Working for the Government -part two

 A few years ago I was employed as a temp to enter all the flood defence data on to the National Flood Defence database. I've explained how I was recruited at short notice from a local employment agency, despite the fact that the EA had contracted with Reed International to supply all their temporary staff. I also explained how unworkable and unsatisfactory the arrangement was, as Reed offices are usually in a different town to where the job was situated, meaning that local staff were unlikely to be given the job.
I was employed on minimum wage and I had no spare time or money to travel to another town to register for work (at minimum wage). In reality the national minimum wage is also the national maximum wage. You can't run a household and a car on minimum wage, so having a national agreement in place is the worst possible option when trying to get people back into work and getting work done and meeting your own targets.
Reed had to take up my references, but I argued that I was already working at the EA anyway, and had been for some weeks, so why shouldn't I continue to work there? Then there was the small matter of the deadline for uploading all the data, the reason why I was engaged in the first place.
So I went back to work at the EA while my references were checked out. In the meantime the agency had sent a new temp along to help. He was considered the very best they could find. He was useless, but then I was biased. However, he was unable to match our work rate even after a couple of day's training. As I said, the job required tenacity, accuracy and intense concentration and my co-worker was sadly lacking. It didn't help that he lived miles and miles away and his transport was unreliable.
(Back to the same problem of paying minimum wage. There's no money for keeping your car up to scratch. Yet another disincentive to work.)
As the days passed, we began to see the light. The pile of work slowly began to diminish. We were going to upload all the data in the time required. My boss rang around the neighbouring regions to see how they were doing. Their answer astounded me.


No they hadn't made much progress in getting the data online. No they weren't making any special effort. Yes they were going to miss the deadline set by the government. No they had no intention of meeting it at any time soon.


So much for government targets.


I now began to see how the public sector works. I began to see that setting targets is unproductive, costly and gives a totally false picture of what is actually happening.

Basically there are three options.

One is to stop doing your normal work and divert all your resources to producing the evidence required by central government that you are hitting your targets.
In the case of my little backwater of the EA, it would have meant taking all the field satff off the job of repairing and improving flood defences and sitting them in an office entering the data on to the computer. Data which is basically useless in the event of a flood. Flood defences are what's needed, not lines on a map.
Option one is the one favoured by someone looking for promotion. Look good in the eyes of Head Office and bugger the workers and the public.  Produce glossy plans and charts that look good but betray the reality.

Option two was to continue to work on the flood defences, utilising the staff according to their strengths, and updating the data as and when time allowed. This also creates a false picture of the situation, but in a positive way. The defences are probably better than as marked on a plan. This is not the way to go if you want promotion.

Option three is to bring in people to update the data while the regular staff do the job they were hired to do. The problem with this approach is that the quality of staff is variable, the training patchy, and the rush to hit the deadline outweighs the need to enter the data correctly. It's also very expensive.

And the final option, one that is used over and over again. In my office there were a couple of men who were working on technical drawings for various flood defences. They worked on a draughtsman's table producing plans in the old fashioned way. I chatted to one when I had a break one day. He used to work for the EA or one of its predecessors but had been made redundant when the EA was re-organised. The re-organisation left them without anyone to make the deatiled drawings that are vital for any work to be done. What did they do? they re-hired the draughtsman, this time as a consultant at a vastly inflated daily rate. So he came back, sat at the same desk and did exactly the same job as he did before, but this time with a big smile on his face. He was his own boss, earning a fortune compared to his earlier salary, and if he fancied a day off he could take it. Nice work if you can get it.

We made the deadline. We were the only office in the whole of the UK to do so.
We were the only office to hit the government's target.
Guess which office got into trouble?

Anyway, my job was done. I heard that another department needed a temporary worker so i approached them and found myself work to last another three weeks or so.

Reed International. Useless. I'd never recommend them to anyone.

Working for the Government

I've not posted for the last few weeks as there's been an election followed by week away on holiday.


And I had nothing to write about.
But that hasn't stopped me in the past so here goes.


I briefly worked for the Environment agency about five years ago. It taught me all I need to know about how the government sets targets, allocates resources and gives contracts. In short, it's rubbish.
The Environment Agency was formed from the Anglia Water Authority and National Rivers Authority amonst other agencies. It sought to bring a whole raft of differing organisations with different responsibilities under one roof. The government did  a similar thing when it combined the Inland Revenue with Customs & Excise and created a body that managed to lose all the good aspects and retain the bad bits of both agencies. I suspect that the same thing happened with the Environment Agency.
In 1996 there were really bad floods in Northampton. It turned out that the flood defences were so bad as to be useless. A lot of money had to be spent putting that right and then the government called for a nationwide survey of every flood defence, and for that information to be put on a national database that could be accessed on the internet. All this had to be done in addition to the everyday work.
So how do they assess the flood defences? They send their staff out to walk the riverbank and measure the height, angle, constuction methods etc of every river bank. These were entered on to paper plans and then entered on the computer database.
As usual, the government set a target for this to be accomplished. The order went out from Whitehall that the whole country's flood defences be available to view online by such and such a date.
It was an impossible task, given the manpower available and the pressure of actually repairing the banks and creating flood protection areas, rather than merely measuring them.
You see the same problem in the NHS, in Education, the Police. All have targets that must be achieved, so the staff spend all their time filling in forms and only doing the work that is relevant to making their targets.

I'd been looking for work for about three weeks. My last job was entering data for a Supermarket chain's distribution depot. The company's promotional allocations were on a separate database to the stores orders, so I entered the quantities from one database to the other so that they could be picked and sent out in one load rather than two. It was not a hard job, but needed speedy and accurate keyboard skills, which I'd learned almost forty years beforehand.


One day I received a call from a local employment agency asking if I was available to work the next day. I was, so I turned up at the local Environment Agency offices, where my job was explained to me.
It was quite complicated, but nowhere near as complicated as working Cubase music software, so I was able to get up to speed quite quickly. I'd be given a pile of A4 sheets that related to a stretch of riverbank, then I'd download the relevant master data from the national database. I'd enter the data from the sheets to the database and once I'd completed the set, I'd upload the amended data to the national database.
I will say that not everyone can do this. It required a high degree of accuracy and attention to detail, as well as working to a tight deadline. But that was what I was used to, having come from a banking and FMCG background
(FMCG= Fast Moving Consumer Goods)
The deadline loomed ever closer. My boss and I were the only staff available to enter the data. To be honest, you could never get a man who'd spent all his life outdoors maintaining water courses to have the computer skills to transfer his data in an office environment. Any more than you could have asked me to survey the riverbanks for the data.


It was then that we encountered a snag. While it was OK for my boss to have a temp, he could only get that temp from the approved supplier, which was Reed International. I wasn't registered with them. I had to take a day off and travel to Northampton to register and be interviewed for the job I'd been doing with a great deal of success for a couple of weeks. I had to give references which had to be checked up. I went along with it reluctantly.


Here I was, a temporary worker on minimum wage having to travel to another town at my own expense to register for a job in my own town. If I wanted to work in Northampton I'd have registered there. My boss said that they'd asked Reed for temporarary staff months before but they'd been unable to find any, and yet he'd rung a local agency who provided a first class temp (me) the next day. He shook his head, saying that the government had a policy of using local business wherever possible, but that it was thwarted by their insistence of centralised accounts, who refused to allow local businesses to compete. There had to be central buying, which accounts for why a post-it pad costs ten times from the approved supplier than what you could buy it for in the high street.

False economics.
On a national scale, it may make sense for one firm to supply all the temporary staff, if all that mattered was sending out one cheque instead of hundreds. But unless the agency has an office near every government office, it is useless. If you go to Scotland or Cornwall teh problem is even more magnified. If a government office in Penzance needs a temp and their chosen agency is in Bristol, or Taunton,or Exeter, or Plymouth, or Bodmin or even Truro, they will have a long wait to get one.
The whole idea of temporary staff is their availability at short notice, their flexibility and versatility.

As usual, the government got the worst of the deal.

(to be continued)

Job Hunting

I've written at length about some of the jobs I've done, so now I want to write about the bits in between- job hunting.
Until 1994 I'd only been unemployed twice.
The first time was after I'd left Town & County Catering at Olympia and signed on with a temp agency. I was hoping for a day or two off but was back working full time within a week.
The second time was when I left Telfers, having had enough of battling against the odds, doing a job I had no training or aptitude for, and hoping to "make it" with my band.
I was out of work for about six weeks that time.
My experience at the labour exchange and trying to claim any kind of benefit influenced my decision to get married a year or so later. One government agency treated me as single for tax purposes, but another treated me as married because I was co-habiting. Both decisions meant no benefits for me. Back then married couples had a tax break so in the end we got married for tax reasons. But that's another story.
After I'd been made redundant from Volume One Bookshops following a takeover (another story for another time- I'm not writing chronologically), I took a year out courtesy of some redundancy insurance that I'd taken out a few years earlier. I used the time to work on my music and record an album for a charity at our church. One thing led to another and I recorded three albums of songs in eighteen months. However, I wasn't earning enough to pay the bills, so I embarked on a ten year career of "temporary" work.
My first "temporary" job was driving a delivery van for a firm that supplied meat and pies to pubs. My route involved travelling around 2000 miles a week around East Anglia, from Peterborough and March in the North, in and around Cambridge, east to Newmarket, Brandon, Bury St Edmunds and Ipswich, south to Colchester, Clacton, Chelmsford, Brentwood and west to Harlow Welwyn Garden City, Letchworth, Hitchin and various places in Bedfordshire. I did this for about eighteen months in a little Citroen C15 fridge van. I drove more than 100,000 miles in it and went through two sets of tires and two engines. I was out in all weathers, rain , snow and heatwave. I remember having to drive at speed through fields of wheat that had caught fire in the extreme heat of that summer, and I also recall driving through some achingly beautiful countryside. Most of the time, however, I was chasing deadlines and failing.
One day my van was in for repair, and the only vehicle that was available was the boss's Vectra. I loaded the boot, packed freezer bags around the goods and set off. I was driving around the Colchester bypass when I noticed two things. One, my speedo read 105 miles an hour, and two, there was a police bike on my tail. The van I was used to driving wouldn't do 70 downhill with the wind behind it, and I forgot how fast the car could go. I pleaded guilty and was fined £30 and had three points on my licence. That is the only time I've ever been caught speeding in more than 30 years driving.
The firm kept losing contracts and although my mileage remained constant, I was carrying less and less, and therefore the turnover was dropping. I did a few days work in the coldstore and freezer, picking orders. That was cold work, and no-one begrudged us taking frequent tea breaks to warm up.
Eventually the firm went bust and I was looking for work again.


I decided to register with the local employment agencies. I didn't want permanent work because I was getting a few bookings including midweek work, and I was spending time in various recording studios. Temping meant that I could work a few days as required and from 1996 until 1999 this was what I did.
I registered with several agencies and would visit them all in turn when I wasn't working, spending a couple of mornings a week calling in to say hello, to see what work was available and to keep my name at the top of their lists.
I occasionally walk around town and I notice that many of the agencies have closed up. There are only about half the number of employment agencies compared to ten years ago, and one of my friends who ran an employment agency for twenty years painted a bleak picture.


A few years ago I worked  at one of the vast car yards in Corby. I didn't stay long, I couldn't cope with the chaos which was due to the manager's failure to plan or organise. Every action was a reaction. They were always fire fighting. Every day the staff would miss their lunch breaks because of some minor catastrophe that could have been avoided if they'd plan ahead.
Even then, six or more years ago, the gangs that collected the cars parked across acres of Northamptonshire and brought them to be loaded onto car transporters were organised according to the country they originated from. There were gangs of Lithuanians, Slovakians, Poles and Bosnians, with only the gang leader speaking English. A few years before I'd worked at the same yard preparing new cars for delivery to dealers. We'd get the car from the yard and while one person fitted the licence plates, I'd check that the heating, aircon, tyre pressures etc were OK. We'd also strip the protective plastic from the wings and bonnet, make sure the lights and indicators worked etc etc. All the staff were English/British. Not any more.


It's tough to find temporary work now. I read that some factories won't employ English speakers because everyone now speaks Polish. Five or six years ago I saw the beginning of that.


But  hey, the food's cheap, booze is cheap, clothes are cheap so why worry?

Good Buying or Goodbye

I've already posted about one firm that went bust because of bad buying decisions, now I want to tell you another story about my time working in retail.
I was working as manager of a large bookstore in Northampton in the late 1980s. The store was set up by the Goldsteins when they were directors of Kingfisher Plc. They d sold Superdrug to Kingfisher a few years before and wanted to try something new. Volume One Bookshops was a new concept in retailing and a complete change from the "libraries with tills" look that characterised bookselling at that time.
Our shops were bright, had acres of space to display books with the covers out rather than spine-on, and sold videos as well. Sell-through video was a very recent concept. Up until that time videos were rental only. No-one foresaw the potential, or that legions of Dr Who or Startrek fans would buy every episode of their favourite shows to watch at home over and over again.

Volume One were one of the first to sell videos alongside books and in time the business grew so that half our turnover came fom selling VHS cassettes. We ordered our stock from a wholesaler called Parkfield. They were the main wholesaler in the UK. We could ring our order in on a Monday and it would be delivered the next day. This meant that we could keep our stockholding to a minimum and reduce our exposure to bad purchases clogging up the shelves.

Sell through video was like pop music with a very short shelf life. A film would be released on a Monday, sell for a week or two and never sell another copy. It made sound economic sense to keep our stocks at a minimum, although the margins were lower than if we had bought direct from the publisher. Using a wholesaler made such good economic sense. The wholesaler held the stocks and we could replace our sales within a couple of days. Constant stock-turn more than compensated for the lower margins. This was good buying.
We started having problems with our video supplier soon after we read in the press how they planned to become the largest video wholesaler in Europe. Each delivery would have lines missing. This went on for week after week. I found out that the firm were taking in so much stock for the Christmas rush that the staff didn't have time to pick the orders going out to the customers. The problem of short deliveries got so bad that we had to change suppliers. Needless to say the video distribution company went bust soon after, having filled numerous warehouses with stock that they couldn't dispatch to their customers.
The firm failed because of bad buying.
We used a couple of wholesalers for buying books. One of them was a small family firm on the South coast. Nothing was too much trouble. You could get in your car and pay them a visit, walk around the warehouse and choose some stock which was then scanned, an invoice/delivery note printed there and then, and the books packed into a box which you could either take away or have delivered the next day.
Our other supplier had a huge brand new state of the art warehouse, and a computer system that was unable to update fast enough to keep up with the business. Every book had a bar code, yet the warehouse lacked bar code readers to input the stocks, which had to be input manually. The stock levels were only updated each evening, so they never knew what stocks they had. The computer said one figure, but the reality was always different. We d place an order and their computer system was unable to distinguish whether the books were on the shelves ready to be picked, in the loading bay ready to be unpacked, or already picked and waiting to go to a customer. Once again we were faced with unacceptable shortages in our deliveries and we switched supplier. They went bust soon afterwards. They had no control over their stock.

Bad information equals bad buying.
Bad buying equals goodbye.

A few years ago I worked in a warehouse that supplied tenpin bowling equipment to the various bowling complexes in the UK. If you bowl regularly you will soon buy your own ball.
The technology of bowling balls is very complex.The normal ball you use when you go bowling for fun is a far cry from the highly complex balls that are used by the serious players. Everything from the shape of the core (the middle of the ball) to the type of material that covers the ball will have an effect on how it moves down the lane. Serious bowlers buy their ball from the bowling pro in the same way that the golfer buys from the golf shop at his course. When you buy a bowling ball it comes without holes. The pro will measure your hand and will cut the holes so that it fits you exactly. You can choose the weight of the ball. Years ago the serious players would use a heavy 16lb ball in order to get the swerve and power to score consistently high. As the technology developed and the players got older they found that they could get the same power and control with a 15lb ball. To all extents and purposes the 16lb ball was obsolete. My friend and work colleague was responsible for ordering the stocks of balls and although he knew as well as everyone else in the industry that 16lb balls were obsolete, he would still order "a few" each time.
Every time a new ball was introduced we would sell out of 14 and 15lb balls, leaving the 16lb balls unsold. Eventually we had a warehouse full of 16lb balls that no-one wanted. We ended up giving them away,although it might have been better to send them to landfill.
The company is no more. Bad buying contributed to their downfall.

Money money money

My last post about being mugged on the way to the bank reminded me of the time that I was involved in a bank raid. I don't think I mentioned this before, but it was when I worked at the Westminster bank in about 1968. We were having new strongroom doors fitted in the basement, and being the most junior male staff member I was assigned to watch over the workmen as they drilled and hammered away.
One Monday morning at about 10.30 I was in the basement when I heard a commotion from upstairs in the banking hall. A few seconds later one of the bank clerks rushed downstairs looking a bit scared. He had an imprint of a size ten shoe on the side of his face.
I should point out that we had no security screensin front of the tills. The powers that be thought that they were an unnecessary barrier between the bank and the customer. Well, several robbers thought that a four foot high counter was no barrier to them helping themselves so they ran in, spraying ammonia everywhere. Ammonia was the bank robber's weapon of choice. It was easy to get hold of from your hardware store. You used a squeezy washing up bottle and sprayed it into people's faces, causing minimal damage as long as the victim was able to wash the ammonia out of their eyes. What it did was immobilise the bank clerks while they scooped the cash.
Anyway, one of the cashiers had seen them come in and was turning away as the thief jumped the counter, catching him with his foot. By the time he got downstairs and we knew what was happening it was all over.
That didn't stop me almost wetting myself with fear. What if they'd heard that the strongroom was open and they were coming down the stairs? We all hid where we could. It was a bit like that scene in The Life of Brian, where the Roman soldiers search the place and can't find the rebels, even though you can clearly see them behind the curtains and under the table.
After a few minutes we ventured out and upstairs. The bank had been cleared and the doors closed. The police were there within minutes- yes minutes, no more than five.
Someone from head office came and made us a cup of tea and went there, there. No-one was seriously hurt. A few people were splashed with ammonia and had stinging eyes. One of my colleagues saw what was happening and his mouth fell open, in time to catch a mouthful of ammonia. He burped for the rest of the day.
We were all sent home after lunch. The contractors came in the next day and fitted security screens. Then it was business as usual. The robbers were caught before they had a chance to dispose of the money. No CCTV, no DNA database, just good policing.


Down the years I had to handle a lot of money. Some firms used security vans to collect the takings while other firms left it to the manager to bank the cash.
I used to smile at the advice given by head office. It was all about varying the time and the route you took to the bank. However, there was one flaw. Whether I left the shop by the front door or the back, whether I took the long route or the short cut, I still ended up at the front door of the bank. Anyone wishing to jump me only had to wait there.....


After I'd been mugged in Corby the company arranged for a security firm to collect the takings each day. I still had to go and get the change from the bank, but if anyone fancied their chances at grabbing two bags of coin and outrunning me while carrying it, I'd have said, go on, make my day.


By the late eighties and early nineties I was working in a bookshop where the average sale was £5 rather than the £1 or so in a drugstore. We were taking more and more credit card payments and we'd installed EPOS and credit card terminals. However, half of our takings were still in cash, and one of the stores I managed had an annual turnover in excess of £1m. In the run-up to Christmas the turnover would increase by 50% each week, then double each week, until we took more than a week's takings each day. The week before Christmas' takings amounted to 10% of the total turnover for that year.
My day revolved around counting money. We opened the shop at nine, and empty the tills every hour or so. At about eleven my chief cashier and I would start counting the money that we'd taken from the tills. As soon as we'd finished counting, we'd go and get some more, and so on,
By Christmas Eve I was sick of the sight of money. My hands hurt to hold the notes and my fingers ached from counting them. It was not uncommon to count £15,000 in used fivers and tenners in the course of a busy day.
That store is no more. I doubt whether the firms that took over the business ever approached the levels of turnover that we achieved. The end of the Net Book Agreement and the stupidity of selling a premium product at a loss put paid to that.

That sinking feeling

It's 1988. We moved back from Somerset the year before and we've just moved house again. Sue had bought a house in Kettering so that we had somewhere to live while we sorted ourselves out. It was a nice mid terraced house overlooking a park and we paid £34,000 for it, having sold our house in Shepton Mallet for £37,000. House prices were rising fast and we decided to move while we could, so, one year after we bought our home, we sold it for £46,000 and bought another one on the outskirts of the town. It was slighly larger and had a garage. We paid £48,000 for it.
It's worth noting that our house earned more in that year than I did. I was on about £11,000 as I recall.
As well as moving house, I was in line for the new store in Corby that was due to open later that year. The company still had plans to continue expanding and had a brand new state of the art distribution centre in Southampton. It was then that we began to hear rumours that the company was up for sale. The rumours were confirmed. Everything went on hold and I had to continue commuting to St Ives.
Then the news came through that the company had been bought by Superdrug.


Oh joy.

There were a few ex-Superdrug managers working for Share and none of us felt secure. We were called to a meeting to meet the new owners and I came face to face with my nemesis who by now had been promoted from Area Manager to Regional Director. I recognised a few of the Area Managers as well. Superdrug only appointed from within so they'd been managers when I was kicking my heels as an assistant manager.


After that meeting which seemed to go OK (there were no promises made that we would automatically keep our jobs) I recived a letter stating what I could expect if I decided to accept redundancy. It wasn't a lot and I'd just moved into a new more expensive house. I agonised over this for a week or two and finally and reluctantly accepted the new contract from Superdrug.
Share had already appointed a new manager for St Ives, so I was once again a spare manager. I went around the various local stores to re-acquaint myself with the systems, which hadn't changed much, only evolved and then I heard that Superdrug had taken over the lease that Share had signed on the new store at Corby, so I applied for the position and was given the OK.


Once again I was recruiting, and training staff, fitting out and stocking the store. The store opened and we started trading. I can only remember a few things about it.
One was the silly lift from the warehouse to the shop floor. It was only about 3 feet high and just big enough for one stock trolley.
Then there was the steady stream of toerags who had nothing better to do than to stand outside taunting me. They were all barred from entering, but that didn't seem to stop them. They thought it was a game. They'd intimidate the younger staff and openly shoplift unless I stood in front of them. I wish I'd had a cattle prod.
The next was the staff's accents. Although Corby is less than ten miles from Kettering, the people speak with an entirely different accent, a strange almost scottish accent. This derives from the huge influx of Scottish and Irish families to work at the steelworks in the 1930s, when the population increased from 1500 to 15,000 in a little over eighteen months.
Finally there was my chief cashier. She lived on one of the more notorious estates. She knew everyone who came into the store. OK so far, but then she didn't turn up for work one Saturday and rang in sick. This meant that I had to cash up the tills on my own and at that time we used to take the banking to the local bank and deposit it in the night safe. We closed on time and I asked a couple of Saturday staff to wait and walk with me to the bank. As we rounded the corner I was jumped from behind by a young man who tried to grab my briefcase which looked like a security case. I fell to the floor and we had a tug of war for a second or two. I managed to kick him hard in the balls but in doing so broke my hold on the case. He ran away with my case which contained my wallet, some papers and the remains of my lunch. The night safe wallet was inside my jacket, tucked under my armpit. My glasses were broken and I was bleeding from a cut above my eye. I placed the wallet in the night safe and went to a call box, rang home and then called for an ambulance. The cheque cards were cancelled before the lad had stopped running. The police later found my briefcase in the local river and no, I didn't get it back.
I rang the area manager and he arranged to meet me early on Monday morning. When I arrived at work I looked a sight. I had a huge black eye and swollen face. We sat at the checkout to greet the staff as they came in. I kept my back to each one and turned to face them in order to gauge their reaction.
Only one person didn't register shock.
Guess who?
My chief cashier.
We suspected that she'd tipped off her boyfriend and he'd mugged me. Only there was no proof.
She put in her notice a few weeks later.
Funny that.


About nine months after the store opened I was on the move again. I was asked to take over an existing Share store in Northampton.
And I went on a training course. My first proper training course since I'd left school over twenty years before. Ah, well, it's never too late to learn.

On the move again

I worked for Superdrug and Share drugstores in the late 70s and 80s. Both businesses used the same model of having a central distribution centre where suppliers delivered, and minimal stocks in the branch. We kept accurate stock and order records (this was pre- EPOS and computers) and we ordered what we needed every week.
It meant that the companies didn't have their cash tied up in slow selling stock in the branches, which was the downfall of Lewis Meeson's.
I left Meesons after they'd been taken over by Martins and moved up the High Street to Share Drug Store, a company in the same mould as Superdrug. It was a brand new shop, and I was sent to another store for training while the builders fitted the store out. I enjoyed working there, it was a much better atmosphere than Superdrug, and they were expanding.
We'd been living in Somerset for about three years. I loved our house but the towns were all a bit small for an ambitious retail manager. After a succesful Christmas I was ready for a change.
Share had about 140 stores, mostly in the southern counties, with a distribution centre in Southampton. One day I was looking at the list of branches when I noticed thatthey were proposing to open a branch in St Ives. It was a few weeks after we'd been to Cornwall on holiday, and we'd spoken about the possibility of moving down there. In the end we decided against it, because of the lack of alternative employment should the job not work out.
Suddenly the company was opening a branch in St Ives. I looked long and hard and then realised that it was St Ives in Cambridgeshire!
We'd lived in deepest Somerset for three years, and the locals were only just acknowledging our presence. I'd always treated the move as temporary, and we'd visited every tourist attraction within 30 miles, so I was ready to return to the Midlands.
I talked it over with my wife and we agreed that I should apply for the post. I heard back within a few days. I'd been successful. All I had to do was train my successor and I could move up in time to recruit the staff and fit the store out. However, the company would not be paying my relocation costs.
We put our house on the market. We'd been there for three years and had turned a very run-down property that lacked a kitchen or central heating into a nice comfortable end of terrace home with a very large garden, not overlooked, on the edge of town and with views out over the Mendips. We'd paid £22k for it 9in 1984) and sold it for £37.5k in 1987.
However, it still wasn't enough to buy a house anywhere near Cambridge. St Ives was about ten miles from Cambridge and the most we could afford there was a tiny two bedroom quadrant home. We decided to move to Kettering and I would commute, although the A604 wasn't the best road to travel on.
I moved up to stay with Sue's relatives and began the job of getting St Ives store open. She rang me one day to say that someone had agreed to buy the house. I said that she should get in her car and come up and buy us a house in Kettering.
So she did. She put Chris in the child's seat, sent Jayne to school and drove the 150 or so miles to Kettering. She walked into an Estate Agent just as a couple were placing their house on the market. She had a look around and did the deal there and then. She then drove back home and told me what she'd done when I rang her later that night.

Sue packed everything and arranged the move while I worked to get the store open. She moved on the day I opened the store. We had to stay in her parent's spare bedroom that night, as we couldn't get the keys until the following morning.


St Ives was a succesful store that made money right from the start. We had a good team of staff and we all got on well. It was a bind travelling 35 miles each way each day, with only the last few miles on dual carriageway. I began to look around for somewhere a little closer to home.
As luck would have it, the company had signed a lease on a shop unit in Corby, just down the road. I was all set to transfer there when the news came through that the owner of the company had put it up for sale- and the new owners were- Superdrug.


Four years on and I had come full circle. I was going to be working for Superdrug again.
Oh bliss. Not.