yen_powell

A cobbler/cobblers is a shoe mender/shoe mender's shop. Cobblers is also one of the million slang word for testicles, no idea why we have so many.

When I was a small child on holiday these sort of post cards cracked me up. Now I'm a mature adult, I snurk on the inside only of course.

Yes, now I'm glad you brought that up. Why is it that no slope looks as bad as it is in real life in a photograph or a video. If I took a picture of the top of Everest it would look like a billiard table.

Is that even fallen over. Sometimes doing that is easier than trying to get the side stand down on very uneven ground (on smaller bikes only of course).

You don't need a jack. Adrenaline and embarrassment usually suffices.

Just found this picture when looking for something else. Me standing next to someone else's bike. Mine is the black AT at the other end. The one I'm standing next to belongs to the person in the Chuck Berry story on page 3. Strange Dave is fettling at the back.

Maybe to stop it getting too top heavy and falling the rest of the way into the dry ditch. I went past it quite quickly, but after about a 100 yards, I decided to turn back. I think it may have also reminded me of the Navigator in the first Dune film. Also Raggety from 1070s puppet Rupert the Bear

Not one of mine, I'd only have a single arrow in the wrong direction, you get better head-ons that way.

I saw a brand new cottage with a thatched roof today, they still make the odd one. Thatch was banned in London after the Great Fire, but special permission was given for one building to be constructed with one. The replica of The Globe Theatre passed fire safety regulations, partly because the original burnt down and everyone got out safely.

I only went out for a little poodle on local roads originally, but whilst out I remembered that I had put a post code into my satnav and saved it a month or so back for one of the places in my Wild Guide book. There were two places I wanted to visit, a hidden quayside with nice views over a river with the best name ever (The Twizzle) and another similar place, but where the quayside stones had originally been part of the medieval London Bridge. I didn't have the book with me and could only find one of the post codes on the satnav, so off to the Twizzle it was, the old bits of London Bridge will be for another day. On the way there I went past a farm entrance with a hedge next to it with a small gateway set into it. Being nosy I stopped and stuck my head through and found a little graveyard, miles from anywhere as far as I could tell, and next door a little church. No idea how they get much of a congregation as no village is close by?? Like most little Essex churches, it is built to look like a wooden rocket ship. I also shot past a tree that to me looked like a giant wooden snail rearing up, so did a u-turn and took some pictures of that. I finally arrived at Quay Lane in a place called Kirby-Le-Soken. The book had said to park in the village and walk up Quay Lane, but I rode up it as far as I could until I met a sign saying any further was private property. The road was very narrow so I plonked the bike into a little concreted entrance to an electrical sub station and after chucking my jacket into the top box I started walking further up the private road (but public footpath). After about 500 yards the narrow lane opened up to reveal a little cottage with its own private bridge. According to the book, it is called Witch's Cottage. A little further along the road ended at a gate into the river. I took a few pictures by the gate then backtracked a few yards and walked along the field footpath which popped out by the river again. A few more snaps and I headed off to Frinton on the coast. It was only 2 miles away, but due to a weird combination of mini roundabout, a railway level crossing and 100 year old drivers it took me 20 minutes to get there. Frinton is the sort of seaside place that doesn't allow pubs, chip shops, fruit machines or ice cream sellers. I plonked my self down on a bench on the cliff top and had a coffee out of my flask. I could see loads of wind turbines out in the channel. They definitely weren't there when I last came here in 1976!

You know, Wednesday, when the things is on the thing. By the blue doodah.

Yes, all pictures in black and white.

So I've pulled my trousers up and I'm still in shock and not paying too much attention to the doctor. I finally realised she is waving a very small transparent pill container at me and speaking. The container is a few inches long, has a label on it and a screw lid. She wanted me to go to the toilet and provide a urine sample. Not easy with such a small container, but I did my best and gave the outside a good wash afterwards. I handed over the still warm container and the last thing she did was sit me down and open a book in front of me. I recognised it at once. It was the book of numbers they test you for colour blindness with. I first did this test at an opticians when I was 8 years old. I can only see the first number, the rest is just a sea of dots. I have even asked people who can see the numbers to trace them with their finger and I still can't see them. Strangely every eye test since they have made me do it again, like I am going to be miraculously cured of being colour blind. So of course, I fail the test as usual. Oh dear she said, you can't join the T.A. if you're colour blind!!!!! Now why didn't she tell me that at the start, we could have skipped the anal foreplay and gone straight for the rejection! Not only that but I could have spent my weekend previously indoors in the warm instead of running up and down an assault course. I left the room and went out to the waiting area. My mate was waiting with a smirk on his face, knowing what I'd gone through. "Don't worry" he said, "As you get promoted they put more fingers up. Become an officer and you get the whole bloody arm!" A few days later I go back to Tilbury and see the sergeant who first signed me up and sent me on the 2 day testing weekend. He's seen all my results. He's especially upset about the colour blindness because I got the highest score in the intelligence test out of the 100 blokes there, not that much of a feat as I said, some could barely write. He asked me if I was still keen to join. I asked how that was possible being colour blind. He looked around to make sure no one was listening and then told me to go to another regiment and apply all over again. Then I could learn the colour blindness test and fake it. I thought about it for a few seconds. "I'd have to have a medical again wouldn't I?" "Oh yes.". "I think I'll leave it if it's all the same to you, cheerio........."

Fuck me, you've got a picture of Prince Andrew squeezed up against an ex miner.

There's more medical yet, tomorrow though.

Eventually the day ended and we were free to do whatever we wanted in our Victorian barracks with luxury downstairs stables and horse troughs, all at no extra charge as well. Someone asked if we could go to the pub and the answer was yes, but anyone not there in the morning when our names were called was failed. Myself a a few others walked across the parade ground and out the gate to a pub in town somewhere. This had some of the sergeants in there already so I bought them all a drink to ensure better marks if they saw me dragging my self along the ground crying. I think this worked actually. Coming back later that night we couldn't find the gate we had come out of, we got a bit lost. So rather than walk right round the huge outside we climbed a large wall instead to get into the parade ground. We did it the old fashioned way, none of that leaping on each other stuff like earlier when I got muddy hair. Then we jogged across this huge expanse till our buildings appeared. Back in the room I squeezed into the awful supplied sleeping bag which had a distinct sweaty feet smell. On the other side of the room was the bloke with the damaged plums. He was telling everyone loudly that someone had swapped his sleeping bag because it definitely never had a broken zip when he got it. A voice in the dark told him to go to sleep or they'd chuck him out the fucking window. I zipped mine up and snuggled down to a guiltless sleep... In the morning we did the assault course again, poxy thing. I was even floppier across it than before, but I think my beer buying paid off here. Then we got taken to a store and top government experts measure my feet and wrote it down carefully, hopefully against the right name. If my overalls were anything to go by, I might have to stuff the toes of any future boot with paper or cut the toecap off. I then went into the next room and a respirator was stuck over my perfectly formed face. This was then tested by someone putting a hand on the filter and asking me to breathe in. Nothing happened, I just went blue and the veins stood out all over my head. Apparently this meant it was a good fit. The rest of the day passed in a blur, I think they had me upside down doing the sit ups again because my guts felt like I'd torn a foo foo valve. Finally we got our results individually before being sent to our respective lorries for transport back to where we had started from at the crack of dawn the day before. I was told I had passed subject to the medical. The man with the squashed spuds was one of our group and he moaned all the way back to Tilbury because they had failed him. A week later I had an appointment at Laindon medical centre. My sweaty mate came with me. He kept sniggering as we sat in the waiting room, but wouldn't say why. I was soon to find out. My name was called and I was told to go to a particular room. I knocked on the door and heard a female voice tell me to come in. Bugger I thought, woman doctor. I predicted I would be dropping and coughing at some point. I opened the door, hoping she was awful looking.....No such luck. Ask me to take my clothes off in front of a female medical person nowadays I wouldn't think twice. 22 year old me was a bit more worried about it. So, I was weighed and my height measured. The doctor was quite fit and when she bent down to do something to the scales I got a flash of cleavage. Brilliant I thought, that's all I need. I thought about Maggie Thatcher as hard as I could. Then she asked me to lay on a trolley and pull my trousers and pants down and my shirt up. As I lay there she started poking me in the guts. She saw me wincing, as the upside down pull ups were still having their after effect. Then she grabbed my bollocks and gave them a quick squeeze. This woman must be marvellous at selecting supermarket fruit I recall thinking. Then I swear she flicked my knob about a bit with the end of her biro. NOW, the next bit....you have to remember I was still young and naive. So when she asked me to turn on my side and draw my knees up under my chin, I did so not realising what was to come. "Just relax" was what I heard before I nearly shot off the trolley. As I lay there stunned and violated trying to go to my happy place she was already washing her hands at the sink. I'm off the trolley by now, still with my trousers and pants round my ankles, hopping up and down. "What did you just do?" I asked. "I just put my little finger up your bottom she said". I was shocked, we hadn't even been formally introduced and she had not bought me dinner or anything. "Are you sure it wasn't a thumb??" Still hopping about from foot to foot, I complained it was still stinging a bit. "That's because it's a very tight muscle" she replied. "That is because NO ONE has done THAT before, are you sure you're a doctor, you're not just here to empty the bins or something are you?" says I. "Look on the bright side", she said, "you'll never get piles., err, you can pull your trousers up now.

Yes, just clearing the tubes for the medical a week later when I was sexually assaulted by the doctor.

So about a 100 blokes are sitting in a large hall with test papers and a pen each in front of them. I would say that about 70 were holding their pens the wrong way round, eating their paper or asking for crayons as they weren't allowed sharp writing implements. A large sergeant told us to turn the papers over and start answering the questions. Can't recall too much, but I think there was some basic English language questions, bit of maths and then lots of diagrams with pullies and gear wheels and you had to predict what happened to the last item in a sequence if one turned at the start followed by stuff with weights on balance arms at different distances to the fulcrum. I've always finished exams very quickly, not necessarily correctly, but speedily. At school I would be sitting bored out of my brain for an hour plus, getting glares from other pupils and teachers, so this time I took a piece of scrap paper and doodled stuff for ages instead. When the papers were finally collected, I quickly turned over my scrap paper with all the knob pictures before it was seen by the sergeant. Some people were still writing as their papers were snatched away. After we completed the tests we were taken into another room for a lecture. What it was about I have no idea, but the unexpected exercise had started taking a strange toll on everyone. There seemed to be a continuous round of farting from everyone, including me, followed by the deadliest stench permeating the room. I was in a confused state. Everyone likes the smell of their own farts, but is this still okay if everyone's smell the same?? The officer giving the lecture gulped and stopped and said that it might be best if everyone went outside for 10 minutes and got it out of their system. He kept some people back to open windows.

I am never keen, I feel out of control and see dangers that I think the rider hasn't. But I'm the same in the passenger seat of a car. On holiday sometimes we hire a car and one of us drives out for the evening, then after drink is taken on board we get a cab back, leaving the car in town. In the morning someone has to go on the back of a scooter or motorbike to collect the car. My 73 year old mate has the habit of weaving about, I swear he tries to get every pot hole he sees, like a game of pothole Bingo. I cringe in fear on the back, my only consolation is if he's driving on the correct side of the roa, depending on which country we are in. My other mate rides in and out of London all week and he is definitely an unhappy pillion behind me. He is carrying a bit of extra weight so he's usually tightly wedged between me and the top box. He will shout out that a traffic light has turned red, like I haven't seen it. It is usually on the horizon and will change 2 or 3 times before we even get near. When I bought my 3rd Africa Twin I had to go to Norwich. I asked my friend Charlie to give me a lift. His bike was a GSXR110, bit of a beast. The rear seat was tiny, I had trouble bending my legs enough to get them on the rear pegs. When he finally hit the on ramp to the A12 dual carriageway he gunned it and not only did I nearly fall off the back, he hit a lump in the road at the same time and I went up in the air as well. I shit myself. Later on when we left the A12 and got onto a smaller road (A140??) where he went round a roundabout so fast I swear my ear was on the tarmac. I had had enough by then and made him pull over and swap positions and I rode it with him on the back the rest of the way.

After the gymnasium we were led into another room to be shown various big bangy guns and allowed to play about removing some of the parts. Back then the T.A. were still using the self loading rifle which I'd only seen my action man using in the 1970s. The real army had moved on and were regretting it I recall, their new gun had a habit of falling in half at critical moments. This SLR was placed in my hands and I don't know how my Action Man coped, no wonder his realistic hands fell apart. It weighed a ton. Sod running about with that. We were also shown the general purpose machine gun we would be using if we passed and were accepted. I say we, it was a three man team on a machine gun they said, someone to load, someone to pull the trigger and someone to say, "Shoot at him Geoffrey, he looks a bit foreign to me". You've probably seen them before, big thing, tripod or bipod, belt feed and a load of spare barrels. I hadn't realised till then that you had to change barrels if firing for a long time, at least that was what I was told. I had never seen John Wayne have to do this, must be inferior equipment. We also got handed some sort of hand held rocket launcher thing and what we all excitedly called a sten gun, but apparently was actually a Sterling. After this it was lunch time, more ready made super sweet mugs of tea, some not too bad food and me wolfing as much of their sticky syrup fruit salad afters as possible for energy, because the basic fitness test was coming up later on that day. We were driven in lorries to another part of Colchester, a large green, some M.O.D housing and a rectangle of roads. A week after the events I'm writing about took place, a military policeman was badly injured in the same place when his car exploded. The car bomb had been set by the IRA, the MP lost both legs and some fingers. We sort of forget about the IRA nowadays with all that's happening in the world, but terrorist bombs were quite common on the UK mainland when I was growing up. The last one I remember was the one in Canary Wharf which put our jerry built office in docklands into a permanent tilt despite it being about 200 metres away from the explosion. Anyway, with freshly rolled trouser legs I listened as a large red faced man in a track suit explained that it was a 2km run which had to be completed in 11 minutes to pass. You started by walking quickly and as you passed a certain point you started running and were timed from that point. Well off I went, legs in all directions, my boiler suite billowing. 2 minutes later I was ready to bring my dinner back up. 8 minutes later I am looking for a hole to put my foot in so I can twist my ankle and cry off. That's when the twats who had paid attention in the morning chat grabbed me, team work you see. Despite me crying and telling them all to fuck off, they dragged me along. I think I came in 30 seconds over the 11 minutes. I was doubled over ready to honk, but this NCO started screaming at me not to bend forward, to stand up straight and to definitely not besmirch his nice clean grass. After my head had stopped throbbing, we all piled back on to the lorries and then waited for the man with the ball bag slings to walk in, he was still waddling along it seemed. I say piled back on, I think it took me a few attempts to get in. It was back to the hall which was now filled with desks. It was intelligence test time!

No unfortunately.

So this officer is giving a 100 blokes a talk in some sort of a hall. First he gave a history of the regiment which due to cut backs was about 10 regiments all joined together. He said that this battalion was nicknamed The Steel Backs because they never cried out when being flogged around the time of Waterloo. I'm in trouble here I thought, I'd cry like a baby when they took my shirt off if it was chilly. He makes the mistake of going on about team work which was to come back and haunt me later. Next we are all taken outside and they attempt to teach some sort of drill. My version of marching was different to everyone else's. Try moving left leg and left arm at the same time and crouching and you'll probably be as good as I was. I must have looked like the hunchback of Notre Dame after he'd not paid his tailor's bill. Next we were whisked off to an assault course. This thing was mostly made of mud with a few brick walls, ditches and climbing frames mixed in. We were taken to each obstacle and taught the best way to tackle it. I was shagged just walking around them. There was a wall about 10 feet high. This NCO grabbed me and made me stand facing it with arms outstretched. Then he got two other blokes to place their palms on the floor and I had to stand on their hands. Luckily my overalls had unravelled round the ankles which cushioned them a bit. He then told them both to lift at the same time and I would magically go up the wall and be able to grab the top and pull myself up. In theory this is fine, but when the two wankers lifting are of different heights and ability, all it did was tip me over side ways head first into the mud. After I had got up and rubbed the mud in to my hair properly, he then showed us a better way, which was one bloke putting his back against the wall, crouching down and put both hands together whilst I ran at him, slapped a shitty boot into his hands and as he lifted, I jumped and I got to the top of the wall. One miscalculation and he could have had the boot in his balls mind you. Back to the start and we did the whole thing properly. I was not fit, my days of long distance running at school were 6 plus years behind me. I would have to use brains to pass this thing. So whenever any of the NCOs with a clip board was watching I ran like a hero, all arms, legs and determination. When I was out of sight I whimpered and dribbled and crawled slowly. When we got the the 10 foot wall, the dim bloke who had my sleeping bag somehow managed to fall with a leg each side of it. He gave a terrible scream and had to be lowered to the ground and taken away to have his bollocks put in a sling by a medic. We didn't see him for the next few hours. After the assault course we were taken to the mess hall for breakfast. I lined up and found the the tea urns didn't just have plain black tea in them. It was already mixed with the milk and about 400 sugar lumps by the taste of it. My hands were a bit shaky from the assault course so I dropped my first cup of tea all over the floor. After mopping that up I got another one and moved on to the food queue. Some army cook type geezer, all acne and flaky skin asked me if I wanted two bits of bacon. I said yes and he grinned as he cut my single piece into two pieces. I wolfed my breakfast, glugged my tea, glugged another mug of tea and then it was marching off to a gymnasium. In the gym they did all sorts of PT tests. Hanging off bars to see how many pull ups you could do, timed climbing of ropes, flinging yourself over a vaulting horse etc. The worst one was hanging upside down off some wall bars and doing sit ups. My stomach was still hurting from that a week later when they sent me for a medical, more on that later.

When I was about 22 my sweaty friend encouraged me to have a go at joining the T.A. He said if I joined now, they were about to head for Germany for shooty bangy type stuff and I'd get free time off from my employer. What's the worst that could happen I thought. So a month or so later I present myself at a building near Tilbury and myself and 5 or 6 others boarded a Bedford truck which headed off to Colchester to join a group of about a 100 blokes from various corners of Essex and Suffolk. I was signed in, given a sleeping bag with a busted zip, a pair of overalls 42 times too big for me, a number on a piece of cloth, some safety pins and directed to a bunk in a Victorian cavalry barracks. Stables below, sleeping areas above. This was next to a parade ground that seemed to go to the horizon and lots of other brick and black wooden buildings. Anyone who has watched Blackadder Goes Forth would recognise it as it was used in the opening titles where the band marches playing the theme tune and Baldrick finishes with a tap on his triangle. It's now a Wimpey or similar housing estate. First things first, there was a dim but large bloke in our group. When he wasn't looking I swapped my sleeping bag with his. We then had to put our overalls on and pin our numbers to our chests. I rolled my trouser legs up about 10 times till they only just brushed the floor. The really tall bloke next to me who's overalls were too short refused to swap with me so was left looking like a toddler in a romper shorts combo. As we were called out for a talk by some bloke in a peaked cap I could hear the dim bloke moaning about his broken zipped sleeping bag.

His Mrs scared me a bit if I'm honest.