1976 and all that

I hate those books and programmes on TV about mistakes in movies.  The ones that tell you that Matt Damon had his jacket undone when he set off running across some rooftops in Algiers in the Bourne Ultimatum but that when he landed it was done up.  And that there was the reflection of a camera crew in a window on Pride and Prejudice, or that Russell Crowe was wearing a wristwatch in Gladiator, or that the Morris Minor they used in Heartbeat wasn't made till 1973 but the episode was supposed to be set in 1971.

I know next to nothing about making movies but one thing I do know is this:  It's not easy.  I thought Avatar had a pretty rubbish story and I fell asleep in the middle of it, but I'm in no doubt it was technologically a major achievement and I'm pretty certain I couldn't have knocked it up in 5 minutes in my back garden with some leftover green paint and a couple of tall people.  And when James Cameron did Titanic he built a scale model of the ship and made it on some sort of tipping mechanism so he could tip it up at an angle for some of the filming.  

Recently I've seen the King's Speech and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and these were both set in the past in London and I was amazed at the historical detail, like the period cars and place names on the walls etc.  But I'm sure it won't be long before someone is telling me in a BBC3 clips programme that in the Wembley Stadium bit at the beginning of the King's Speech someone was wearing a bobble hat and they weren't invented until the seventies.  That was when I had one anyway.

I admire the effort that goes into films, because most days I struggle to even dress myself, never mind make a historically accurate blockbuster.  And as well as film-makers, I admire writers of history as well.  The writing I do is easy, because I just write whatever old crap comes into my head, but the process of writing historical books, whether fact or fiction must be a massively painstaking process, and the writing part only happens at the end, after tons and tons of research has been done.  I'm currently reading All Hell Let Loose by Max Hastings about the Second World War, and it's a narrative of the whole war pieced together from first hand accounts and diary entries and that sort of thing.  And I think it's incredible the amount of work that must have gone into producing it.  But that's not the kind of writing I want to do, because I just like the writing part and I don't want to have to do boring stuff like checking facts.

When I was a child one of my favourite books was 1066 and all that by Sellar and Yeatman, and it was brilliantly funny.  I always remember that in the introduction it said 'History is not what you thought, it's what you can remember'.  At least I think it did.  I haven't checked.  I loved it because it told history with humour and if they had to bend the accuracy of some historical event to get a few jokes in, then they would.

Whenever I write anything, whether it's about going cycling or about growing up or whatever, it's not a balanced historical account of an event in the past, it's what I can remember, particularly if it seemed funny at the time.  For example, when I wrote about going for breakfast at Tan Hill, I spent a disproportionate amount of the ride report talking about the miserable woman with the urinal cubes.  Because she stuck in my head.  Even though it was a beautiful day and there was lots of beauty to describe if I only knew how to do it, I remember her better than the way the flowers looked or what birds I saw.  I don't have a framework of reference to hang these things on, but I can always remember crazy people. 

I often say that I remember the really hot summer of 1976.  But that's the thing.  I don't remember it.  Apart from it being bloody hot, I only remember one thing about it.  It was our first summer in the council house we got after my dad died, and I can remember sitting out in the parched front garden on the yellow grass in a stripey deck chair.  We lived at number 37.  The 16 year old boy who lived at number 18 had got the 15 year old girl from number 53 pregnant.  Our house was about halfway between their houses.  And the only thing I can really remember from that summer is that the family of the girl liked to chase the boy down our street a lot and shout abuse at him.  And I used to sit in the deck chair and watch.  

And from a whole summer that's it!  That's the only thing I can remember.  But I'm grateful for that memory, because it lets me know that I was there.  And if anybody mentions the hot summer of 1976 I can tell them that I remember it, even though I only remember the sun and the shouting.  1977 is a pretty similar story.  The only thing I can really remember is the Queen's Silver Jubilee, and the street party I went to, and the family next door but one (the ones who cut up their internal doors and put them on the fire) who arrived at a party in the height of summer in trenchcoats.  And it soon became clear why when they started shoving sandwiches and trifle into their pockets for later.  They would eat one sandwich and the coat would get another 5.  And I never saw anything like it again until the mad cake woman at the Waterstone's store opening in 1999 who swept an armful of cake into her bag.   But that's another story.....

 People often tell me I've got a good memory, because I can remember things they've forgotten.  Well, my way of remembering an event is to find someone who is doing something nuts and hang the memory of the event onto them.  It may not be historically accurate but it works for me..

Turning black into white on the Northern Rock Cyclone

Shakespeare said that there's nothing good or bad, but thinking makes it so.  Like most of his ideas, he probably copied it off someone else.  I mean the Buddha said something similar and he was born ages before Shakespeare, but as it's virtually impossible to come up with anything completely new these days, and as he did say it rather concisely let's not give the guy a hard time.  He's had plenty of stick already this year, with people claiming he didn't even write his own plays.

I don't think Shakespeare was much of a cyclist, but if he had been and if he'd been into Sportives, he might have given the Northern Rock Cyclone a go.  I've done it twice and that's enough times to know that thinking really does make things so.  It was virtually the same event both times, but one time I thought it was the best thing since sliced bread, and the other time I wanted to slice my own head off with despair. 

For anyone who doesn't know, it's basically a bike ride round Newcastle and the surrounding area.  You can either do a Fun Ride of 30 miles, a Medium Ride of 60 or if you're really fit, a Long Ride of 100.  Completely logically, they let the 100 milers set off first, then the 60s, then lastly, they let the fun riders go.  They let them go last, so they don't wipe anybody out with the baguettes they're carrying in their shopping baskets.  It costs £20 to enter, but for that you get a timing chip and a T-shirt and there's an arrow on every bush telling you which way to go, so there's no thinking to do, just riding.  They also give you a bag of other assorted crap at the end, leaflets and stuff, and a bar of chocolate, although I could do with that at the beginning. 

Anyway, when I did it in 2009, I got a lift off Graeme, got there really early, got parked at the stadium, registered early and then set off with Carol and Suzanne as soon as we were able, which was with the last of the 100 mile riders.  Although I felt pretty crappy from a lack of cycling that year, it was pretty much 5 hours of being overtaken by faster riders, then when all 3 routes converged at Stamfordham 11 miles from the end, I got pumped full of pink Powerade and bananas at the feed station and then spent about 40 minutes overtaking fat blokes on mountain bikes, old ladies on shoppers, and other assorted people who were slower than me.  I felt like I was some kind of Superhero as I was tearing past them all.  Then I got back to the stadium and I got clapped and cheered in by a family of 3.  They were actually cheering someone who was riding near me, but I didn't care.  And then I drank some cider in the sun and I felt absolutely brilliant.  

Here's a picture of me feeling absolutely brilliant!

So I told people how great it was, and I rounded some other people up (Ruth and Mark) and I did it again the following year.  And it was bloody awful!  All the things that went right one year went wrong the next.  

I drove there myself instead of getting a lift, I got there quite late and had to park about 3 miles from the stadium.  Then when I got to the stadium, I had to walk for miles and then queue up for ages to register, and then after all that went wrong, I started the ride and that didn't go much better.

At the start we lost Suzanne because she couldn't clip in with her posh shoes, then Mark lost his kagoul and we had to stop, then Ruth chucked her water bottle on the floor and had to wait ages for all the riders to go past before she could pick it up.  

Because we'd got there so late and taken so long to register, instead of being in the way of faster people who had to spend all day overtaking us like the year before, we were in the middle of the fun riders and people doing it as a challenge for charity, and we had to spend all day swerving round them as they rode four abreast and were stopped on the grass verges having picnics and a generally lovely time. 

And the feed stations had all been decimated and there were just empty bottles and banana skins everywhere and I didn't get to neck Powerade and at the end where I'd felt like Superman the year before I was now getting left for dead by the 100 milers who were steaming past me.  And now I felt like I was the one with the knobbly tyres and the baguettes, and a dog in the picnic basket on the front because all the people I could have steamed past and felt superior to had all gone home ages ago.

And when I got to the finish, nobody cheered because I didn't finish at the same time as that bloke who had his family there this time, and when I handed my timing chip in they gave me a bag of rubbish and in it was a white T-shirt that was miles too big.  And that just emphasised how upside down the whole experience was because last year they gave me a black T-shirt that was too small, with a neck so tight that it made my eyes bulge.  And the white one's so loose I could stick tent poles up it and sleep under it.

So is it a good event?  Of course it is.  It's a brilliant ride, but if anything it's a victim of its own success.  It's so massively popular that millions of people all turn up at once, and if you get there quite late there's only distant parking and the skins of bananas. 

And when you go for the first time, with someone who think it's great and who does all the organising, you are free to enjoy it, because it wasn't your idea, but when you've recommended it to people, and then things go wrong, you feel responsible for their enjoyment as well as your own. 

Also, in the year between doing it one time and the next, I'd done a lot of Audaxes, which are very small-scale and cheap, and if you're always a last minute Charlie like me, it's not such a big deal if you get there late.  Although, having said that, if you're late enough to miss the start and if you haven't got a clue where you're going, they can end up being just as disastrous.  Especially if you're me.

Come in Mr Kafka your time is up - How not to do a 200k Audax

Graeme was round here yesterday, asking me what my cycling goals are for next year.

Well, I don't really have any, but I wouldn't mind completing a 200k Audax.  I did a pretend one with Ruth last October on a route I designed myself and then in April this year I had an aborted attempt at the Wiggy 200 which starts and finishes in York.  I couldn't have got it more wrong that day if I'd programmed my behaviour into an electrified cock-up generator before I set off.  And my mood was so dark most of the day I thought I was in a Kafka novel.

The day didn't get off to the best start when the alarm went off at 4.30 am.  I needed to catch the 6 am train to York to get to the start for 8 am.  Helpfully all the burglar alarms in the street had been going off all night anyway so that helped me wake up.  I usually like the early train because it's easy to get your bike on and it's quiet, but oh no, not this day. 

There was an annoying bloke sitting near me who was on his way to Manchester airport and he kept droning on about a total load of bollocks and talking in baby talk to a small child on the other end of the phone and I really wanted to take his phone and shove it down the chemical toilet at the end of the carriage.

After the completely unrelaxing train journey I then met Mr Misnomer Adam the Slowcoach at 7 am in York station and we rode to Wigginton together.  I was trying to take it easy, but as usual I struggled to keep up with him, so I was pretty knackered before I even got to Wigginton.  

For a 200k the Brevet cards are red instead of blue, and instead of the odd assortment of old blokes in beards and fun riders I've seen at the 100ks I've done, the place was heaving with lean sinewy types who looked like they'd never even seen a pork pie, and who could probably ride to Outer Mongolia on the vapour from a banana.  I felt like a Sumo wrestler who'd taken a wrong turn and turned up by accident at the start of the Tour de France,

If I wasn't having a bad enough day already, then the bloody ride started.  I had researched the route beforehand but I wasn’t all that confident on the first section so I wanted to stick with one of the bunches. I got in a group with Ann Benton.  I thought she must know where she’s going, as she’s married to the organiser. I am led to believe she’s over 70 but even so I was having trouble sticking with her. Right from the start I had a pain down the back of my right leg which was worrying me and as it got a bit hilly around Coneysthorpe I was really struggling. One time I had real trouble getting my breathing back to normal even going downhill. Twice Slowcoach had to wait for me at the top of hills and I thought we can’t go on like this. 

It’s a bloody long day if you’re waiting for somebody all the time so I asked him not to wait for me any more, as I felt crap and I might not finish anyway, so no point wasting his time too. After he went off, I stopped for some chocolate, a diclofenac and a caffeine tablet in the shade of a big building and I wondered what the bloody hell I was doing here. Then I noticed it was only twenty past 9. I’d already done 30k so I thought maybe I should just set off at my own pace and see what happens. After all I still had 12 hours of time left. 

It went ok for a bit. I managed to follow the route sheet for about 15k and then I ended up in two minds about where to go at a Byways signpost. I chose wrong and ended up on top of a hill I wasn’t supposed to go up in Great Edstone. I couldn’t face doubling back so I carried on until I reached the A170 but then I was faced with 7 miles of Bank Holiday traffic on the main road before Helmsley. After about 3 miles I’d had enough and turned off at Wombleton I think and found my way to Helmsley via Harome. 

I got to the BATA service station at 11.  I went in to get my card stamped and the bloke behind the counter said to me ‘Blimey, you’re a bit off the pace, aren’t you?’. I said ‘Yeah, I’m off home, it’s as close to there as it is back to the start'.  

With hindsight I realise a lot of the problem with me that day was psychological.  All the places I had to go on the ride: Helmsley, Stokesley, Bedale, Knaresborough, Ripon, Masham etc, I know where they all are, and I know how far apart they all are, and it just seemed like a massive obstacle to get over, to go to all those places in one day, on a bike.  And so I failed the mental challenge, even before I discovered that my legs didn't work.

I carried on to the main square in Helmsley and it was heaving. I bought a coffee and a cookie and watched lots of families trying to eat ice cream before it melted in the scorching sun.  My knees were looking pretty red so I went to the Co-op to buy some sun cream but they’d bloody sold out.  I phoned Ruth and told her I was likely to be bailing out and asked her to be on standby to give me a lift, but I decided to press on to Coxwold. 

When I got there I sat in the shade and ate some melted chocolate and considered my options. I’d missed the info control at Oswaldkirk so I wasn’t likely to be getting a medal even if I finished, so I decided I had two options: Ride towards home or ride back to York. I remembered that it’s quite a long fast descent to Easingwold from Husthwaite so I thought I’d go back to Wiggy, hand in my uncompleted Brevet Card and go home. So that’s what I did. I rode back via Huby, Sutton and Strensall and I got back to Wiggy 5 minutes before the control opened for the early finishers.  I'd forgotten my sunglasses and my eyes had all dried out from squinting by then, and the sun was blinding me so I pretty much rode the last 20k on glued together eyes.

I walked into the hall back at Wiggy and Gerry didn’t take much convincing that I hadn’t completed the whole route. In fact, including wrong turns I did 110k plus about another 12k to and from the train station before that. 

It turned out it was the hottest April day since 1949. No wonder I was overheating. You could have fried an egg on my head by the end. Ruth came to pick me up and I pretty much passed out after that.  I was woken at about 6.30pm by a text from Slowcoach telling me he’d just finished. It’s a good job he hadn’t been riding with me for long. He’d have still been out there on Easter Monday.  I felt like crap all day, both mentally and physically and I was glad to get it over with. But as Ruth pointed out, if I hadn’t attempted it, I’d have just stayed at home and picked a fight with her and said ‘I wish I’d gone on that ride!’, so at least I knew it wasn’t meant to be. 

Even now I don't really know entirely what went wrong.  Apart from being blinded by the sun, havng a hotplate for a head, going off far too fast with totally the wrong people, weighing about two stone too much, being unable to follow the route sheet and trying to cycle on legs that were full of jelly, it's a complete mystery why I did so badly.

But this kind of thing has happened to me before.  I did the Swaledale Marathon (a 24 mile walk) one year and I was absolutely crippled and blistered all to hell by the end, and I made just about every first timer's mistake there is.  And for about 3 hours I said never again, and then I spent a whole year preparing myself to go and do it right, and I did, and when I had, I felt okay about not doing it again, because I'd finished it right once.  And that's why I'd like to have another go at a 200.  

Another piggy back ride on the enthusiasm of others

There's a bit in the film Awakenings where an otherwise comatose lady reaches out her hand to catch a tennis ball being thrown to her by Robin Williams.  When he describes this phenomenon to the people around him, Robin (or Dr Oliver Sacks as it was in real life) explained it by saying that she was 'borrowing the will of the ball'.

Well, a lot of the time, I myself am in an apathetic stupor and I would miss things, if it wasn't for the fact that I get swept up in the enthusiasm of others.  This is my own version of borrowing the will of the ball.  Two of the main protagonists in this are Ruth and Graeme.  They've been responsible for a lot of the cycling I've done, just by infecting me with their enthusiasm, and last night they were at it again, but this time taking me in a totally different direction.

Come and see a documentary about vinyl records they said.  It will be great.  Yeah right, I thought.  I can do without that I thought, going out in the bloody cold after work.  Anyway, egged on by the prospect of pizza and coffee beforehand, they got me there.  And I'm so glad they did.

The film was called Sound it Out.  And it's about Sound it Out.  An old-fashioned record shop in Stockton, run by a man called Tom.  Although I love music, I've never really been a big fan of vinyl and it would certainly never occur to me to collect vinyl records.  In our family it was my brother who got the vinyl bug.  Up until a few years ago he had hundreds, if not thousands of vinyl records (he's got a family now, so he's sold most of them, but he does buy and sell records online as he's still pretty knowledgeable about it).

But for me, the film wasn't about the vinyl.  It was about people.  And it challenged my narrow view of the world.  My initial impression of a lot of the people featured in the film were that they were a bit weird, and not at all like me.  They were proud to make a statement about their love of music through the way they look and behave, whereas I don't do that, and I never did.  I never had posters of bands on the walls, and I never dressed like my favourite pop stars. 

As we got to know each of the people in the film, my first impressions fell away and they became fully rounded characters who all had a story to tell, and who were all ultimately likeable.  

And this impression was in no small part created by Tom himself, who treats everyone the same, whoever they are.  During the film, he had some fairly strange requests put to him by some odd looking people, but he spoke kindly to everyone and listened to what they had to say.  And knowing he was being filmed, it would have been easy for him to make some smart arse comment to camera after they'd gone out, but he didn't.  He had time for everyone  And I really liked that about him.

I've recently gone back to working in a shop myself, and I always try to speak kindly to everyone and to listen to them, however odd they might seem.  In this regard, Tom is an ideal role model, as is David, who works in there with him, and does exactly the same.  

I'm always saying that things were better in the olden days, but I don't really believe that.  What I really mean is that there are some aspects of how things used to be that I remember fondly and that I miss, and one of those things is good old-fashioned customer service.  Knowing your customers and treating them as valued individuals.  A lot of modern organisations try to train this into you.  Well, if they really want to know how it's done, they should go see Tom.  Or go see the film.  Or both.

TQM my ass

I used to work in a bank (between 1988 and 1998).  I wasn't very good at it though, because I didn't like selling stuff to people, and that was a big part of the job then.  One of the best ways to avoid selling stuff was to do admin and that's why between 1990 and 1991 I worked in Bradford in a place called the Customer Service Centre.  

It should really have been called the Customer Misnomer Centre, because we tried really hard not to let any customers in.  It was basically an admin centre that allowed us to do loads of mundane work centrally, like setting up standing orders and bouncing cheques and it meant they would need less staff in branches.

Although we used to speak to customers on the phone, they weren't supposed to get in.  We did once get a stray one in the reception area, and no-one knew what to do with him.  It was ages before someone asked him what he wanted and then politely and firmly ushered him out of the door.

We had TQM in those days, short for Total Quality Management.  One of its core principles was that no-one was ever to blame.  If something went wrong, it was a fault in the process rather than in the person who made the mistake.

Well, so much for that theory!  The reality was somewhat different.  We worked in a big open plan office, there were about 40 of us in total.  And we all had individual badge card numbers.  If there was a cock-up it could easily be traced back to your badge card.  The manager and his assistant didn't come and find you if you made a mistake, they just opened the office door and yelled out your badge card number.  This was followed by the walk of shame across the office, and then as you disappeared into their office the door would be slammed behind you and the blinds drawn.  The door got slammed so much in those days that the door frame was coming out of the wall.  If it wasn't your turn, you could see it get looser every time it got slammed.

One of the jobs I used to do at the CSC was to manually redirect direct debits intended for accounts that had been closed when small branches had been shut down.  This wasn't in any way the customer's fault as they hadn't had any say in having their account number changed by us.  In time, the bank put a technological fix in place for this and the original account numbers were retained after branch closures, but this was the early 90s.  We were still using Casio calculators then with green numbers on.

The first of the month was always the heaviest workload for direct debits as that was when Prudential amongst others took their payments out.  Anyway, one first of the month I decided that the originators of the direct debits would get the message more clearly about having to use the new account numbers if we just bounced all of that month's direct debits on the closed branches.  There were about 120 in total. 

I hadn't really foreseen the full consequences of my actions, but I had set off a chain reaction.  One of the direct debits I bounced was the mobile phone payment of one of TSB's very important commercial customer's and pretty soon his business mobile had been cut off.  

With the benefit of hindsight, I probably shouldn't have said when asked about this 'Yeah well, we bounced all of the closed branches direct debits that day'.  I think the manager got a bit high pitched when he said 'What do you mean all of them?'.  

Every time we bounced a direct debit we had to write it on a sheet and he asked me to go find the sheets.  You could fit about 20 to a sheet and I'd filled pages of them.  I remember he kept turning the pages over and over in disbelief.

It was okay though, because I'd told my supervisor what I was doing, and she was pretty gung ho and thought it was all a really good idea, like most ideas that you have in the heat of the moment, so after they'd finished with me, she got a pasting as well, but even more so, because she wasn't a young thing like me, and also a supervisor and so she should have known better!

It wasn't the best day I had working in a bank, but it wasn't the worst either.  No, that was the day I lost £1000 and they had to call the inspectors in.  They found it eventually.  After 3 days of interrogating me.  But that's another story....Actually, that one got blamed on my supervisor aswell in the end.  I think there's a pattern emerging here, maybe it wasn't my fault after all.

How I used to befriend strangers in the days before the internet

In the days before the internet, things required a bit more effort and creativity than they do now.

For example, if you had to do a comparison between New York and Calcutta for your homework, you had to get your ass down to the local library and thumb your way through the Encyclopedia Britannica to find stuff out.  This included using a few skills which are falling out of fashion these days, eg walking, reading and thinking.  I got 19 out of 20 for that homework by the way, so I must have been able to do all 3.

Meeting and getting to know strangers also needed a bit of creativity too, and a little known thing called 'Being able to have a conversation' used to come in useful.  A good forum for having conversations in my youth was the ferry from Dover to Zeebrugge.  I used to go to Germany quite a bit in the 80s and we mostly travelled on the Transline buses.  These took about 24 hours to get from Leeds to Northern Germany and they required a 4 hour ferry crossing aswell.  They were brilliant for talking to people, because they couldn't get away.

Although it seems unlikely now I actually made some friends this way.  And one of them I'm still in touch with, although it took Facebook for me to find her again after losing touch for a while.

She used to be called Ute Fehn and she was from Stuttgart.  We got talking on the back of a cross channel ferry.  It was in the early hours of the morning and it was dark so we couldn't see each other for the first 3 hours or so.  In fact it wasn't till 5 am that I found out she was dressed in yellow.  

Because I couldn't see her my first impressions of her were that she was funny and kind and had a nice voice.  Oh and also that she was German, although I'm not sure she is any more (I think she might be American now).

I've met other people in similar circumstances, but I can't go on about that now, because Ruth has invited Graeme round for coffee, and I didn't know, because I wasn't looking on Facebook, and even though she's in the same house, she failed to tell me...Ah, it wasn't like this in the olden days.  Actually I take that back, it was, friends turned up at your house unexpectedly all the time then, because it was easier to go to their houses than use the bloody massive phone with the dial on...

My grandma couldn't bend her legs and my grandad used to jump out of windows

I've got arthritis.  I got it when I was 34.  That's around the same age my grandma got it.

She stopped bending her knees when she got it, so eventually she walked a bit like R2D2.  I decided to keep bending mine, in case they set in place, and also I think they have better drugs these days.  I'm sure riding a bike helps, because that's tough to do without bending your legs.

My grandma used to infuriate me by sellotaping 50p to my birthday card, but then telling me I had to share it with my brother.  But it's my birthday I used to say, to no avail.  Still, the same thing used to happen to him on his birthday.

My grandparents lived in a back to back house in Sheffield the first few times I went to see them.  They only had an outside toilet so if you needed a wee in the night you had to pee in a pot called a Gazunder (because it goes under the bed).  It wasn't much good for number twos, and tripping up when taking it to be emptied was not to be recommended. 

My grandma would give me games that she'd cut off the back of the Cornflakes packet, and she once gave a big build up to the fact that she'd bought me a Taxi.  I used to collect Corgi cars (before I smashed them all up to make a junk yard) and I thought she meant one of those, but it was actually a chocolate biscuit. 

My grandad had an affair once.  He used to pretend he was off round to his mate's house to do the pools but he was actually seeing another woman.  Not sure if she helped him fill in his pools coupon or not.  Details are sketchy on that.

One day he thought he'd been found out.  Something his son said to him made him think he'd been rumbled.  So he jumped out of a window.  It was six floors up.  I think he meant to die, but he didn't quite make it.  As well as damaging his legs, he also bashed his head in, and not long that after he became schizophrenic.

When I saw him after that he used to giggle a lot and buy furniture.  Sometimes he'd tell my grandma he was off out to the shop and the next thing he'd turn up at our house in Leeds (about 40 miles away) giggling.

My grandparents only lived in a small flat but they had so many settees and chairs it was like a game of 'We are the Champions' getting from one side of the room to the other.

Eventually my mum had to circulate his picture to all the furniture shops in Sheffield.  Sort of like a Wanted poster but with the message 'Do not sell furniture to this man!' underneath instead of a reward.  But that didn't stop him.  When they were on holiday in Skegness he ordered a 3 piece suite to be delivered from there.  He gave them a key and told them he'd left a bag of money in the wardrobe to pay for it.  He hadn't though.  

As well as settees and chairs they had about 7 things that my grandma used to call 'Poofies'.  They were just big lumps of stuff you could rest your legs on, or stand on if necessary to get stuff off the top of cupboards.  I'm not sure if they have a real name.

Those two were the only grandparents I knew, and they both died in the 1980s when I was still at school.  My dad's parents died before I was even born.  And my dad didn't last long either.