It might have had something to do with one of the FoodCycle head office communications team joining our shift at FoodCycle Marylebone in January. Soon after that, I had a message from someone else in communications there wondering whether we’d be prepared to be featured as a Valentine’s story.
It would have been churlish to say no.
We had no action pictures of us working together on FoodCycle in our FoodCycle shirts, except for some masked-up ones for the pandemic days. I asked if a sofa-selfie would do and we were told “yes”.
Don’t ask how many goes it took for us to obtain the half-decent picture that was used.
Janie and I were so pleased to be invited to this Crisis event – a thank you to us 2021/22 Crisis At Christmas volunteers. I wrote up much of our volunteering experience at the time – click here or below.
Our extended volunteering for several weeks into January was unfortunately foreshortened (although only by one shift) when I tested positive for Covid after what should have been our penultimate shift. Which meant we hadn’t had a chance to say goodbye properly to several colleagues.
Reunited with Tracie & Connie
Further, we had heard such great things about the outcomes from this year’s Christmas initiative, we were keen to learn whether the new delivery model would be repeated in 2022.
Tristia and Matt express thanks and bring positive news ahead of 2021
Janie and I wondered whether we might also run into Kathy & Caroline from FoodCycle at this event, as we knew that both of them do Crisis, although we hadn’t shifted with either of them at Christmas. Almost as soon as the speeches finished, those two sought us out:
Caroline & Kathy “soughting” me outNot sure what Mike just said, but no-one, least of all Mike, seems pleased in that instant It wasn’t all bearded, long-haired, bright-shirt-wearing hunks named Ian
We had a very enjoyable time. Afterwards, Janie and I treated ourselves to a shawarma supper takeaway from Ranoush. It would have been rude to walk past the place on the way home, after all.
A Prize Dinner – Kitchen At Holmes, 29 July 2022
Free to choose whatever we want
Back in the mists of time – before we did our 2021 Crisis at Christmas volunteering, I went to a really charming Baker Street Quarter Partnership event, which was, in part, a fundraiser for Marylebone FoodCycle…
…and won a dinner for two courtesy of Kitchen At Holmes in the fundraising raffle.
Janie and I had not got around to booking that evening, as I pointed out every now and then when I stumbled across the envelope/voucher in my in-tray. We agreed that we really shouldn’t push the “valid until November 2022” deadline and that a summer Friday evening out rather than in would be a treat for us.
This meal certainly was that.
Please explain the difference between chanterelles and girolles, Genaro.“It’s like this…”
Genaro looked after us extremely well throughout the meal.
The food looked amazing and tasted just as good. We photographed the food like a couple of youngsters.
In fact, if it is culinary eye candy you are after, you can click the link below and see all the foodie pics we took:
Janie started with the lamb kofte, depicted above, while I started with a tuna tartare dish. Janie then moved on to fish – sea bass, while I enjoyed a veal steak. The chunky chips were a delight for us to share, as were the carrots & purple potties, also depicted above.
Of course a raffle is all luck but, as the organisers said at the Baker Street Quarter Partnership do all those months ago, it was really nice to have FoodCycle volunteers win one of the high-end raffle prizes
Our deserts – we sort of feel we got our just ones
Even more thrilled were we on receiving an invitation to join our benefactors for a drinks reception in Portman Square. Unfortunately, Janie couldn’t make the drinks, as she had arranged to do a Samaritans shift that very evening, but I joined several of our fellow FoodCycle-Marylebone-istas at the event; Kathy, Bill, Debs and her husband Adam.
An evening in Portman Square was a return to the scene of past “crimes” for me. Back in the late 1980s and early 1990s I spent a great deal of time in Hesketh House (now known as 43-45 Portman Square):
Formerly known as Hesketh House – someone’s left the light on in what was temporarily my fourth floor room – I hope it wasn’t me, as if it was, it’s been on for 30+ years.
I was known to “hang with the crowd” from there for a while…
…and even umpired a mini tennis tournament for them in Portman Square one summer – 1990 I think. The tennis court had been repurposed as a food and crafts fair for the 2021 Winter Garden season.
Anyway…
…not only did I stroll down memory lane, I got a chance to get to know some of our FoodCycle folk a little better and also to meet the lovely people from Baker Street Quarter Partnership who were helping to raise money for our cause.
I casually splashed some cash – or rather wafted my contactless card – on raffle tickets but thought little of that until one of my numbers came up. A dinner for two in the highly regarded Kitchen At Holmes.
The irony that I had won a slap-up meal for two, given that Janie and I have been volunteering à deux for the very food charity that was benefitting from the raffle, was not wasted on me, Janie, nor on those at the party. Janie and I will report back on the gift meal once we have enjoyed it – probably in the new year.
A relatively recent image of the two of us enjoying big city hospitality: Tokyo October 2018
I did consider phoning the Samaritans there and then to let Janie know our good news, but on reflection and on discussion with those around me, we concluded that it wasn’t exactly a crisis and that the good news could wait until later.
A brass ensemble for the brass monkey weather
Meanwhile we were serenaded by a superb quintet of brass virtuosi, Ensemble of the Golden Bough, who came to the event by virtue of Wigmore Hall – Janie and I are normally avid Wigmore-Hall-istas but have not been to a concert there since just before lockdown:
The Ensemble of the Golden Bough mostly played classic seasonal fare to create a suitable atmosphere. The quintet comprises Christopher Barrett, Ryan Linham, Sam Kinrade, Phillippa Slack and Rory Cartmell, each of whom is an exceptional exponent of their instrument(s). The following vid is not the seasonal type of music they played on the evening, but it is lovely and will give you an idea of the virtuosity involved:
It was almost enough to convert me to brass-only arrangements of music, which is not usually my bag. It certainly worked for that setting and the playing was truly top notch…
…as was the whole event and the company. A very enjoyable evening indeed.
Not only that, but Antonia from Baker Street Quarter Partnership informs us that we’ll smile even more when we see the four-figure sum raised for FoodCycle.
UK society seems to be opening up, tentatively. Even the manically-busy Noddyland spider appears to be back in action at full pelt, having gone strangely dormant on us through the pandemic. Hence the evening and weekend slots seem to be filling up again.
20 September 2021
Monday evening, we had a very enjoyable, convivial dinner at Dominic and Pamela’s place. We hadn’t spent time with the pair of them since the Ireland test match a couple of years ago.
Another couple, Sally & Barry, were there; bridge friends. Most of the conversation was about other matters; crime and punishment came into it a fair bit as both Pamela and Barry were criminal barristers in their time.
Dominic prepared a superb meal of tricolore salad, duck ragu with pappardelle…
Tuesday evening was the only virtual event of the week. The City Giving Day Quiz Night. Why anyone picks me for quiz teams is a bit of a mystery; I’m not good at retaining “quiz-type facts” and tend to sound uncertain about stuff I know about, while convincing about my wildest guesses. I also lose concentration easily during quizzes.
Photo-bombing my own screen shot – top row, centre
Anyway, it was for charity and the round depicted, the music round, was a perfect 10 for the Z/Yen team, which we had named FS Club 7; an ideal name for a six-person team, we felt.
In the end we were only three points off the top slot, so we felt good about ourselves without virtually-returning victorious.
It was about as much fun as on-line quizzing can be. This event is actually a convivial thing, when face-to-face, so here’s hoping that next year it will be in-person.
22 September 2021
A very exciting occasion as FoodCycle Marylebone opened its doors again, 18 months on, to welcome people for communal meals. Janie and I have been involved for most of the 18 months in-between, delivering food for most of the lockdown period and latterly helping with a cook & collect takeaway service these past few months.
The switch to community dining within Covid protocols must be challenging at all FoodCycle projects. At Marylebone, where uniquely we need to operate out of two sites, some of those challenges come to the fore. Yet somehow the cooking team always manage to conjure up superb meals…
With thanks to Rachelle for the photo
…while returnees from the communal dining hosting team helped us to get through the evening without a glitch; there was much joy among the several dozen guests and the hosts alike. Let’s simply say that I was hosting “leader” only nominally that night. But I did fill in the forms, which apparently I do comparatively well, despite my allergy to form-filling.
Thanks to Bill for this photo
Before the meal, Reverend Clare conducted a short, moving service of remembrance for those regulars who are no longer able to join in with the communal meals. Janie and I had got to know several of the people who have died or become incapacitated since the start of lockdown.
Reverend Donna took on the role of DJ during the meal, playing an assortment of gentle classics. But at one point I detected the unmistakable sensation of live music in the hall. One of the guests, a Russian gentleman, who had only recently started attending for takeaways, was playing the piano…
…masterfully…
…with exceptional virtuosity, in a St Petersburg style, if you know what I mean.
“Did you know he could play?” I asked the reverends. Both demurred. He simply asked if he could have a go and they thought, “why not?”
Not quite Sokolov (both the gentleman and the piano are a few sizes down from the grand depiction below) but that YouTube link might give you the gist and in any case is a charming listen:
There was tumultuous applause at the end of our guest’s set. I for one found the whole experience delightful and moving; it was the first time I had heard live music of performance quality since before lockdown. I do hope that gentleman plays for us again.
The whole evening was a great success. We’ve learnt a lot and hopefully we can do even better next week.
25 September 2021
Earlier in the week, out of the blue, I received a message from Frank Dillon saying that he would be in London this weekend and at a bit of a loose end on Saturday.
As luck would have it, Janie had arranged to have her hair done middle of the day and I too was available.
Thus Frank journeyed from Gray’s Inn to Noddyland for the afternoon, while his kin went to the Chelsea Flower Show.
The weather didn’t smile on us quite as much as I’d have liked, but we were able to take coffee and sit on the terrace for some time.
By the time I started to pull together a luncheon platter, word came from Janie that she was on her way back from the hairdresser’s, so we were all able to graze together, at which point it was only right and proper to try a glass or two of wine.
We didn’t quite finish putting the world to rights, but we had quite a good go at it. In any case, we’ll need something left to remedy for our next regathering, which hopefully will be reasonably soon.
It was a really pleasant way to end a convivial and charitable week.
It’s an exciting time for us at FoodCycle Marylebone. We’re finally saying goodbye to the emergency delivery service that has been running there throughout the pandemic and starting the process of migrating back to the more regular FoodCycle model of communal cooking and eating.
Janie and I have been helping with emergency deliveries at several projects during the pandemic. White City for example...
But this week was the last week of the deliveries. It was also one of two piloting weeks for the transitional cook and collect service. The headline photograph shows me and Janie trying to come to grips with the sneeze guard screen. Hopefully we’ll have come to terms with it by next week.
Will I need a third hand to take the register while holding this screen?
The main reason that Marylebone is one of the last FoodCycle projects to migrate to the transitional service is not to do with our low-level flat pack assembly skills.
No.
It is the fact that, uniquely, Marylebone FoodCycle does not have a single site available for cooking and service to the guests, so there are significant logistical challenges with which to grapple.
Bill Miller has been leading the good battle to set up the new service while keeping the emergency service ticking over. He is a pleasure to work with, is Bill. For some obscure reason he doesn’t like to have his photo taken whenever we’re around, yet he is the poster boy for FoodCycle Marylebone on Instagram:
Anyway, while we were grappling with the cook and collect starter kit, such as getting our heads around the vital dating and allergen labelling system for the cooked meals, a small cast had long-since assembled at the nearby Greenhouse Centre to pilot the cooking:
With thanks to Rachelle Gryn Brettler for the kitchen photos
Once the cooked food is ready, a volunteer collects the cooked meals and trolleys then from Greenhouse to St Pauls. This week Janie and I piloted that bit of the volunteering, so we can “project lead” it in future:
Janie is demonstrating the de-luxe food trolley, said to be the Rolls-Royce of such trolleys
Then, once the cooked food was all labelled up, Amandine, Janie and I were snapped by Bill in the process of bagging up food for this week’s delivery service.
Then, just to make sure that Janie and I really had done a decent double or triple shift, we also delivered the cooked food and surplus to a local shelter project and then went on and did our (formerly regular) delivery round for the final time.
No photo of what Dumbo actually looked like when we set off with all that lot in tow, but the picture below from last summer looks a bit like it:
I don’t think Janie and I will miss doing multi-shifts like this. That was an exhausting one-off.
Still, at least once it was done we could relax…it wasn’t as if I was giving a talk that night or anything…
With thanks to Rachelle Gryn Brettlerfor snapping us in Rossmore Road, preparing to do our FoodCycle run on a wet winter’s day
We don’t get out much in Lockdown 3.0, other than to buy food and do our charity work.
That is giving me a chance to crack on with my retro-blogging; I’m working through 1995 & 1996 to cover the Ged & Daisy (Ian & Janie) “25 years ago” story. I’m needing to give more thought, though, to the formerly less well-documented, “40 years on” story of my early days at Keele University.
Strangely, 1981 and 2021 seem to have collided, forty years on.
…mentioning the superb tapes Graham Greenglass used to make for me, including quirky numbers such as Rossmore Road by Barry Andrews. I still hum it or sing it more often than not when Daisy and I do FoodCycle from there:
Dreamy use of sax and double bass on that track.
Last week, I wrote up the very weekend during which several visitors descended on Keele and Graham presented me with a few cassettes, including that very track. The piece below is a thumping good read, even if you weren’t there, including an excellent undergraduate recipe for spaghetti bollock-knees:
On Wednesday, before Daisy and I did our FoodCycle run, I did an NHS Responder gig to collect a prescription. Strangely the prescription was to be collected at the Tesco Hoover Factory in Greenford. Strange, because also on that little collection of quirky recordings given to me in February 1981 was the song Hoover Factory by Elvis Costello:
So, by some strange quirk of fate, forty years after being given recordings of those two rather obscure (but wonderful) recordings about lesser-known places in West London, I found myself doing charity gigs from those two very places.
I have already written up the ear worm I got from Hoover Factory a few months after first hearing the song:
But the early 1980s connection this week does not stop there.
While I have been cracking on with the NHS Responder/GoodSAM app as well as FoodCycle, Daisy has been training to become a Samaritan and this week moved on from being a course trainee to becoming a mentee (i.e. doing real sessions with real calls under the supervision of a mentor).
Towards the end of her course, Daisy had been waiting with a little trepidation to find out who her mentor might be. Mentors work closely with their mentees for a few weeks. She knew that it might be one of her course trainers or possibly someone she hadn’t encountered before.
A couple of weeks ago Janie announced that her mentoring instructions had come through and her mentor was a new name to her: Alison Shindler.
GED: Oh, yes, I know Alison Shindler.
DAISY: What do you mean?
GED: She was a leading light in BBYO towards the end of my time there.
DAISY: Might not be the same person…
GED: …Ealing BBYO – bet it is!
Of course it is.
What a pleasant surprise.
Less of a surprise though, after their first session together, is that Alison & Daisy seem to be getting along really well. I’m confident that the mentoring partnership should be a very good one.
Meanwhile Alison has furnished me with a photo from so far back in the day, the biggest surprise is that we were in colour back then:
With thanks to Alison Shindler for this photo
That’s a c17-year-old me turning around, next to me Simon Jacobs who was central to my “going to Keele” story and part of the “cooking weekend”. In the red scarf I thought was Jilly Black (who has remained friends with me, Daisy and Alison throughout those decades – in fact it is a little surprising we haven’t overlapped before now )…but it turns out to be Emma Cohen disguised as Jilly. Opposite Simon is Lauren Sterling plus, slightly upstaged by Simon’s head, Caroline Curtis (then Freeman) who visited me and Simon at Keele the February 1981 weekend following the “cooking” one.
But now, after all that excitement, Daisy and I are in temporary exile at the flat. The replacement of the Noddyland boiler has over-run by a day, making Daisy right and me wrong, as usual.
Stock boiler image: neither the actual old nor the actual new boiler
I’ve been grasping for a quirky early 1980s musical connection for a boiler replacement. So my earworm for the tail end of this tale is by that early 1980s mainstay, The Human League – Being Boiled:
Dumbo The Suzuki Jimny is an occasional writer, here on Ogblog and also at King Cricket. Dumbo’s writings are more widely read than those of most automobiles. Dumbo only ever refers to me as Ged and to Janie as Daisy. Why Dumbo has chosen to write a “review of the year” public message is a mystery, but 2020 was a strange year in so many ways.
2020 started badly for me. I acquired a squeak that would not go away. It was incredibly loud and hugely embarrassing – heads would turn in the street at the sound of me coming and going.
A huge team at my car hospital struggled to get to the bottom of it. Ged and Daisy started dropping hints about my possible retirement. It got as bad as that.
Eventually, just before lockdown, thank goodness Derek, Colin, & Marlon performed a pioneering operation on my viscera, which solved my problem.
Just as well I got better in mid March, because within a few weeks I was being called upon to do voluntary work.
In theory I was on call for NHS Volunteer Responders from early in the pandemic, but no gigs were coming through at first. So Ged and Daisy signed us up to do FoodCycle gigs once or twice a week, which we have continued to do throughout the pandemic.
My copious rear (as Ged describes it) comes in pretty handy, especially for the FoodCycle gigs.
It wasn’t long before the NHS Volunteer Responder gigs started to come through as well. That and FoodCycle kept us really busy through spring, summer and into the autumn.
Just occasionally, it got a bit much; like the time the NHS Volunteer Responder app went into overdrive…
Ged was busy with work the last few weeks of the year, so we did a bit less volunteering in the run up to Christmas, but during that time the pandemic got a lot worse again and the need out there started to rocket up, so we started NHS Volunteer Responding again on Christmas Day and have done lots of gigs since.
My proudest moment of the year was just a few days ago, when Ged and I went to the Co-op on Hanger Hill to get some shopping for a person who is having to isolate. (There seem to be a lot of those at the moment.)
Three young fellas from the Tesla Show Room & Shop around the corner came out of the Co-op just before Ged came out with the shopping. The young fellas stopped to admire me and one of them said, “I think these cars are pretty cool”. Ged overheard him and said, “seriously cool, not just pretty cool”.
So I don’t think Ged & Daisy will be dropping hints about my retirement again any time soon. I think we’re going to be pretty busy with NHS Volunteer Responding & FoodCycle for the next few months at least.
We ended up pursuing a rather convoluted route this Sunday for our East Acton FoodCycle run.
The gig started normally enough. There’s Janie, Father “Friar Tuck” Richard, Alannah & Francesco from a few week’s earlier, at Our Lady of Fatima Church, White City
FoodCycle provide us with an excellent app, Circuit For Teams, which does a wonderful job of listing our drops, linking to the satnav & optimising our route.
But this week something had changed. It might have had something to do with my upgraded iPhone. Circuit is now offering us a choice of satnavs, which is great, because we both like (and are used to) Waze, whereas it was previously hard-linked to GoogleMaps, which we like less.
But here’s the thing.
It seems that, in amongst all the upgrading excitement, but unbeknown to us, the app had switched on some functions that allow the app to take instructions by voice, using Siri, Apple’s voice control gizmo.
Early in our journey that day, Janie and I were chatting about travel, or rather our much diminished desire to travel at the moment. Janie pondered where we might want to go if/when the pandemic is over and we thus discussed Madagascar, where we were planning to go in 2018, until an outbreak of pneumonic plague there in late 2017 rather put us off the idea. (In the end, we went to Japan instead, in autumn 2018.)
After the first drop, the Circuits app seemed to be in a spin of re-routing and re-optimising. No matter, I thought, I know the way from White City to North Kensington for this second drop.
But the app was still in a spin ahead of the third drop:
… it keeps saying “route not possible”…
…said Janie, to which I merely said:
…ask it to re-optimise again – I know the way to our third drop anyway.
But Janie kept reporting that the app was failing to show a route for our journey and after our third drop, we were heading to Hammersmith to a new location and I really did want the app to show me the way…
…so I took a close look at the thing myself…
…the app had added “Madagascar” to the list of destinations and was trying (and for some obscure reason, failing) to route us to Hammersmith via Madagascar.
At this juncture I was reminded of the scene in the animated film, Madagascar, after the penguins have taken control of the ship in a “special forces style” operation, only to realise that they have absolutely no idea how to use the ship’s navigation systems. That scene is 1’40” into the clip below, all of which is well worth watching.
Much like the penguins, I tried pressing buttons to see what happens – in particular I thought it might be a good idea to remove Madagascar from the list of FoodCycle delivery destinations.
That worked. Once I deleted Madagascar and pressed “reoptimize route”, within a second or two, order had been restored and Circuits was again performing as expected and showing an excellent route for our deliveries.
Thus, in the next hour or 90 minutes, it was mission accomplished. Hurrah.
Because, when we have a lot of food to deliver for FoodCycle…
The Government is encouraging people to try and get back to “normal”, whatever that might be, while the pandemic is in its summer recess. This doesn’t seem to have reduced the load on charities, such as FoodCycle, nor yet on the needs emerging for NHS Volunteer Responders.
What it is achieving, though, is a reduced volunteer force…
…Janie was back to work this week, but she’s not letting that stop her from continuing with the volunteering, at least for now…
…yet I get bemused looks from plenty of people when I tell them that our voluntary workload is increasing.
Two examples this week.
FoodCycle Marylebone 15 July 2020
Probably a temporary glitch, for this project, which we have been supporting by doing deliveries for nearly three months now. The delivery load has increased to three teams these past few weeks, but this week, try as they might, they could only find two so we needed to take on an extra half load.
That meant 16 deliveries; 32 bags full (sir).
Our previous record; 24 bags. “32 bags full sir” required some strategic stacking
Mostly on the Lisson Green Estate, plus one or two blocks on the Church Street side and a few up in Maida Vale; mostly people we’d delivered to before, which helps.
When there’s something strange……in your neighbourhood……who ya gonna call?……I said, who ya gonna call???…FoodCycle!!
As usual, we got a lot of satisfaction from this gig; huge amounts of gratitude from the guests who clearly need the food and really appreciate our help.
But it really was a bit of a marathon this week. Back to three teams for Marylebone next week; Janie and I are grateful.
The Day My NHS Volunteer Responder App Went Berserk, 17 July 2020
Since May, we’ve both had a steady stream of calls. Not all that many, frankly, but around a dozen gigs each (more if you count the “no shows”), which, from what I can gather, is significantly above average.
I think the run rate has been increasing slightly, but when the first eight weeks is metaphorical dot balls and the next few weeks is ones, twos and the occasional four, it is hard to be overly analytical about the rate.
Then came Friday 17th July.
I relocated to the flat, for the first time in months, as Janie was taking patients at the house and I thought it was about time I collected the post, flushed the loo, ensured the computer was working/updated properly and got on with preparation for the Z/Yen Board meeting. Frankly, now we do everything in the cloud, I could now do Board preparation work from pretty much anywhere without shlepping loads of files or papers.
I’m not entirely sure what triggered the storm that followed, but basically the NHS Volunteer Responder App decided that, as soon as I closed one call, it wanted to alert me to another one.
I didn’t really notice it earlier in the day. My first call took a while to close. An utterly charming South-East Asian woman – Vietnamese I think from the name – who didn’t answer the first time I called and then wanted to come off the calling scheme as she is no longer isolating and is returning to work. The first such call I have taken, I called the support line to establish the protocol for doing that – basically the woman herself needs to call the support line to be removed from the scheme.
Perhaps my first ever human (telephone) interaction with the scheme itself triggered a new status on my account…
Super-responder. Bit of a mug – probably will help pick up all the slack everywhere. Bombard with calls until this responder expires.
…or perhaps the algorithm detected “a new kid in town” around Notting Hill and there happened to be a lot of business around there on Friday.
Most of the calls were delightful folk who really appreciated the scheme, had used it when they needed stuff but didn’t, as it happens, need any help that day. One other person wanted to come off the scheme and I advised her on how to do that, now I am an expert on that protocol.
As the afternoon went on and my little “ivory tower” office heated up, I decided to return to Noddyland, taking one last call. I think my 12th of the day. A charming gentleman in Earls Court who did, on this occasion, as it happened, need a prescription collected and one or two other things from the pharmacy.
In truth, I was glad to at least have one of my calls today result in an errand, even though it was a little out of my way on a hot day.
I ran the errand and returned to my car, opened the windows and checked my messages.
I picked up one message from a client that absolutely needed dealing with before I could draw stumps on my working week, but my mobile phone battery was already running low (NHS Volunteer Responder does that) so I arranged a call with the client for 30-45 minutes hence, when I’d be home.
Then I cleared the good deed I had just done by clicking the “completed task” button.
The responder went off again instantly.
I realised that I should switch myself off duty, so I hit the “reject call” button and switched myself to “off duty”.
The responder went off again instantly.
The “off duty” signal must have crossed in the post with that one, I thought. So I rejected that call and started the engine of my car.
The responder went off again instantly.
I’m starting to sweat a little now. I rejected that call. I had now been off duty for a good two or three minutes.
The responder went off again instantly.
I rejected the call and closed down the app. That would shut it up, surely?
The responder went off again instantly.
People in the street are starting to look. It’s not a quiet thing, the NHS Volunteer Responder App. It has been borrowed from the Royal Voluntary Service GoodSam scheme for emergency defibrillation, so it sounds like an emergency alarm.
In fact, if you haven’t heard it before, brace your lug holes and listen to this:
There was only one thing for it, I deleted the NHS Volunteer Responder App from my phone.
That did shut it up.
I reloaded the app later on, once I had spoken to my client, cooled down and seen real umpires draw stumps on the test match day. In short, once I had fully recovered my composure.
Fully recovered
I dread to think what might happen if the UK Government’s world beating “track and trace” app can go into that sort of overdrive. Perhaps best not to think about it.
Joking apart, that bizarre day was unusually rewarding. Swathes of gratitude from people, many of whom don’t need a lot of help (or rather, they have their own sources of help) but feel much reassured by the periodic calls to know that they have a back up service that will seek them out if they find themselves needing the help. It must be a very vulnerable feeling, to be shielding for several months and needing people to help you. Even if we are mostly just providing some psychological comfort to shielding people, as much as the occasional “errand running” gigs that form part of the deal, I think it is a very worthwhile service.
Plenty of calls for me again the next day, too. So I think this is partly about a build up of demand and a reduction in supply. Anyone out there who hasn’t volunteered yet, simply because you’ve heard there is no demand…that’s not so…
Nearly 40 years ago, around about the time I went off to university, Graham Greenglass and I would occasionally swap mix tapes, as young folk in those days oft did.
Graham (left with tickle stick), Ros, Alan & Paul – spring 1979
On one of those tapes was the quirky song, Rossmore Road, by Barry Andrews. I loved that song and listened to it (along with its companions) a great deal in my early months at Keele.
If you’ve never heard it before, click the YouTube below and you might well be transfixed. If you have heard it before, I suspect that you have already clicked the link without waiting for my edict.
So, imagine my delight when Janie and I were instructed, for our next Marylebone FoodCycle gig, to forsake the Roman Catholic Church of Our Lady on the junction of Lodge Road & Lisson Grove, which had previously always been our starting point. Instead, we were to start and end our gig at St Paul’s Church, Marylebone, on Rossmore Road.
Jenny (left), Curate Ali & Me at the Church of Our Lady the week beforeWorra lorra grub! Church of Our Lady the week beforeDumbo The Suzuki Jimny piled highReturning to Rossmore Road after the gig……specifically, returning the temperature controlled box and temperature checking apparatus
Of course I have walked and driven past Rossmore Road hundreds of times on my way to Lord’s. But this was the first time I had ever actually had an appointment on Rossmore Road. I mentioned this fact to Curate Ali, who, surprisingly, previously had no idea that there was a cult-status song about the road in which her parish church is located.
But it’s not all about Rossmore Road.
Janie and I have had one or two interesting occurrences and adventures over the past few weeks.
A couple of weeks ago we needed to go into the congestion zone, south of the ring-road. There was a contraflow just outside the block we needed to get to for our drop, so (contrary to Janie’s entreaties) , I insisted on driving around the block and walking the food around the block, rather than causer a possible obstruction, even for just a few minutes. Sometimes our drops can take some time.
Doing the more southerly Marylebone drop
In the course of that simple walk around the block, three different, unconnected people stopped us at various junctures to quiz us about our face guards. It was as if such things had not been seen in that part of London before! It felt really weird.
On progressing to our next drop, the road we wanted to use was closed for some unknown reason (there are SO MANY road closures in the parts of London we are serving for FoodCycle just now), so we were trying to navigate our way around those narrow Marylebone Streets while working out what to do without the help of the sat. nav. which was blissfully unaware of the road closure.
A car came down the road the other way, quite quickly, making it impossible for either car to get through without a convoluted “dance” of reversing and manoeuvering. The other driver hollered at me aggressively. Janie leant across with our FoodCycle permission letter to let him know that we were doing charity deliveries and could do without his aggression. I finished off the interaction by saying…
…behave yourself…
…which Janie told me afterwards might well have come across as a little bit passive-aggressive. Tough.
As we drove around the block looking for an escape route, a car came the other way.
It’s him again…
…said Janie.
Looks nothing like him…
…I said…
…100% sure it is him, he’s just hanging his head in shame, so he looks a bit different…
…said Janie.
We’re delivering to all sorts of interesting people on these rounds. One thing they almost all have in common is how grateful they see for the help FoodCycle are giving them.
And it’s not just the Marylebone round that we’ve been doing; we also do the East Acton gig quite often.
Janie with Richard (aka Friar Tuck – at least that’s what i have decided to nickname him), Alannah & Francesco
But next week we’ll be at Rossmore Road again – I can hear that dreamy saxophone refrain from the start of the song; it’s become an earworm for me again some 40 years after its first appearance there in my ear:
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