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Thanks a lot...
Page 18
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Take a stroll with us through the little side roads of haulage, the diversions and detours, the quirky, the quixotic and the downright strange...
As a child On the Margin was always first in the queue for Christmas presents. Furniture, pets and siblings were quickly moved from our path with a deft combination of elbows, fists, feet and our considerable toddler-sized bulk before we descended on the stack of gifts like a plague of locusts on a wheat field. Five minutes later, after more paper shredding than a troubled Enron executive, we'd be surrounded by stacks of shiny new toys and filled with a profound sense that we were clearly the centre of the universe. However, the trouble always came afterwards, in the form of thank you letters. It took extreme amounts of parental cajoling and the sort of threats normally issued to middle-eastern dictators before we'd put pen to paper and thank distant aunties for the delightful bobble-hats they'd sent. So in a bid to change our terrible ways and make up for that self-centred childhood, On the Margin would like to offer some heartfelt "thank yous" before we go any further. First, to the lovely Bryan Scarfe, transport manager at Ringwood Brewery, for the wonderful beer which kept us
nicely topped up for a few weeks and helped us to cut down on the gin-spending. Second, an even bigger thank you to two Crawley-based hauliers PJ Brown and M Matthews who are very generously
providing big piles of dirt for very little cash (insert own comments about muck and brass here) to a cycling project based down in Dorking. Your help is much appreciated and if someone can lend them an excavator it'll be even better.
With the end of the football season upon us (what will we have to talk about for the next few months?) we're still left wondering at the goings-on at Leeds United everyone's favourite bunch of chippy Northern tykes. There are still rumours abounding that the club will be taken over by haulage magnate Steve Parkin, who runs the Yorkshire-based Clipper Group of companies.
We were initially puzzled as to why Parkin would want to get involved with the recently-relegated outfit. But then we considered the similarities between the two industries: sky-high operating costs, problems with staff recruitment and retention, cumbersome and heavy equipment (well, principally Mark Viduka but you get the point) and figured that almost any industry must be easier than haulage.