• That ever-so-slightly camp northern playwright Alan Bennett took a
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look at hauliers' wives on TV the other night. Sitting snugly in the lobby of a Harrogate Hotel, he first decided that the average Mrs Trucker is not a pretty sight, before rambling into an imaginary transport caff off the Al where all the indutry's marriages are apparently made. Heaven indeed.
It seems unlikely to a Hawk like me that any sensible woman would sit with mouth agape, her egg 'n' chips going cold, waiting for the average British truck driver to walk in through the door.
She either would not be in there in the first place or she would leave, climb into her waiting 38-tonner and flatten the first ever-so-slightly camp northern playwright she saw on the road trying to imply she has nothing better to do with her time than trawl our dwindling number of truckstops in search of Mr Right.
• A team from distributor Glass Glover did its best to dish out some fast deliveries when it took on customer Tesco in a charity cricket match.
The contest, at Glass Glover's sports ground in Rotherham, raised 22,750 for Great Ormond Street children's hospital. • Truck racing diehards at Silverstone a week last weekend might have wondered why ERF boss Peter Foden did not turn up in Sunday's final after qualifying so gallantly on the Saturday.
Now the Hawk can reveal why. Apparently the great man gave up his place to fellow driver Barry Lee, who does this sort of thing for a living, but was dumped from the Saturday heats for speeding. This, it seems, is totally kosher, and typically Lee went on to take first place in his race in Foden's trusty ERF E14 35ST.
Says Foden: "It was pouring with rain and I was quite glad not to have raced. Besides, I only did it in the first place for a laugh." Not that Foden is any novice when it comes to racing, having started in 1952 (in a Jaguar X1(120 no less) and was the first person to compete in an Aston Martin veeeight. Foden also has no less than three Monte Carlo rallies under his belt.