It was strange visiting TPT as an unemployed
employee who didn’t exist. I don’t know
who or what they were trying to con, by fiddling my employment status, but I
really did feel sorry for any person who was a student with them. And please understand that once again, that
having discovered a huge collection of imbeciles, I often did wonder if it was
me that was wrong. Perhaps all these
social workers and civil servants were not absolutely useless, perhaps it was
me. I hated some of the ridiculous set
ups that I would encounter throughout my normal working day. I remember nipping around to the admin area
to photocopy some paperwork. The
photocopier seemed to be under guard from a male student.
I lifted the lid on the photocopier and was
about to set my paper on the glass surface when he stopped me. I was informed that I was not allowed to use
the photocopier as I hadn’t been trained.
I would have to hand him the ‘job’, he would record it in his book along
with my name and department and the number of copies I would require. My ‘job’ would be put in the queue and when
complete, I would get a telephone call and could come back and, having signed
for it, could collect the photocopies. He couldn’t do the ‘job’ there and then as his
supervisor wasn’t with him. I understand
that it took three days to train an average person on a photocopier. I compared it to the time on 92 Squadron when
Slim, the squadron Warrant Officer, threw me a machine gun and within twenty
seconds had me turned in to a fully trained killer by saying ‘The bullets come
out this end, which you should keep pointed away from yourself at all times.’ Practical and with a health and safety
element included, you can’t get better training than that.
Talking about head cases and guns would
naturally take me back to dear old Grahame.
Tony had been skipping about like an infant outside an occupied toilet
waiting for our trip to go and visit Grahame.
I did feel sorry for Tony as it wasn’t nice to see how much pressure he
was under from debt collectors and the like.
Nothing much has changed in the debt industry as I see a nine month BBC
undercover investigation into two of the biggest bailiff companies in the UK is
about to be broadcast. I understand that
one bailiff in the programme describes ‘bailiffs’ as ‘legal thieves ripping people
off.’ I think it is an awful shame that
poor people allow themselves to be treated so badly, we should arm the
population, like Grahame always was. I
would like to see a bailiff try to enter his house.
We did, we entered Graham’s house and he hadn’t
changed, I had expected him to have mellowed, I wasn’t expecting any prison
tattoos, or for his accent to have changed.
The only apparent change I could detect was that he had got louder. Grahame and Tony went into another room to
discuss their business and I sat down with Ginny and had a nice cup of tea and
a chat. Ginny was still upset that all
of their so called friends had disappeared when Grahame had been sent
down. She didn’t have one good word to
say about the Duke of Norfolk’s son, who scarpered away the moment the police
showed up and hid behind his father’s skirts, but then that’s just the British
aristocracy for you. It took about forty
minutes before the pair of them came out and, judging from the smile on Tony’s
face, I could tell that Grahame had fixed everything for him. I was reminded of Goethe’s Faust and wondered
if I had enabled Tony to actually sell his soul to the Devil.
Graham and I chatted about this and that and
the other. He insisted that I send him
some of my writing work so that he could skim an eye over it. He knew people you know. I don’t want to leave a direct connection to
Grahame from this blog as I would hate to cause him any embarrassment. What I write is the truth, so I have no
qualms about recording what has happened, I am not in the business of purposely
embarrassing people, that comes later.
Just to see if Graham is still on the radar, so to speak, I Googled his
name the other day and was quite surprised to see that he is now a film
producer and has been for a number of years.
I immediately sent him a message so you can expect to see this blog
turned in to a major Hollywood blockbuster in the near future. I wonder who they will get to play me? Graham insisted that we stay in touch as he
had the odd job come in that might interest me.
Tony and I headed back to Skelmersdale and Tony
was adamant that I deserved a reward so he organised a fancy dress party at the
air cadet squadron. I decided to dress
as my favourite and most influential character, Rab C Nesbitt. Rab was a Glaswegian television sitcom
character who would comment on the state of society, and very accurately I may
add. Added to this he was an alcoholic whose main lifestyle choice was to
remain unemployed. Rab always wore a
string vest and a bandage on his head. I
could copy the bandage but could not find a string vest anywhere; this was long
before the days of the internet and e-bay.
I settled for a plain, round necked, tee shirt but to add that little
something extra, I set it out and poured a cup of vegetable soup over the front
of the garment, allowing it to dry, so it would give the impression that I had
vomited over myself.
My costume was quite a success on the evening, but
people still remind me of that evening today.
One of the then cadets, Carol Browne, always recounts how I stood by the
bar picking bits of dried vegetable from the front of my tee shirt and eating
them. She found it quite disgusting, in
a funny way. I found it quite handy as
you all well know there is never enough peanuts on a bar. I suppose I had invented a new and healthy
bar snack. Tony disappeared after that
and I wonder if like me he had an ulterior motive for being with the air
cadets. He wasn’t ex forces, he wasn’t even an ex cadet. so I have no idea why
he was with us. We had spent some time together
apart from the long journey up and down from Grahame’s or Lumb Bank. We had once been sent off to attend a course
in the Lake District about the safe management of outdoor pursuits for
teenagers. We never made it to the venue
as it was such a nice day and the mountains in the Lake District were looking
so splendiferous, we sat outside a country pub all day, drinking beer and
admiring the scenery.
And I suppose that is the one thing that I
wished I could do instead of sitting in an office with a bunch of high flying
TPT managers. I actually hated working
for TPT because if you noticed something was wrong, or came up with a more
efficient way of doing things, they were not capable of change. I was used to life in the air force where if
you could see a better or more efficient way of doing something it would be put
into effect immediately. I had been
given the usual task of producing a timetable for the two week long mandatory
course for the long term unemployed.
Once again my comments that this could only be completed in a general
manner as to be more specific would depend on the actual individuals on the course,
fell on deaf ears. I could see that I
wasn’t going to get anywhere so settled down to dream up another theoretical
timetable. Then the telephone rang.
The last person I expected to hear was Grahame
but sure enough here he was bellowing away at me down the line. “Peter!” he roared. “I have a job that I need your help on.” I know I was smiling as Grahame spoke, for
the man was completely off his rocker.
“I want you to be my bodyguard for a week.” Makes you feel good when an ex SAS officer
needs little old me to protect him, but then the mountain rescue teams didn’t
half produce some hard men. “We’re to
fly to Johannesburg and pick up a consignment of diamonds. You’ll be given a weapon when we get to South
Africa. All we have to do is deliver the
diamonds to an address in Amsterdam and its two grand each, for the weeks
work.”
A couple of things occurred to me as Graham
spoke. One was that if he was offering
me two thousand pounds for one week’s work, apart from it being a good deal, he
would have been getting at least six.
The offer was so far off the scale that it didn’t even register with me,
but I could see the opportunity for a bit of a laugh. John, my manager at TPT, was also the chap
who trained the air cadets in the use of firearms. Sounds a bit grand for a person who trains teenagers
to fire .22 rifles, but such is life.
“Listen Grahame,” I explained. “I’m
waiting for a call to go to Ireland, but I have a weapons expert here with me
who might be interested.” “Put him on,”
bellowed Grahame. I covered the
mouthpiece as I handed the telephone to John.
“There’s a friend of mine here,” I explained. “Who needs help with a wee job. Two grand for a weeks work, but the person
needs to know something about guns.”
John snapped the telephone from my hand.
I sat down and watched the colour drain from his face and he stuttered and
spluttered as he turned down the offer from Grahame. I left the office so that the telephone could
not be given back to me. I know I was
smiling to myself as I walked along.
Graham certainly had livened my day up, but he also helped me confirm
that I wasn’t the mad one in all of
this, perhaps, and I know it sounds very strange, but perhaps I was one of the
sane ones.
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