Vagueness and the Aftermath - A sporadic diary

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Telephone boxes still work here, I've tried em.

Still carrying old penny coins then

Oh I didn't actually put money in God forbid, i just listened to the dial tone.

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Were those photos from Northampton, Tom?

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Were those photos from Northampton, Tom?

Yes.

Tomorrow....


Bedford!

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Where the He'll did he come from?

I've seen films that start like this.

Click to see full-size image.

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Where the He'll did he come from?

I've seen films that start like this.

Click to see full-size image.

Pardon my lorry geek-ness, C Butt are a huge Northampton-based business. When you see lorries bearing the Amazon or Aldi brands, they are almost certainly owned by C Butt & Sons. Still a family-owned business too.
 

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Actually that's quite interesting.
Early this morning a bloke in a car arrived and had a word with the driver, then he brought out a clip-board and took some notes, then he took a photo and left.

We wondered if he was from the ministry of transport, (Do they still exist?) but now we assume he was from head office.

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Two lovely photos from the C Butt archive.

I could stare at the first one for hours, just look at that driver proudly stood there. Magnificent photo in so many ways.


 

Click to see full-size image.

Click to see full-size image.

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Great pics Tony.

Me and a very good friend of mine named Jimmy Calladine, (Recently passed, God rest him) once bought an ERF for scrap.
Scrap iron was almost worthless at that time but it had a Gardner 150 engine which we could sell for about £450. Back then, £450 was the price of a good second-hand car.

Our plan was to use our lorry and a straight bar to tow the ERF to the salvage yard, a simple task on the face of it but one fraught with problems, not least of which were seized brakes and the absence of a drivers cab, which had gone missing, taking the seats, steering wheel and other controls with it.

The seized brakes we fixed by backing up the adjusters on the big air servos as far as we could, a technique known as "winding them off".

We could do nothing about the missing cab but we strapped an old car seat to the exposed chassis, forced a foundling steering wheel onto the bare column and declared her ready to roll.

Both Jimmy and I took a practice turn at sitting in the jury-rigged drivers seat, legs dangling, clinging on to the makeshift steering wheel to save ourselves from falling the 10 feet or so on to the road or into the engine below.

I decided that on this occasion I would rather be tow-er than tow-ee. Not surprisingly, Jimmy felt the same.

We tossed for it and I lost. I felt like I had been condemned to death, meanwhile, Jimmy was filled with a sudden conference that everything would be fine.

I donned my safety gear, which consisted of a yellow hard-hat, a pair of welding gloves and a purple scarf and I climbed into the seat, resigned to my fate.

As soon as we moved the truck the front axle, which, unnoticed by us, has been disconnected when someone removed the front springs, rolled along the chassis until it rested comfortably against the back axle.

Trip over.

God bless the man who took those springs, it's more likely than not he saved my life.

PS- Afterwards Jimmy argued that it was still my turn to be tow-ee the next time because I hadn't completed the job, I argued that I had because I had driven it as far as it would go.

We never did resolve it. I guess now, we never will.

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^^ are those lorries mating?

[Karabiner]

^^ are those lorries mating?

The one on top has a strange look on his face

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Look at these bits of steel fixed together with rabbit-turd welding in the photo below.

Click to see full-size image.

How can anyone be talented enough to make them paper so perfect when viewed from a distance?

It's like those huge graffiti murals or the horses carved into chalk hillsides, how do they get the scale right?

Click to see full-size image.

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Has anyone ever seen sugar cane for sale before? I haven't.

What do you do with it? (Decent answers only please)

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We take this stuff for granted but imagine what it was like for people to walk across this river for the first time.

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Really? Yuk!

Click to see full-size image.

Click to see full-size image.

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A totally free and virtually unused car park 5 minutes walk from the centre of Kempston.

Click to see full-size image.

Click to see full-size image.