Broken Mug

After feeling ‘not too bad ‘ all day I seem to be deteriorating again come evening and loosing appetite. Damn, how can my knee do this? Another of my daily joys is the anti-clotting injection I have to self-administer. It’s a nothing thing really but hey, only 11 more to go.

All this melancholy reminds me of the time I made a guy cry. It was in early 1969 and I was working in a company in Whitworth, just to the north of Rochdale. It wasn’t a specialist company but still made some quite technical stuff, the machine I worked on was for a laboratory in France. On the other hand some guys did local mill maintenance and were able to make as much as £60/week for 7 X 12 hours. Heady money.
One of the machines we used was a very old radial arm drill, which was botched together with a new electric motor driving through an old Ford car gearbox of some antiquated type.
This guy who cried was the turner and was highly skilled at his trade. He actually wore a blue shirt with a tie and he chain-smoked King Six cigars as he worked at his lathe. “And I’m very partial to a Romeo and Julliet”, he’d say.
One day we had a lot of building contractors in to repair all the leaks in the roof and come tea break it was a case of help yourself to any of the cups of tea on the canteen table. One of the contractors had mine so I picked up another, and it turned out it was our erstwhile turners mug. Boy was he upset. Our tea man told me afterwards that he was mopping tears. Just how stupid can people be? Nope, don’t even try to answer that.