etc) that I decided that at least if I went with BT there would be only one supplier to deal with. And they were offering a fair deal at the time, including a free Home Hub which did some extra clever things, including supplying a free second telephone line.

Soon after switching to BT we had an intermittent problem with noise on the telephone line and dropping off of our internet connection. There was no consistency about the pattern except that it kept recurring.

The line tested as OK from the exchange end (as it would when it was not playing up, so there was eventually not alternative to asking for an engineer to call – which as with TalkTalk involved accepting the risk of paying £130 if no fault was found.

The engineer turned up and spent ages testing this and that and finding no fault. I explained thta it was an intermittent fault abd bless him he persisted – and eventually did reproduce the fault.

Even then it took another hour or so of swapping to alternative pair or wires in the local junction box, then to an alternative pair further down the chain towards the exchange to clear the fault.

Since then we’ve had reliable service and we even ended up with faster braodband speeds as a result of his pair swapping activities. We live in a rural area and I expected that we were therefore several miles from the exchange but not so, we are connected via a junction box more or less outside the huse to an exchange which is in a modest-sized roadside box only half a mile along the road. Gone, it seems, are hte days when telephone exchanges are great big things in buildings; they just live in little roadside boxes like ours.

I was pleased with BT and happy to stick with them – until I noticed, having heard Sky advertising even cheaper broadband deals than in the past recently, that BT had quietly put their prices up on me.

We had gone for a special “anytime” calls deal for £4.70 per month but I knew that was over a year previously, so armed with confidence that I could switch suppliers if necessary, I rang up BT to tackle them about the price increases, which were to line rental, broadband and the “anytime” charge. All three had gone up.

When you are retired from work, as I am, you have an extra incentive to save money when you can and you also have the time to make the inevitably protracted phone calls which enquiries of this sort involve.  At least with BT these are made on free, 0800, numbers, so I got myself settled comfortably for a long haul and dialled the enquiry number printed on the phone bill.  It was a piece of luck that we were still on paper billing because otherwise I might not have noticed, or noticed as quickly, that something had changed.

The lady I spoke to, who was clearly located somewhere on the Indian sub-Continent, tried to be helpful but dialogue took a lot of effort and she was probably fairly new to the job and operating from a script and needed to put me on hold for long periods each time I asked a question while she made enquiries.  She was scrupulously polite and apologetic about the delays but eventually she got fed up of being asked questions she couldn’t deal with and “escalated” the call to her manager.

The mamanger spoke better English and had more experience but after a while he gave up too and offered to connect me to the “Customer Options Team”, explaining as he did  so that I would probably have to join a queue (again) to speak to them.  As best I could work out the aim of the BT game was to keep me as a BT customers by offering a better deal – but within limits.  The initial call taker had one set of limits and the Manager had slightly more room for manoeuvre.  What he could deal with however was my persistence in wanting to know exactly what I was tied into with BT and how and when it started.  Hence the offer to connect me to the next level up the line, which he did.

I’m sure it was unintentional but as he tried to connect me the line seemed to disconnect and although I hung on patiently for a while just in case but it was no use; the phone started making “you’ve left me off the hook” noises, so I gave up.  So far my enquiries of BT had lasted 51 minutes.  I redialed to start again.

This time I had the benefit of a bit of a learning curve and I was able to get through the automated menu system, which gives you lots of options to visit the website etc and takes you round in at least one compulsory circle before you can ask to speak to a real person about your Telephone Bill.  I was once more in a queue and in due course connnected to the Indian sub-Continent, speaking to another helpful young lady.

By telling the story of the chat with the Manager and that I’d been cut off while he was trying to connect me to someone else we short-circuited the process and she put me through herself.  This time I was successful in joining their queue and after a pleasingly short wait another real person came on the line, introduced herself as Sammy and offered to help.

She answered my questions about tie-in without undue difficulty and it emerged from the records to which she had access that we had committed to a 12 month contract for the “anytime” deal in January 2009 and this period was automatically replaced by another 12 month commitment each year on the basis that BT had written to me just before the anniversary date, explaining that they  would be doing this unless I contacted them to say I didn’t want it.  It hadn’t been necessary for me to opt in again.

Likewise it was explained that BT would have written to me with notification of the price increase before it took effect and since they were giving me prior notice of it, upping the prices during the 12 months contract period would not relieve me of the obligation to complete it.  So in effect I was stuck with BT at least until January 2012.

I suggested to the young lady that enforcing a contract on this basis (that they had sent me letters which I might or might not have received) might be open to challenge and that I felt a bit miffed that they were putting the prices up for me while at the same time offering better deals to new customers to compete with Sky – but I also made it clear that I wanted to stay with BT, providing I was given a fair deal too.

Bearing in mind that I had by this time had two different sets of special offers from the Indian sub-Continent, both of which would involve paying less, it was a pleasant surprise when she came up with an even better deal.  I would get the line rental for £10 per month (by paying £120 for a year up front) and then £4.70 per month for anytime calls (so the same as before the price hike) and only £11 per month for broadband.  Furthermore I would be on “Broadband 2″ with an allowance of up to 40Gb download rather than only 10Gb, which I had recently started to be charged at £5 per month for exceeding.  So instead of £16 per month for “Broadband 1″ plus £5 extra Gigabites which had gone up to £17 plus £5, I would be paying £11, with a comfortable safety margin for increased internet use.  This was close enough to the best Sky was offering so I was happy to accept it.

A new 12 month contract starts again from today and we’re now on paperless billing but I’ve made a calendar note to check on my phone and internet charges next May, which also happens to be when I need to check my electricity bill status, because I also get a 5% discount for paying that 12 months in advance.  Since you can’t get anything like 5% net interest on your savings at the moment, these discounts from the the utility companies for paying up front are well worthwhile, if you can afford to pay up front.

Another useful piece of information emerged from the very helpful Sammy, her direct line phone number.  Not her personal phone number of course, but a direct way of contacting the BT Customer Options Team, which have the authority to offer the best deals, and speak English as a first language.

If you need to contact BT about your Telephone Bill ring 0800 800030 then select option 1, it’s as simple as that.

As motorcyclists we get around a bit and we use our eyes.

Madeleine has a very distinctive defect in her right eye which looks like a black mark, bottom left.

It’s is easy to remember and would be easy to recognise, providing you look.

She will now be four years older, so she will look like a 6 to 9 year old.

If you see a young girl in this age range with a right eye defect like this one do not hesitate to contact the police, wherever in the world you might be.  For more information click here.

Attractive Check In Staff

Having surrendered my Tax Disc at the end of November and (eventually) got a refund, I now need to tax my bike again from the start of next month, March, so I can get back on the road.

So I went along to my local DVLA Office again to buy myself a new tax disc.  I went there well before the end of the month, eight days before it in fact, although only six working days, to avoid what I knew would be DVLA’s busy period.  With luck the Office would be fairly quiet.

I also timed my arrival to be late in the day (they close at 5pm) to try out my theory that even if it was busy, they would be pulling out all the stops to clear the queue in order to avoid delaying their own commute home.

There was no queue at all for “Check In” and hardly anyone in there at all apart from staff.  The glass door which had suffered the ram raid during my previous visit had been given some new glass but the door was fixed in the fully open position; either they hadn’t had that part fixed or they weren’t going to risk another attack.

Much to my pleasant surprise there was a free Check In desk and it was being attended by an absolutely beautiful young lady with a lovely welcoming smile and long blonde hair.  As I walked straight up to her at the desk I thought I was dreaming and, since I haven’t tried to use anything remotely like a chat up line for several decades, resorted instead to jocular comment on the absence of a queue.

“Have you been bribing people to stay away?” I asked cheerily.  ‘Silly old fart thinks he’s being funny’ she probably thought, but she kept her lovely smile in place anyway, for which I was grateful.

The last time I went there the lady who dealt with me was quite presentable too, so I feel I can recommend the Preston DVLA Office in that respect.  Once upon a time you had to fly British Airways to be sure of seeing a pretty woman in a nice uniform and a DVLA Office would probably have been a non starter, now it seems to be the other way around.

Sorry but you’re too early

The Beautiful Blonde was very nice about it but when I told her I had failed to re-tax my bike on line but also confessed that the bike was currently SORNed, the shutters effectively came down.  Unless the vehicle is currently taxed (in which case you can re-licence it up to two weeks before the end of the month) you must wait until two working days before it; that’s the DVLA rule.  Presumably that’s so you cannot benefit from more than a couple of days of “free” licence and maybe also a weekend if you’re lucky in the way the month end falls.  They don’t mind you paying for the part of the current month you can’t possibly use if you resort to taxing with effect from the month before because it’s not practical for you to come back again later, that’s a windfall bonus to them. Nor of course will they give you any credit for an unused part of any month when you surrender a tax disc.  But they won’t let you have a tax disc earlier than they absolutely have to if your bike is being re-taxed after a winter lay up; that would be allowing you to take advantage of them.

It’s probably an offence anyway to use a vehicle on the road before the start of the month when the tax disc comes into effect even if it’s in your possession, but DVLA don’t want you to even have a chance of committing that offence. Isn’t that considerate of them?

In the days before computers, when the only check on whether a vehicle was licensed was the vigilance of PC Plod while pounding his Beat, it might have made practical sense to apply this time restriction but in these days of Automatic Number Plate Recognition and convenient roadside checking by the police of any vehicle’s taxation, insurance and MOT status, I don’t suppose Mr Plod spends any significant time scrutinising Tax Discs in car parks and the like, to spot missing or forged tax discs, let alone those which might be in use before their proper date.  If you are riding around on a bike which the computer says is not taxed an ANPR police car will pick you up whether you are displaying a tax disc or not and you’ll still have some explaining to do.

My beautiful blonde Check In Lady took the trouble to confirm the Rule with a senior colleague before explaining very sympathetically and pleasantly that she would love to let me tax my bike today but a DVLA Rule prevents her.   Interestingly enough she also suggested that I might like to try a Post Office, on the basis that they might have different rules.  She really was trying to be helpful.  The senior colleague whom she consulted looked like a much more typical DVLA Hard Case who didn’t care one little bit about my problem, but the beautiful blonde did project a genuinely caring intent.  Good for her.

Defeated On Line

Before travelling to the DVLA Office I had already tried to re-tax my bike on line three times over the previous two days.  The first time the site was down for “essential maintenance” and I was advised to try later.  On the following day, my second and third attempts, I came up against a brick wall.  Although I had the Reminder Notice (with its Reference Number) to hand and when that didn’t work the V5 Registration Document (with its Document Reference Number) I still could get an option to tax the bike starting on the 1^st of March.  There was an explanation that my Tax Disc could take up to five working days to arrive, but no explanation of why the system was insisting I taxed the bike with effect from February 1^st.  Having only just managed to get my refund for the months of December, January and February, I didn’t of course fancy sacrificing a whole month unnecessarily.  I had no intention of using the bike before March.

I’d surrendered my previous Tax Disc at the DVLA Office just before the end of November but it had taken until January 28^th for me to get the SORN acknowledgement and the refund (in separate mailings) which is why I had a Reminder Notice, which DVLA’s computer had issued during early February, presumably by DVLA’s left hand because DVLA’s right hand was still in the process of telling it that my bike had been SORNed with effect from 1^st December.

Maybe at the Post Office

I’d come clean with the beautiful blonde about having been unable to tax the bike with effect from 1^st March on line but when I took up her suggestion of trying a Post Office I decided to be a bit economical with the truth.  I simply presented my Reminder Notice and, since the bike is due for its first MOT until March 20^th, asked if anything else was required.  It was.

While a Post Office can check a vehicle’s MOT status on line it cannot check the insurance status, as DVLA Offices can do.  The nice Asian Lady was very helpful and polite but she explained that I would need to produce my Insurance Certificate.  Therein lay another problem because I didn’t have one; my insurer is completely paperless these days, so all I had was whatever they’d sent me by email.   If I printed off whatever they’d sent me that would probably do nicely she said.    And she confirmed that if I could produce an Insurance Certificate she would definitely be able to issue me with a Tax Disc starting from the 1^st of March.  There happens to be a very good Fish & Chip Shop opposite this Post Office so I consoled myself by spending £11 (yes, £11 it costs these days) for our Tea.

Print your own Insurance Certificate

The Insurance Certificate wasn’t among the stuff I’d been sent so after the Fish & Chips were dispatched, since it was still before 6pm, I rang the Insurance Broker (which is the IAM Insurer, Adelaide Insurance based in Northern Ireland) to explain my need.  They couldn’t have been more helpful and almost immediately after the phone call ended an email arrived with the Insurance Certificate as an attachment.  I printed it off without difficulty and it look the part – the critical bits of text, which an unscrupulous person might try to alter, were printed on a patterned background.  It would defeat anyone with proper computer skills like my granddaughter for long but it certainly would have been impossible for me to use as the basis for a forgery.

Armed with this print-out I went back to see the nice Asian Lady at the Post Office.  It was her husband who was serving but he remembered me from the previous afternoon, accepted the Insurance Certificate and the Reminder Notice  and I made out my cheque.  It was never going to be that easy I suppose but a look of surprise came to his face as something came up on his screen which brought the process to a halt.  “Do not issue the Licence” it said, simple as that.  No explanation.   I had my V5 Registration Document with me so he tried using that with the same result.  Apparently he had no option to override this message; Big Brother had chucked a spanner in the works and that was that.

My naive hope that the Post Office would indeed have its own Rules which might be different than the DVLA’s had been dashed.  It turned out that Post Offices can’t issue Tax Discs more than two days before they come into effect either.  Whether I chose to use a Post Office or a DVLA Office, I could do neither before Friday unless I wanted to tax the bike retrospectively from the beginning of February.  DVLA has therefore put some effort into blocking any attempt to get a Tax Disc more than two working days ahead of its start date and seems to have been effective in implementing its Rule.

A restrictive approach has its price

The price which both DVLA (or Post Office) pays for applying this restriction is to add to the burden of work at the busy time of the month when there are always long queue both at DVLA Offices and at those Post Offices which issue Tax Discs.

It’s difficult to see that persisting with this rule in the computer age makes any economic sense at all because although Tax Discs themselves do not bear a “valid from” date, the enforcement process is driven almost entirely by the computer record and this presumably carries the start as well as the end date of each Licence – or presumably could be relatively easily modified to do so.  Why then does DVLA still bother with this “two working day rule”.

The answer is probably because those who run the DVLA lack the vision or drive or both to update their rules and processes in pursuit of efficiency and of providing a better customer service.

Surrendering takes time and duplicated effort

If you read my earlier article about a DVLA visit you may recall that when I finally got to the front of Queue Number Two and submitted the completed form with my Tax Disc to surrender my bike’s previous licence for a refund, I was told that the refund would come through the post in due course.  In practice this meant that having scrutinised and accepted a surrender form, DVLA’s way of administering the refund was to send all these forms and surrendered tax discs to Head Office at Swansea, where someone else would process the refund.  Clearly this involves duplication of effort and it’s difficult to see why this is necessary.

And as my particular application for a refund turned out the application form gets scrutinised again too.  About six weeks after my visit to the local DVLA Office I received a letter from DVLA’s Head Office rejecting the application for one of several possibilities, which were listed.  It wasn’t told which, I had to work that out for myself.  The letter also said that my licence could not be returned “for security reasons” but that SORN had not yet been accepted and that it would not be accepted until the flaw in the application was resolved.  The date from which the refunds would be calculated would be the date on which they received my response to this letter.  So I had already lost six weeks (and therefore two months) or my three month refund.

The only possible reason for rejection which could apply in my case was that the details of the Registered Keeper shown on the application form “did not exactly match” the details on their records. And indeed the name and address on the letter (as they had transcribed them from the form) didn’t match.  My surname appeared to have been miss-spelled and I had managed to add an extra letter to our house name.  The Post Office had managed to deliver the letter to me, addressed exactly as the person they thought it had been wrongly written but the DVLA Clerk who had scrutinised the application form had nevertheless found good enough reason to reject the application because the details “did not exactly match”.

Now I wouldn’t claim to have the best handwriting in the world but I had used block capitals and the form had been scrutinised at the local DVLA Office before it went to Swansea.  I certainly hadn’t added any extra letters.  It might be understandable that a Clerk could misread one of the letters in my slightly unusual (by Welsh standards) surname but how, when the letters were all entered into individual little boxes on the form, could the clerk possibly misread the total number of letter in a house name by adding an extra one?

It struck me that by employing clerks who either couldn’t read very well and/or couldn’t transcribe names and addresses accurately and couldn’t use (or were not permitted to use) common sense to tell when the form probably did refer to the actual Registered Keeper, DVLA had invented quite a clever way of avoiding giving out refunds.  It was especially clever that they didn’t them write to the Registered Keeper to tell him or her that someone was trying to claim a refund on his Tax Disc, but to the person who’s details did not match, and who was therefore the potential thief and/or fraudster.  Somehow that didn’t seem sensible or even logical, so much as deliberately awkward and obstructive.

Wasteful effort

Maybe DVLA thought they had invented another way to make money – but then I realised that they weren’t ever likely to be save themselves much money compared with the administrative costs involved, even if larger refunds than mine were at stake.

To keep this in proportion I should mention that the refund at stake for me was a maximum of just over £15, which by means of this additional scrutinising stage, some weeks after the application was submitted, DVLA had already reduced to a maximum of less than £6 – but at an administrative cost to DVLA which seems likely to have far exceeded the sum at stake.

Now call me petty minded but the arrival of this form brought out the stubbornness in me so instead of responding to DVLA Swansea by post I took the letter into my local DVLA Office, choosing a day and time when it would hopefully be quiet.  As it happened it wasn’t that quiet and I did have to queue but only for about ten minutes or so to get to Check In.   The young lady who dealt with me, who was very presentable and pleasant, looked at the letter, looked the record up on her screen, scribbled something on the form and said it would now be OK and the refund would arrive in due course.

I wasn’t for giving in quite so easily so I asked whether, as it seemed to say on the letter, I would now receive only a reduced refund. Yes, she said that was a possibility.  I then pointed out that I had handed the form in at her Office rather than posted it to Swansea, that they had checked it for me before accepting it and that if I was now to receive a reduced refund I would like to be told how I could make a complaint about it.  She hastily grabbed the form back from the pile and scribbled something else on it, then went off to search for a leaflet explaining DVLA’s complaint system.  They weren’t readily to hand.

There was no acrimony in this conversation and she had been polite and pleasant throughout, as I had been.  Rule Number One when you are complaining or threatening to, especially when you are dealing with officialdom, is never, ever to lose your rag; you just give them an excuse to throw you out.  Why be unpleasant to a pleasant lady anyway?  She doesn’t make the rules and she might be perceptive enough to think they’re silly, same as you do, as the beautiful blonde I met on my most recent visit seemed to do.  It was the dark-haired bloke with whom she double checked who looked like he believed in the rules in an unquestioning way – or at least that he enjoyed having some rules to impose.

So as I left the DVLA Office after my second visit, with my complaint leaflet in my hand but no real intention of using it, I was feeling a little smug.  The second round of scribbling on my letter told me that I was pretty unlikely to have my rebate reduced and it probably wouldn’t be delayed all that much longer either.  I was right, the cheque for £16 something turned up with a week or so followed by a SORN confirmation latter, backdating the SORN to the last day of November.

Spoilt for choice

But as I write this article DVLA have got me beaten as far as getting a new tax disc before their really busy period at the end of the month is concerned.  Unless I am willing to pay for the wasted month of February I will have to wait until Friday or Monday.

If I’m being sensible I should go to see the nice Asian couple in the Post Office again mid-morning, so avoiding their lunchtime rush, when the queue shouldn’t be too bad.  There’s a nice traditional Baker & Confectioner Shop next door which sells really nice cakes.  But the devil in me wants to go to the DVLA Office again, timing my arrival at one minute to 5pm, in the hope of some more entertainment and in the hope that once again I will be greeted by an attractive young woman.

Friday Postscript: I took the easy option and went to the Post Office.  There was no queue and the nice Asian Lady couldn’t have been more helpful.

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A visit to DVLA can be entertaining

Sunshine and a clear sky in Suffolk

I’ve been in deepest Suffolk for the past week or so, with only occasional internet access, hence I’ve not been posting much.  Nor of course have I done any riding recently because my bike has been laid up for the winter.

Since the turn of the year I’ve been fairly heavily engaged in refurbishment of a bungalow which has been our holiday home for the past eleven years, since shortly after our first grandchild materialised nearly 300 miles from our home in Lancashire.

Families are relatively scattered these days, or at least ours is, so this was a way of having better contact without imposing too much on their family home.  Since then we’ve acquired another eight grandchildren, located in four well separated geographical clusters so we couldn’t keep buying extra homes to get close to them, but we did keep this one and it has been a great place to go for a break from a busy working life.  Suffolk people seem to live life at their own pace and are rumoured, although I’ve yet to see one myself, to have bumper stickers saying “Don’t rush me I’m from Suffolk”.

And the bungalow more or less looked after itself; we could go and go without even having to worry much about maintenance.  I was earning good money and we could afford to pay someone to tend the garden in our absence – and it wasn’t either difficult or expensive to keep up.

But come retirement, or rather the drop of income which goes with it, and the bungalow needing some more serious work done to keep it safe and sound, we had to think again.  The wiring insulation was made of time-expired, crumbling rubber and the oil-fuelled boiler was long overdue for retirement as well as being far too expensive to run with the price of heating oil these days, so we had to either spend money on it to modernise (and then try to get some money back by letting it out) or sell.

This is not a good time to be selling houses and the value of our bungalow had fallen by nearly 20% over the past two or three years, so selling it to cut our costs was by no means an attractive option – and even if we were able to extract the equity by selling the bungalow, such are the interest rates on savings that it’s not even possible to keep up their value with inflation. In real terms it costs you 2% or more of your money to stick in the building society or bank and that somehow doesn’t make sense.

It’s only a two bedroom semi detached bungalow on a 1960s development but it’s right on the outskirts of Halesworth, a small market town which is only a few miles from the coast and it has open views across fields from the back garden.  It very pleasant outlook in the daytime but with no street lighting at the back to spoil things, the view of the night sky from the patio can be truly spectacular.  We’ve always enjoyed staying there, as have family members and friends who’ve also used it for holidays.

Could it become a holiday let, so that we could get some income from it but also continue to use it ourselves?  Happily when I approached an agency which handles holiday lets in East Anglia and they sent someone to look the place over, they reckoned the property was suitable.  She was tactful in the way she put it across, since she  was talking to a fat old man who was stiff as a board after a week’s physical exertion but the idea was clearly at our bungalow would appeal to “the more mature and less able” holidaymaker if no one else.  I got the message.

So we bit the bullet and robbed the piggy bank to pay for complete re-wiring, a new gas supply and central heating boiler and several new radiators and, since the new boiler would be going up into the loft, it was also expedient to demolish the redundant kitchen chimney to create more usable space in what had been a fairly small and old fashioned kitchen.

All of this work was outside my DIY capabilities even at their zenith twenty or more years ago – and you are not allowed to do your own re-wiring work these days anyway, or certainly not to do your own complete re-wiring.  All this work was therefore done professionally.  This left us with what I thought would be the relatively easy part to do ourselves, rediscovering in the process some DIY skills I hadn’t used for a while but might even enjoy.

We did a ten day spell in January and went back ten days ago hoping to finish off.  It would be necessary to de-clutter the place of the stuff we had accumulated over the years, to make it suitable for holiday letting.  But apart from making good in the kitchen, which would mean fitting new units, we would simply be cleaning up after the building work and touching up the decorating where the electricians had chased out the plaster for re-wiring.  We had, or thought we had, leftover tins of the requisite matching paints.  It shouldn’t be too bad.

The bigger job would be fitting an extra run of kitchen units on the side where the boiler and its chimney used to be and additional worktops.   Matching the pine kitchen unit doors and the worktop we’d installed on the other side of the kitchen about five years ago might be problematic but even that might be possible.  Otherwise we would re-use the existing carcasses and fit new doors and drawer fronts to match the additional ones we would be installing.

It didn’t turn out to be remotely that easy of course and despite two and a half weeks of very hard work (at least by my standards) we still haven’t finished, so we’ll be back done there again soon.  I did most of the painting and because I’m an aged, overweight and physically unfit Winger who had contrived to avoid touching a paint brush for many a year, something of a re-learning curve had to be climbed.

Despite the need for this, by last Thursday morning Liz and I had finished almost all the re-decoration, all of the cleaning and most of the de-cluttering and the kitchen re-fitting had also been completed.  This included laying laminated flooring in the kitchen, which I’d never done before and didn’t get quite straight.  I had also completely repainted the walls of the two bedrooms, for which it turned out we didn’t have matching paint after all.  Elsewhere touching up was all that was necessary; one-coat emulsion paint is wonderful stuff, as I realised when I bought a small tin of ordinary white matt emulsion to touch up the ceilings; it didn’t cover remotely as well.

I had seen professional decorators in action and I knew that they moved all furniture into the middle of the room and then laid covering sheets along the floor edges, so I copied this approach using, in the absence of proper covering sheets, newspaper.  My lack of  both agility and flexibility, coupled with my excess horizontal dimensions called for a special technique when painting on or near the skirting boards which, after a number of unsuccessful experiments, involved lying down and shuffling along the floor either forwards or backwards between brush-fulls.

If I’d had proper coverings sheets this might have been straightforward but unfortunately the sheets of newspaper wouldn’t cooperate by keeping still, so every time I moved I also had to rearrange those underneath me.   If you can picture a walrus shuffling through a narrow passage carrying a tin of paint in one flipper, a brush in the other and at the same time trying to keep the newspaper floor covering in place you will appreciate something of the difficulty I encountered.  Painting the lower edges of the walls therefore took quite a while, especially near the corners where I sometimes got completely stuck for a few minutes but the top edges were easier and once I got going with the roller on the rest of the walls I was comparatively quick and efficient.

I chickened out of replacing the existing kitchen worktop within which a porcelain sink was set (which became necessary when it proved impossible to get a matching worktop for the other side) and got a carpenter to do it.  The skill he showed in getting a really good fit to the not-very-straight wall would have been impossible for me to achieve.

The refurbished kitchen

But I did fit the additional kitchen units and swap over the old doors and drawer fronts myself, which saved some money and I found quite satisfying.  The project coincided with something of a price-war among the DIY suppliers on kitchens, so that part of the project came in under budget.

We also made enough progress de-cluttering the place for the Letting Agent to take some pictures for their brochure but this was achieved mostly by shifting the clutter into the garage, which we will be using as a store, we will still need to de-clutter that properly at some stage too.

There’s still more de-cluttering to be done in the bungalow too; it’s amazing how much stuff you accumulate in ten years of using a place, even as a holiday home.  We had too much furniture and crockery and too many ornaments and nick-knacks.  Why it was necessary to build up a stock of half a hundredweight of candles in assorted colours when electric lighting arrived in Suffolk at least fifty years before this property was built is a puzzle to me but of course we men don’t understand these things.

I also unearthed a long-lost pair of chrome rotor covers for my 1986 GL1200 Aspencade SEi in the garage which had never quite got fitted while the bike lived in Suffolk for a while, after I got my GL1800.  Sadly the gear change mechanism packed up shortly afterwards and Gloria (as she is called) had to come back north in a van to get fixed by Graham Whitaker, because I didn’t know how.  (It turned out to be a weak or broken spring as I recall, anyway it was nothing much in the end, thankfully.)

So by about 9.30 last Thursday morning, one way and another, although we’d had to get early and rush around to do the final de-cluttering for the letting agent’s photo session, we had got the place more or less tidy and the sun came out to help too.  All this frantic effort to get the bungalow ready had been far removed from the retired lifestyle which I had started to get used to during 2010 and I had even started to feel a bit stressed at the burden of it all, such was the contrast.  Both Liz and I had worked hard all week and we were pretty tired.

But we had broken the back of the project and another spell of a few days would see the whole thing finished.  We had met the deadline for the photo-shoot and we would easily be able to have the place ready for occupation by the target date in a few weeks time, with a realistic prospect of getting paying guests for the Easter holidays.  We were therefore feeling a sense of achievement as we shared a coffee with the Agency Lady.  We could look forward to a relatively easy afternoon and a relaxed evening off before travelling back to Lancashire on the following day, Friday.  I was even starting to look forward to welcoming some family guests to our Lancashire home for the coming weekend, which until we had got the bungalow tidy enough for the photo-shoot, I had almost been wishing could be cancelled.

It was about 10 o’clock on that Thursday morning when I got the phone call about the bunged-up septic tank back home in Lancashire.  This was not welcome news.

OK, so a septic tank needs emptying from time to time, that’s no big deal – except that our septic tank, somewhat unusually, happens to be more or less indoors.  And we already had guests staying in the out-building, a former Gig House, under part of which the tank resides.  The phone call was from our guests; the drains weren’t working properly and nor, even more ominously, was the toilet.  Oh bother (or something along those lines) I thought to myself.  Our relaxed half-day and evening had suddenly evaporated; this was a problem which couldn’t be solved over the phone.  We packed up as quickly as possible and headed north.

Fortunately we have wonderfully resourceful neighbours in Lancashire, including a family-run agricultural contracting business which seems to be able to do and mend almost anything except computers or televisions but maybe even those.  And about twelve years ago when we first discovered that we had a septic tank (or rather what was then merely an ancient underground brick-lined cess pit) it was our neighbour who worked out, with very limited options, how to turn a potential environmental disaster into a workable equivalent of a septic tank.

Our Lancashire home was built in 1834 on a sloping hillside and the deeds contain the ominous phrase “the privy and piggery are subterraneous”.  Neither piggery nor privy still exist and at some time between Mr Crapper inventing his wonderful water closet and us moving in, probably a hundred years or so ago, a drainage system had been contrived involving the aforesaid brick-lined holding tank, dug next to the former Gig House, at the lowest part of the property.  Then the former Gig House was extended over the top of it, hiding it from sight and memory.  The outflow from this cess pit was a stone “sough” (an ancient type of field drain) leading a few feet into the adjacent field, where it simply stopped.  I don’t suppose it was ever intended to cope with the produce of power showers and several toilets.

There was no option (because of space and gradient limitations) to install one of those modern plastic underground septic tanks anywhere else on the property so we simply had to make use of the old underground (and now also under-building) holding chamber and adapt it as best we could. Our expert neighbour said after turning it into a credible septic tank system  (by adding a proper outflow into a filtration bed in the adjacent field, having persuaded the field’s owner to let us do so) that it would probably need emptying of “residual solids” every ten years or so.  He was more or less spot on, it had quietly done its job for twelve years or so and without causing the least trouble.  I didn’t appreciate at the time that “residual solids” would mean having to suck out the equivalent of  several cubic meters of semi-liquid (and therefore also semi-solid) concrete.  There was also the possibility that it would express itself in a malevolent gaseous form too.

For aesthetic reasons, since the tank lived under what was now a shower room and toilet, the product of the latter having possibly the shortest journey to a septic tank anywhere in the world, we had taken a bit of trouble to seal the top of the tank effectively once it had been commissioned.  We had even laid carpet over it, so you really didn’t even know it was there – indeed the guests who had phone to report dysfunctional drains and toilet didn’t, so at some stage I was going to have to enlighten them.  Emptying the tank therefore wasn’t something I could simply organise by telephone; I was going to have some explaining to do as well as get personally involved in gaining access to the manhole which sealed the top of the tank.  Hence the need for the rush back home.  On the way up the M6 I rehearsed how I would break the news.

Happily the drains and hadn’t actually overflowed by the time we had driven back to Lancashire but there was clearly a risk that it would do so at any time, perhaps even overnight.  Nor could the outbuilding simply be vacated until the problem was solved at leisure; this tank also dealt with “incoming” from the main house higher up the hill, including some rainwater.  A decent rainfall or even the flushing of a toilet in the house could potentially be the tipping point; the tank really had to be emptied out quickly.  I decided that our guests would sleep better that night not knowing this.

I had however made plans with our expert neighbour by telephone on the way home for the tank to be emptied first thing the following morning.  With neighbours like mine mustering the wherewithal to suck the tank out even at very short notice was merely a matter of a phone call.  We slept soundly up in the house and so, in blissful ignorance, did our guests further down the hill.  At 9am the following morning a very big tractor and an even bigger trailer tank complete with vacuum pump turned up as planned.  Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, our guests in the outbuilding had apparently slept soundly and at any event hadn’t even got out of bed.

I was reasonable to conclude that neither drains nor toilet had gone critical overnight either.  So the plan was modified; the tractor would return after 10am, by which time I would have persuaded the guests to go out for the day.  I had hoped to achieve this without actually spilling the beans but with the deadline of the tractor’s return looming I had to come clean.  As soon as I told them what was about to happen at 10am they moved like greased lightning.  They certainly didn’t pause for breakfast and I don’t think they risked filling the washbasin to freshen up never mind using the toilet.  At any event the coast was clear so I set about opening up the top of the tank.

Now I’ve had to put my hands in some fairly unattractive places in the course of my career but I really wasn’t looking forward to this task at all.  I didn’t mind taking the bathroom door off or cutting the carpet at the doorway to allow a flap to be raised to expose the manhole cover; that was quick and easy.  It was prising up the manhole cover that I really didn’t fancy, not least because I couldn’t be sure it wouldn’t pop up under its own steam – or under the pressure of something much worse.   I took the precaution of laying plastic sheeting fairly liberally around the place before bracing myself for this task, not knowing quite was I was going to encounter.

It was not a pretty sight inside the tank but at least it didn’t try to jump out and attack me.  And curiously enough, and much to my surprise and relief, it wasn’t smelly at all.  The tank looked at first glance like it was full (to the brim) of concrete.  There was a dip in the middle, as if the rising level had settled back a little, which was probably just as well.  The occupants, on being told what the problem was likely to be and what was about to be done, had reported that the toilet had appeared to unblock itself again overnight.  Maybe something had un-bunged itself a little somewhere and saved me from an early unpleasant bath.

The end of a forty foot length of six inch diameter suction pipe was hauled into the building and then poked into what looked like concrete but which was actually only semi-solid, like ready mix concrete which has yet to set.  We knew the tank was five or six feet deep and, with a bit of encouragement, in went five or six feet of pipe.  I then held the pipe (which I was told might thresh around a bit (as if I wasn’t already terrified enough) while the tractor driver went out to turn on the vacuum pump.  There I was, Mrs Ormerod’s little boy Stuart, all alone hanging on to the end of a big pipe which was stuck into some very unpleasant looking stuff less than a foot from my face and might be about to start thrashing about.  Why, I thought to myself by no means for the first time in my life, do I get myself into these situations.  Sixty five years old and a grandfather of nine and I’ve done it yet again.

The sucking capacity of this agricultural equipment turned out to be truly amazing.  I’ve met some impressive suckers in my time but nothing in this league.  The pipe didn’t thrash around and the level of the apparently semi-solid contents of the tank simply dropped away rapidly before my eyes.  In less than three or four minutes all but the last foot or so of this very thick, mud-like stuff had disappeared up the pipe and there was a fearsome sucking noise from the tank as the end of the pipe seemed to be  desperately trying to suck its way down to Australia.

Unfortunately the stuff around it wouldn’t flow, so apart from the immediate vicinity of the end of the pipe, which was emptied down to the flat bottom of the tank, there was still quite a bit of contents to be extracted.  And this was perhaps the really thick and stodgy stuff.  Nothing identifiable in it thankfully, but had it been ready-mix concrete you would certainly be thinking of adding more water.  Could the suction pump cope with this really thick stuff too?

It wasn’t remotely practical to wag the end of the great big hose pipe around to try to suck up the rest of the stuff from the bottom of the tank so I tried squirting a hose pipe into the tank to encourage the stuff to flow.  This didn’t make any impression at all.

My brain was probably too tired from the past week’s efforts at the Bungalow at this stage because although I worked out straight away that climbing down into the tank to shovel it towards the pipe was unappealing, I didn’t think through the implications of using the pressure washer to loosen the stuff at all well.  It didn’t occur to me to dress more appropriately for the task before giving this a try.

The pressure washer did the trick and the stuff was broken up sufficiently for the pipe to gobble it up but I also got a liberal coating of backsplash, as did the bathroom.  At least the tank had now been properly emptied of the dreaded “residual solids”.

Management, as she’s respectfully referred to in our household, turned up just as we had extracted the suction hose and I was in the process of replacing the manhole cover.  I was also trying quite hard at this stage to avoid dripping anywhere except on to the plastic sheeting myself and, bless her, she saw the need and offered to help with the cleaning up.  Come the moment come the woman – in this case with bucket and mop.

Despite my forebodings and in spite of me spraying myself and the bathroom with some of the contents of the tank, the overall job wasn’t half as bad I expected.  The mysterious lack of odour helped quite a bit of course but when our guests returned after their unplanned day out there was no trace of the fun we’d had in their absence.

Needless to say I have relaxed into a refractory phase after the efforts on the bungalow since finishing that job and I am looking forward to doing a bit of proper retirement-style pottering about for the next couple of weeks, rather than working hard and continuously on a project – especially emptying any more indoor septic tanks.

I’m particularly looking forward to spending some of next week digging the bike out of the pile of clutter it’s got buried under in the garage in recent weeks, while it’s been parked up for the winter.

If you would like to know more about renting a holiday home in Suffolk, which despite the lack of mountains has some nice biking roads,  visit the Heritage Hideaways website.

So, dear, long-suffering GoldWing ladies, this one’s for you.  If he’s still with us after that clear warning, on his own head be it.  He’ll be sorry.  The picture has absolutely nothing to do with the subject matter of course.  I just thought you might like it.

I’ll just prattle on a bit for a couple more paragraphs, to get him to lose interest in the article, then we can start the real business.

Got all your presents have you?   That nice little packet of hankies for him that are really for you when you’ve got a cold and your nose is running?  Don’t want to waste new hankies on him when he’ll use them to wipe the shiny bits on the bike do we?  He can have them back when they’ve been washed a few times; they’ll be kinder on his sensitive nose then won’t they?  And those nice man socks that work well inside your riding boots?  Does he get a box of chocolates too, which he won’t really want, so you’ll have to eat them in the New Year – which is why you might as well get him your favourites.  Not that he would know that they were your favourites of course.  Had to be told what to get you for Christmas again this year did he?  Then forgot and had to ask you to remind him?

Pretty aren't they?

Now that we’re on our own, well, you know all too well don’t you, those scary moments on the bike when he doesn’t seem entirely comfortable with himself?  (I’m being tactful, he might still be reading at this stage.)  Neither are you very comfortable with those wobbly moments on the bike either of course, but you’ve learned from experience not to make that known at the time.  No point in making a fuss, male ego would be dented, that sort of thing?

And he’s the rider, so you don’t really know quite what went wrong and caused the bike to wobble do you?  It might have been the “banding” he usually blames, although quite what elastic bands have got to do with tarmac roads goodness knows.

But you do know that he obviously didn’t intend it to happen quite like that and therefore something didn’t go quite right, whatever he says caused it.  And it isn’t exactly a pleasant experience is it?  Exhilarating sometimes but not in the nice way that there have been exhilarating times on the bike.   He still gets you aroused from time to time, but not always in quite the same way as when you first met him.

My dear wife secretly scored our rides by counting the number of  OMG moments, although of course she didn’t tell me until afterwards, when there was a chance I might see the funny side.  OMG stands of course for Oh My God, which is what she used to say to herself under her breath.    She didn’t count them out loud either thank goodness.

Thinking back to some of the OMGs I’ve subjected her to I’m amazed that she didn’t scream at the time but there you go; that’s part of being a woman – being able to keep your mouth shut under severe provocation sometimes, even if he thinks you never can.

It was just as well she didn’t pipe up about the OMGs at the time; I had quite enough on my plate trying to work out for myself what was going wrong to make me wobble the bike so much without the additional complication of vocalisations from the back seat, involuntary or otherwise.  My poor little brain was already seriously overloaded.  Male ego was being dented quite enough too by wobbling the bike in the sight of other bikers in the group as it was; chirping from the back seat would have been water off a ducks back and even a mild-tempered man like me might have considered it cause for letting off steam by vocal retaliation rather than interrupt my efforts to recover control of the bike to express my heartfelt thanks.

Yours look like this once did he?

Ten or more OMG moments per day out on the bike was par for the course when I was new to GoldWings.  Not all major, heart-stopping incidents of course, probably only two or three of those.  In my defence I would mention that I was trying to relearn motorcycling more or less from scratch at the same time because all I’d ridden apart from her in the past ten years was a moped we used to hang on the back of the motorhome.

We had some real fun riding that moped together too because it wasn’t what you would call challenging to cope with.  The fun was more in the way of being laughed at by passers-by than having wobbly moments;  it only went at about 5 mph so there was plenty of time for conversation, including with passers-by and it was more or less impossible to fall off as long as we stayed fairly sober.

We sometimes hammed things up for spectators because we were quite a comical sight.  I suppose this was useful training for the more serious challenge of keeping her sense of humour when I was making a mess of riding our GoldWing.  Perhaps she always thought of my riding as a continuing comedy act and that explains why she doesn’t ride any more!

Hey ho, whatever.  By those standards maybe your man isn’t all that bad in way of dishing out OMG moments after all.  Maybe his riding just needs a bit of polishing shall we say, in order to improve your peace of mind and enjoyment of the activity?  Be nice to feel at ease on the bike again, to do without those anxious moments as you approach a junction, wondering whether or not he’s going to wobble a bit this time.

So let’s assume your man’s not quite perfect as a rider then, say no more.  Wouldn’t want him to think you were even reading this article because you think he’s not very good would we?  It’s just a bit of  a light read for the ladies for a change, that’s all.  Pictures of flowers and shoes, that sort of thing.

How then, hypothetically speaking, can you get him to see the need for some improvement in his riding without upsetting him?  And how would he go about improving his riding anyway even if you can get him to show the right sort of interest?  What can you suggest to him, you don’t know that do you?  You’re not an expert on riding are you?

Just as well really; can’t see him taking to you back seat driving on the bike – he’s touchy enough in the car.  He’d really bite your head off if you tried that wouldn’t he?  So how do you get him to do something about the problem off his own bat, that’s the challenge eh?

Nice boots

Well there are ways, aren’t there ladies?  Not that I can always tell what you’re up to because I’m only  a man too, but sometimes I can tell that my wife is on a mission – for example because the same subject just happens to keep cropping up.   And until I get the answer to the unspoken question right the same subject will keep cropping up, so I might as well give in.  I’m usually given enough clues to work out what that answer should be but not straight away of course, otherwise there would be no fun in it, no making me feel that I should have thought of it myself in the first place.

For some inscrutable female reason we have to go round the houses to get there like this but I suppose if I was simply told what to do in the first place I might object.  By the time I’ve finished the mystery tour I’ll say yes to more or less anything.  It’s a combination of wearing down and a softening up in stages.  The bigger the resistance that I’m expected to put up the more meandering the journey becomes.  And even though I think I’ve rumbled what she’s up to it makes no difference to the outcome.

So getting your man to learn how to improve his riding, and indirectly your enjoyment of life on a GoldWing, needs to be approached in a similar sort of way.  It’s probably no good trying to use the standard drip-feed hint approach on this one because he might go all touchy and dig his heels in.  Something a bit more subtle is required.

Of course you don’t know quite what he’s doing wrong or how to fix it, so even though this might not ordinarily prevent you from telling him what to do anyway, this time best not.   And you can’t talk to his biking friends and ask them what he’s doing wrong either of course, that wouldn’t do at all.

But he’s obviously not feeling comfortable with his riding all the time, so even though he won’t admit and may not recognise it, there’s a confidence thing in it somewhere so it’s your wifely duty to help him overcome the problem by one means or another.

My wife recognised my lack of confidence and that it had something to do with the OMGs but she didn’t know the answer.  She knew instinctively however that the best way to help was to avoid making an issue of her discomforts and give me time to work out for myself what I needed to do.  I was trying to work it out for myself all right but the problem didn’t exactly lend itself to self-analysis.  Nor unfortunately is your man likely to be able to work it all out for himself.

This is because motorcycling, certainly for those riders of mature years who now ride GoldWings, was almost entirely self-taught.  You borrowed or bought a bike, taught yourself to ride it and sat your test – which involved riding around the block while a man on foot watched you from the pavement.  You rode one way round then the other, to show that cope cope with both left and right hand junctions and you have to show that you could ride at walking pace and do an emergency stop – which the examiner signalled by stepping out in front of you holding his hand out.  It’s quite a lot more complicated these days of course but back then only the most basic of skills were tested and the test was probably taken on quite a small, low performance bike.  A GoldWing is a different kettle of fish altogether.

And just as you can’t ask his biking mates, neither can he.  Male ego makes it difficult for blokes to ask their biking mates how they do things, especially things which shouldn’t be difficult, like low speed riding setting off from junctions – which on a GoldWing isn’t easy at all and can often be the source of confidence issues (if not unadulterated terror)  for a rider who’s not comfortable with his riding.

Of course they do listen to their mates and they do watch them riding and they do therefore pick up some ideas, some of which might be good ones.  I was very lucky when my confidence was bumping along the bottom;  I rode with some Wingers who were very obviously better and more confident and consistent (especially more consistent) than I was.  Seeing them in action and learning that they had done advanced rider training gave me the idea of quietly going off and doing the same thing – which I then did.

It was the best thing I ever did and also turned out to be extremely enjoyable too.  To this day I don’t really know how much help or encouragement I got from my wife to do it and how much was my own ideas.  Maybe she did quite a lot; she can be very cunning and clever when it comes to that sort of thing – all in my best interests of course.

So many shoes, so little time

So that’s how you can help your rider.  By one means or another get him to do advanced rider training.  He will come across ideas about riding which he couldn’t possibly work out for himself,  might not otherwise encounter and he’ll probably enjoy it a great deal too once he gets into it – meeting a  new bunch of decent riders and learning things without being made to look a pratt.  There are opportunities to do the training all over the Country and they aren’t expensive – but let him worry about that.  You can’t just announce  that you want him to do advanced rider training of course but you’ll find a way of exercising your womanly wiles on him one way or another.  All you need to do is sow the seed.

And the idea for a stocking filler?  Well there’s a handy little book on the subject which will whet his appetite and might start him thinking in the right direction.  It’s quite a readable little book and even if he’s not one for reading he will probably dib into it.

I’ve probably left it a bit too late to get it by mail order for this Christmas so you might have to contrive some other reason for treating him to a biking book.  You’ll think of something.  Maybe you could just leave it in the toilet for him to find when he’s sitting there with nothing else to do for a few minutes.  And of course you can always play dumb about it being a riding skills book anyway; he won’t know you ordered it specially and you can pretend it was just a book which had some pretty pictures of motorbikes in it which you came across while shopping.

If you would like to treat him to a tenner’s worth of confidence-building click here.  If you think he’s a lost cause or not worth a tenner click here.

Have a Happy Christmas you GoldWing Ladies, and a prosperous New Year.

Don't expect just to be handed one of these, they have to be earned!

There hasn’t been much snow here in Central Lancashire but it has been very cold during the past few days and since building work on the new gatepost had to be suspended I’ve spent too much time in a chair and on the keyboard.

I know, I said to myself, I’ll go and visit the local DVLA Office.  That’ll be a painless excursion, even if it does mean a bit of queueing.  And it might even be interesting to see how things go there these days – and strangely enough that’s exactly what it turned out to be, interesting.

I didn’t really go there purely in search of amusement of course.  There are better places for a retired man to take refuge when necessary from his wife’s instructions and admonitions than a DVLA Office but some of them involve contraband foods so in the interests of keeping my options open for the rest of the winter I’ll keep those to myself.

It was the last day of the month and I’d been thinking for some days that with this unseasonally early and unusually cold spell we’re having at the moment my biking season was well and truly over.  So why don’t I surrender the tax disk on the bike this year and save myself a few quid, instead of kidding myself that there will be a few winter days on which I could enjoy a nice ride.  They never are quite nice enough or salt-free enough to be tempting, so why pretend otherwise?  The last day of November would be my last chance to get a refund for December so off I went,  damp tax disk in hand, to claim my refund.  I have never yet managed to keep a tax disk dry on a motorbike.

As I arrived, at about 3.30pm on what would inevitably be a busy end-of-month day for a DVLA Office so I was prepared for some waiting. There were about ten people in the queue which ended just inside the door, so at least it was possible to get inside and out of  the cold.

I knew that I would need to fill in a form to claim a refund so I looked around hoping to see a rack of them from which I could take my pick.  Last time I went to this Office there was a ticket machine in the entrance which invited you to press one of several buttons depending on which type of transaction you wanted to make.  Presumably this was aimed at tracking waiting and/or completion times for the various services which the Office provides.  And as I recall there was also a rack of blank forms.  This time, and presumably in Office’s relentless pursuit of improving efficiency, the system had changed.  It was now necessary for everyone to join the queue to Check In, even to ask for a form.

On a cold day when my choice of alternative leisure pursuits would be limited and might even involve going shopping, there are worse places to be than in a warm DVLA Office doing a bit of system analysis and people watching.  I was, in the modern terminology, entirely cool about waiting my turn.

Three queues rather than one

DVLA Preston, Lancashire

The first result of taking stock of my surroundings was to discover that I was in the first of a total of three queues.  There was a queue to get to the  “Check In” desk, then another intermediate (and distinctly mysterious) Stage Two prior to  “Check Out”, where seats were provided, suggesting that this might be where the really serious waiting would take place.

A numbered ticket system was also involved but this didn’t seem to kick in until Stage Three.  This was perhaps another indication of serious waiting times when you were lucky enough to get that far.

I was starting to feel I might be in for a boring wait after a while because my queue (Queue Number One, standing and backed up to the entrance door) was moving fairly slowly.  There was a large TV on the wall behind the Check In desks which cycled a presentation of what the DVLA presumably thought was helpful information.  But it didn’t grab my attention much because the only one that was memorable or relevant was the warning that if you failed to respond when your number was called you then had to go back to the beginning and start again.

Oh dear, it was beginning to sound like visiting the DVLA was like playing Snakes & Ladders.  You could hit a snake at the final stage and slide right back to the start of Queue Number One.  Maybe this was just their IT Department’s sense of humour peeping through.  But hang on, IT people don’t have a sense of humour do they?  This could be serious!

Entertainment laid on

I was beginning to think I’d exhausted the process of taking in my surroundings when a man walked past me heading for the door doing a very passable impersonation of an Orangutan on the side of a hill.  One half of him was moving up and down as much as it was moving forwards, rather like the horses on a carousel while the other half was doing its best to stay on the ground and walk normally.  The two halves were in considerable conflict.

This poor chap clearly wasn’t pretending so my sympathies were immediately triggered but he did have an intriguing and, I’m slightly ashamed to say, a distinctly entertaining gait.  How on earth does he manage to walk like that, I silently asked myself.  His journey to the door was a feat of collision avoidance as he made his way through the queueing crowd.  I suppose the need to get through the throng of people might have exaggerated the instability in his gait somewhat but it was nevertheless impressive stuff.  Perhaps he’d played rugby as the other sort of Winger; I was feeling empathy already.

In spite of  a very considerable handicap he was nevertheless moving reasonably quickly, without any walking aids and he was in no obvious discomfort.  He looked a bit hacked off but that was understandable, having just been knocked back by the Desk Clerk after spending time in Queue Number One.  Presumably he’d left something vital in the way of documentation in his car outside.  He nevertheless slipped through the two-stage automatic doors at the entrance without any difficulty at all – far more gracefully that Ann Widdecombe has managed to manoeuvre so far on Strictly Come Dancing.  Perhaps she should take lessons from carousel horses too.

Better in the trees than on the ground

This performance had however distracted me briefly from watching what was going on at the Check In desks.  When you are in a queue at airports, supermarket checkouts and the like it is of course impossible to stop yourself closely monitoring what’s going on at the head of it.   And when someone  seems to be taking their time or chatting unnecessarily and therefore holding the job up, you can’t stop yourself silently (if not audibly) tut tutting can you?

A lady who was presumably Mr Orangutan’s companion was standing at the only functioning Check In Desk keeping their place.  Ordinarily this wouldn’t have gone down very well but she looked pained and puzzled rather than defiantly obstructive and his limp had triggered my sympathy anyway, so she retained my personal indulgence, for now.  I’d only been there for five or ten minutes so far and the spectator value was improving by the minute.  I was still cool.

Music-less chairs at Check In

There were however some very irritating delays at Check In, mainly because the Desk Clerks kept relieving each other or simply disappearing at puzzlingly frequent intervals.  There was no warning of closure of a Check In desk when this happened, like you get in supermarkets.  The Clerk would simply turn round and walk away on completing a transaction.  The turnover was of Desk Clerks was remarkably high, as if they could cope with the intensity of the work for no more than a few brief minutes at a time between breaks – or I suppose they might have been rushing off to tackle more urgent work in the Back Office in turns, although somehow that didn’t seem likely.

During my 20 – 25 minute wait in Queue Number One at least five different Clerks rotated through the three Check In positions and there were never more than two positions in operation.  The average occupancy of the three Check In positions was less than 1.5.  Clearly the Check In system wasn’t achieving what you might call its maximum throughput potential and even as a work-sharing system it seemed a bit peculiar.  At lot of effort seemed to be wasted on  all this coming and going.  Maybe they had to do this for Health & Safety reasons, like having to waggle your feet regularly on an aeroplane to discourage clots.

Mustn’t let it get too busy

There was certainly no sense of hurry or bustle about the place, yet Queue Number One did slowly move forwards and it didn’t seem to get any longer.  Either they were keeping pace with arrivals or those at the back kept nudging everyone forward to bunch up, so that they could squeeze inside the door out of the cold or, as seemed to me to be the most likely explanation, newcomers were sizing up the likely waiting time and and giving up without even joining the queue.

I remember calling at a DVLA Office towards closing time on one occasion and in addition to a full complement of staff behind the desks there were a couple of them working the queue to do advanced scrutiny of documents, like they do checking passports and tickets when it’s busy at the airports.  Maybe this only happens as a finishing spurt right at the end of a working day, when there’s otherwise a risk of delay in closing the Office.

After only 20 minutes or so I had nevertheless worked my way to the front of Queue Number One.  Mr Orangutan was still in the Office, having delivered an impressive encore on his return journey from the car park and moved on to Stage Two – the purpose of which was still a mystery.

Patience pays off

It’s a strange experience developing an appetite for filling in a form but but by the time I got to the head of Queue Number One I was positively itching to get stuck in.  When my turn came I stepped forward briskly in response to the beckoning glance of yet another Clerk who had recently taken up position at a Check In desk.  Or more accurately she had taken up one position, which had been vacated a few minutes earlier, and then switched to the other free one.  There was something about the first one that didn’t suit her although it wasn’t obvious what.

After a short while, during which the young lady settled herself in to her satisfaction, I was beckoned forwards by eye contact.  It would be an exaggeration to say that there was a welcoming smile of any kind but there was certainly no overt hostility in the look.  I walked forward and held my damp tax disk up for her inspection.  “May I sell you a slightly used tax disk” I said, hoping to strike a light hearted and friendly approach.

Not a flicker of a smile came back and she said in a formal tones “Do you wish to surrender an unexpired vehicle licence for partial refund?”.  “Yes please” I replied meekly.  “You’ll need to fill in a form.”  Well I knew that but I didn’t dare say so.

Without a word she got up from her desk and walked away.  It wasn’t immediately obvious whether she was going to get the Form or setting off for her next break, even before completing her first transaction.   She wasn’t sulking or even sultry, but she clearly wasn’t really enjoying her work either.  Neither, it seemed, was I supposed to enjoy my visit to a DVLA Office.  Pity really because she was quite a pretty young woman and something told me that in a different context she would have quite a nice smile.

But I was in luck in other ways.  At the back of the Check In area there were racks of forms, like there used to be for the public to help themselves from.  The Clerk brought back the Form to her desk position and very carefully and deliberately took a paper clip from a container.  With continuing care and precision, she attached my tax disk to its top left hand corner, handling it like it was something she’d had to pick up from a cat litter tray.  My tax disk wasn’t pristine and it was still a bit damp despite my attempts top dry it out with a bit of body heat but I wouldn’t have thought it looked or smelled particularly bad.  I’d only had it in my pocket.

She must somehow have been multi-tasking while this was going on, or maybe there was a deliberate distraction of my attention such as magicians use – or more likely I had distracted myself  by fantasising about just how nice her smile would be if she would only let it appear.  Suddenly there was faster movement with her left hand as if she was suddenly bursting into life.  With a practised flourish and without even looking what she was doing she tore off the numbered queueing ticket which was chuntering its way out of a printing machine.  The Form together with offensive, paper-clipped tax disk and the ticket were handed briskly to me.  “Fill in the form, then show it to the lady over there who will check it for you” she said.  Our brief encounter was over; I was being dismissed.  There might have been the flicker of a smile which, in my keenness to grasp the form I might have missed but I don’t think so.

I filled in my Form as quickly as possible and then joined Queue Number Two,  just too late to prevent someone else nipping in front of me.  At least I now knew this queue’s purpose, although of course I couldn’t be sure that there wouldn’t be an ethnic survey and/or an attempt to talk me into taking out DVLA’s own-brand credit card as well.

A Ram Raid of sorts

It was at about this point, as I was settling to the prospect of another period of waiting that further entertainment was unexpectedly provided.  From the direction of the entrance doors, there was a strangled cry of anguish followed by a loud crashing sound, a pause and then an angry or desperate shout of  “I can’t move it”.  The front of  a mobility scooter could be seen in the entrance lobby, lodged firmly into one of the glazed inner entrance doors, or in this case a formerly glazed door.  No human parts were in view nor sign of even a drop of blood, just the very front of a mobility scooter and a pile of broken glass.

No one moved in any of the queues.  We British might be capable of patience while queueing but there has to be a clear and present danger before we will willingly abandon our place in line.  A mere crash into a glass door by a mobility scooter doesn’t even begin to qualify.

The noise of the crash had however caused the Lady Clerk at the head of the second queue to look up towards the door and therefore in my direction to see what was going on.  But from her seated position she couldn’t see what had happened so she eased herself up out of her seat to gain a few inches of height – but that didn’t help.

My curiosity as to how the DVLA would respond to this situation got the better of me and I took the conscious risk that she would leave her station to respond by telling her that a mobility scooter had just crashed into their glass doors – half expecting that alarm bells would sound, shutters would drop at all service desks as DVLA’s Terrorist Attack Plan was triggered.  Fortunately she merely resumed her work.  Clearly if you wanted to make an impact on arrival at a DVLA Office you have to do much better than crash a mobility scooter into the door.

Ram raid by Mobility Scooter

Just as it looked like nothing else was going to happen, Mr Orangutan set off on another spectacular journey to the door.   He had clearly left something else in his car and been knocked back again.  This time he had to weave through two queues and a disaster scene at the door, all of  which he took in his idiosyncratic stride.  There were no sounds of stepping through broken glass or having to climb over crashed mobility scooters and once again he was out and back in remarkably quick time.  Just as well because his Lady, holding his place at the only Desk at the head of Queue Number Two this time, might not otherwise have been tolerated in silence.  Tut tuts were being almost audibly tutted and glowering looks were being looked.  Not by me, I hasten to add.   I was still cool; the spectator value of my DVLA visit had perked up again.

Queueing by Number looms

I had also been cheered up  (but then became slightly alarmed) when I realised that my ticket number (for Stage Three) was only ten numbers higher than the one which was currently being called.  I might not have all that long to wait at Stage Three of my DVLA experience after all – but then I remembered the warning on the TV screen.  There was now a risk that I would still be queueing for Stage Two when it was called, in which case I’d have to start again with Queue Number One to get a fresh ticket.  Maybe I’d be allowed to skip Stage Two the second time around; I lived in hope.

Meanwhile things were hotting up at the head of Queue Number Two because Mt Orangutan and his Lady had finished their business and moved off.  And instead of joining Queue Number Three as I expected they simply left the building.  Had they been sent home to get something else?  I couldn’t tell.

Still, that was another one ahead of me out of the way so I consoled myself with the thought that every cloud has a silver lining and turned my attention once more to the future.  Only one chap ahead of me now and still eight or nine numbers in hand on the ticket counting display.  The tension was building up but I was still in with a chance.  And then, oh dear, the significance of the logo on his jacket and the sheaf of papers he was holding dawned on me.  He was from a car dealership.

He was holding a great sheaf of papers and clearly had a batch of transactions to present.  But he was good looking lad and the young lady Clerk seemed to rise to occasion by mustering a cheerful and businesslike approach to her task.  He was clearly a regular and he was being personable too, so he was getting good service.  What chance would a fat old man like me stand as a follow up act I gloomily pondered?  Surely she would need to go and powder her nose and tell her girlfriends about this nice young man who’d been in again and smiled at her before she could face up to tackling my problems?

It took a while for her to deal with him but to be fair there didn’t seem to be any unnecessary chatting up either way – I was of course alert to this possibility and was eavesdropping like mad.  Maybe it was simply the size of his sheaf that needed such protracted attention.

And then suddenly it was my turn.  I handed over my form.  She smiled politely but she was clearly more interested in my queueing ticket, which she asked me to hand over.  The number and time were then carefully logged.  The ticket wasn’t handed back – what could this mean?

Then she took up my Form and in brisk fashion stuck the tax disk on to the Form with a glue stick, copied the Registration Number of my bike on to the Form more legibly that I had done, obliterated the bar code on the Tax Disk with a marker pen (?) looked up and smiled again.  That’s it, she declared, the Form is correctly completed and your claim will be processed in due course.

And that was indeed it.  I didn’t need to move on to Stage Three at all and I wouldn’t need my queueing ticket after all.  I could leave without further ado.  With huge relief I realised that Mr & Mrs Orangutan probably hadn’t failed in their mission either.

On the way out through the lobby I had to circumvent a couple of very large people lounging at ease on their matching pair of mobility scooters and chatting.  No blood, nor tears, nor anguish and no cups of tea and sympathy from DVLA either.  Maybe they were protesters and they were supposed to be blocking the entrance, at which they were being only partially successful.   Otherwise it wasn’t at all obvious why they would have come to the DVLA Office on mobility scooters unless it was simply to escape from the cold.

The DVLA System

DVLA’s Cunning Plan for dealing comfortably with calling customers wasn’t obvious at first but I think I worked it out while I was queueing that day.  The tickets were time-stamped and completion time was also logged, so it was a performance monitoring system of sorts.  The really clever part of the system was therefore getting callers to do most of their queueing before they get their hands on a queueing ticket, so that this time wouldn’t be recorded.  Of the 35 minutes or so I spent there that day only the last ten minutes or so, less than a quarter of the total, would have been logged as waiting time.

Who says our Civil Service can’t be inventive and adaptable when the need arises?

And of course the multi-stage queueing system they’ve adopted also serves to smooth out demand at busy periods, by ensuring that there is a queue backed up all the way to the door so that at least some callers will give up and go away all of their own accord.  Clever and effective.

As a cost effective way of administering tax disk refunds, visiting a DVLA Office leaves something to desired for both customer and provider of the service.  Busy working people will spend valuable time waiting which might well outweigh the value of any refund they can hope to get; only retired folk with time on their hands can look at it differently – as free entertainment and a bit of extra income as well.  Maybe there’s a career opportunity in this, returning tax disks for people who are too busy to do it for themselves.

A whole series of DVLA appear to need to be involved in a multi-stage process before my refund cheque gets into the post and it’s difficult to see that the process couldn’t benefit from streamlining.  My refund of £15 or so for three months motorcycle tax must cost DVLA far more than £15 to process.

Is it unthinkable that someone could issue a cheque at the counter, payable to the registered keeper in return for unexpired tax disks as a one-stage process?

Stressful times for DVLA Staff?

Perhaps this is not a time to expect to encounter happy and smiling Desk Clerks when you visit a DVLA Office because some of them will presumably be in fear of losing their jobs in these strained economic times.  So I was grateful for the smiles I got from the lady at Stage Two and I understand why the lady at Check In might not be a particularly happy bunny at the moment, what with Christmas coming and her job possibly coming under threat.

So if any of the Staff at DVLA Preston happen to come across this Article I wish them all a Happy Christmas and and Prosperous New Year, by which I mean that I hope that no more of them than is genuinely necessary will have to feel the pinch of the economic recession with the rest of us.

Postscript

It’s worth adding that by experimenting on subsequent visits I was able to confirm that the best time to go to a DVLA Office on any day, even at the turn of the month when they get very busy, is ten minutes before they close.  In order not to delay their own departure for home the DVLA staff pull out all the stops and clear the queues in the run up to closing time so that with ten minutes to go there simply won’t be any queue.  You can walk straight up to the counter and you will receive rapid and efficient service.