Crazy & Co.

Yes We Can Do That, (How I Have No Idea)

20 July 2020

Espresso coffee carts for weddings parties events

The large corporate clients we have, tend to have very little loyalty. If you can’t do precisely what they want, they have no qualms about dropping you and using the next events company on their list.

Over time this has given us the mindset of Yosser Hughes in boys from the black stuff. He was desperate for a job and any job that popped up he would proclaim “gizza job, I can do that.” Anytime a major client asks if we can do something the answer is always “Of course, been doing that for years, piece of cake”. Once we get off the phone it then becomes, “How the hell are we going to do this?”

Espresso Coffee Cart

My wife walked into the office one Monday morning, and picked up an email printed out on my desk. It was the contract for providing an espresso coffee cart to HSBC’s headquarters for an event on the Wednesday, two days hence.

She looked at me inquiringly and asked “Who is doing that job for us?”

“No one, we are doing it ourselves”

She raised an eyebrow and replied “We don’t have an effing espresso coffee cart!”

“Ha”, says I, “Not a problem, Ian is out building the cart now, the coffee machine and equipment is being delivered in the morning, and I am on a Barista training course tomorrow evening”

On the day the first customer was like, “A cappuccino, two lattes, an espresso and a Machiato please”. WTF, help, I can’t do this.

When I had calmed down, I realised that every drink started with an espresso, you just added different amounts of steamed milk and foam. They wanted 5 drinks, you made 5 espressos, steamed a large jug of milk, then poured to suit. Easy peasy. In fact they were so impressed that they had us back on a number of occasions. The espresso cart is now a firm favourite amongst many of our staff.

**Espresso Cart For All, That’s What We Say**

Sony And Nissan Walk Into A Bar

A couple of years later I got a call from a long term client, an events company we worked with quite often. “Jason, do you do mobile bars, we have a massive job on offer from Sony and Nissan, they need a bar to celebrate the end of a worldwide competition they have been running.”, basically players on the Sony GT racing game could compete to win a place on the actual Nissan racing driver development program.

“Yep, we can do that, when is it?”

Lol, “A week today”, gulp. “Er yeh no problem”.

When I told my wife she said that this time I was on my own, she wasn’t coming to that event as I was going to fall flat on my face in front of a major corporate client.

I spent the day feverishly ordering equipment we would need. Luckily a mate of mine Dean, owned a local pub, and he wrote me a list of what I needed. We sourced a company that supplied portable bar sections and set off the next morning to collect them. I took my staff down to Dean’s pub to treat them to a night out, on the condition that Dean let them pull their own pints. And we managed to hire a kid that had worked in a cocktail bar, so we had at least one member of staff who had some idea of what he was doing.

Our New Bar

On the day everything went off perfectly. Well almost, I had ran water through the Jagermeister dispenser to clean it, and hadn’t gotten all of it out, with the result that it froze solid and wouldn’t dispense. But apart from that it was a fabulous night. Especially when Sabine Schmitz on a segway managed to run Martin Brundle over lol, what a booze monster she was. By the nights end she was demanding we just pour whatever shots were left into a glass and she would drink that.

After that one I think we can safely borrow the S.A.S. motto of “Who Dares Wins”.

Since then we have successfully acquired various bits of kit at short notice, crepe machines, Dutch Poffertjes and with a couple hours practice managed to provide a professional service, looking like we had done it all of our lives.

Corporate clients want the impossible, we are happy to oblige.

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Event Planning, Fun Story

This Time It Wasn’t Us, Tales Of Misadventures

17 July 2020

Over the years we have had our fair share of tales of woe. Thankfully I am happy to say that we never upset the client as we always managed to either put them right, or hide our involvement

This tale is slightly different, in that the client most certainly wasn’t impressed, but thankfully this time it wasn’t us, we were innocent bystanders.

On The Job

Ian, one of our event team. Had been sent on a little job in London, which we had been contracted for by another events company. We work closely with many of the major events companies out there, and a great deal of the smaller ones.

This particular job was in a large office building, and we were only supplying a dessert cart. Anyway Ian had rang me to tell me there was a delay in getting into the loading bay. Not an issue for us as we would take about 10 minutes to set up.

The company we were working for had quite a bit of kit to set up, so they were getting a bit anxious over the time frame. Ian rang a short while later to tell me that they had been given permission to enter the load area. The other team had jumped into their van, reversed at high speed straight into a metal post. The upshot was that the back doors were so deformed, they couldn’t open them, and the vans side door was nonoperational so they couldn’t use that either.

Whilst Ian was making a few trips carrying our equipment in, he said they were in a panic and attacking the back doors with bars trying to force it open.

Oops, Some Mothers Do Ave Em

About 20 minutes later he rang again. Seems they had managed to open the back doors. One of them had gathered up a collection of metal poles which were part of a sidestall and gone charging up a wide staircase and straight through a huge plate glass door. Ian said there was glass everywhere! Oops, not a good start for them.

Smashed Glass — **Not The Actual Entrance, But You Get The Idea**

About twenty minutes later Ian phoned yet again. Seems they had set the first of these stalls up. And the guy who had gone through the glass door was stood admiring his stall erecting skills. When unfortunately the top pole, which he hadn’t secured properly. Fell down, hitting him on the head and rendering him unconscious. Ian said that this time there was blood everywhere. I think he would have done Frank Spencer proud.

They had to call a first aider, who in turn called the buildings health and safety, who in turn told them to remove their equipment and leave. Ian explained that although we were contracted by them, we weren’t actually part of the same firm. So they allowed us to stay and operate and we did get paid. A tale of woe, but like a say, not ours this time.

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Event Planning, Fun Story, funfair events, Funfair Rides

Myth Busters On The Funfair

10 July 2020

Myth Busters on the funfair. Growing up in a funfair community, before making the move into full time corporate entertainment. I came across over the years some stunning examples of ignorance concerning our industry.

I will attempt to expel some of the most common, and in same cases hilarious examples I have personally been witness to.

Be Careful They Don’t Steal Your Kids

I think this is a holdover from people thinking we are gypsy’s. As I have heard the same comments directed at them. As far as I can find out from a medical point of view, people brought up on the fairground, have the same levels of fertility as the wider community. So why an earth does any rational person think we need to steal kids. The community also being extremely tight knit, wasn’t really very accepting of outsiders. So anyone magically acquiring a kid they had purloined from the outside world would find it very quickly ostracised.

As an aside, there have been occasional cases in the news where people have abducted children from hospitals etc, and been caught. To the best of my knowledge, none of these people have ever had a connection with our industry. So perhaps we have more to fear for our kids being stolen than the other way around.

All The Men On The Fairground Have Tattoos

Hmm, looking at the popular media portrayal of the fairground worker you would think so. Only we don’t, tattoos are considered about on par with halitosis or scabies, you don’t want them. The actual fairground owners just don’t have tattoos. Dave, who you met on the waltzers will almost certainly have them. But here’s the thing, Dave is a local lad that has been employed to help on the rides. He is one of you, not one of us.

The Lads On The Fair Will Steal Your Girlfriend

This is one that I have to hold my hands up and admit has more than a grain of truth. To some teenage girls the bright lights and big rides seem exotic. And there are many cases of hook ups between said young ladies and guys on the fair. It was usually followed the next day by punch ups between irate boyfriends and guys on the fair.

When The Fair Is In Town Crime Goes Up

This is a persistent one that we could never seem to shake off. Some towns we visited would see many of the shops close the week we were there. It’s a stark contrast to the continent, where the fairs and the local chamber of commerce and shops all work together. Indeed on many Dutch Fairgrounds, the shops will sponsor prizes for the best ride or attraction.

I once asked a local superintendent about this, and what he told me was that in his experience the opposite was true. He said that most of the toerag thieves and druggies tended to visit the fair, rather than be out on the rob, so he claimed a reduction in things like housebreaking.

We Know He Was Off The Fairground Because He Wasn’t Wearing Socks Or Shoes

This was an actual quote made to me by a police officer. We had all arrived to set up in Preston Park for an annual event. A squad car turned up with a couple of young officers in. The officer in charge started enquiring if any of us were missing a member of staff. He explained that a body had been found on the motorway about 20 miles away. When I asked why they thought a random body was anything to do with us, that was his reply. “He wasn’t wearing socks or shoes.” Funny thing, I looked down and all of us had socks and shoes on. Well at least we had shoes, without going round pulling trousers legs up I couldn’t swear to the socks. Obviously the officer in question had failed the intelligence test to become a Unigate milkman and joined the police force instead.

We Have A Large Suspect Pool, It Consists Of Everyone Who Was Working At The Fair

We have endured similar over the years. I once received a message from the police that they would like to interview me. It is only routine they said, but they were interviewing everyone who had attended Stokesly Show Fair due to a young lady being sexually assaulted. I told the female detective that she couldn’t see me that day as I was just leaving to an event in Ripon city centre. “No, probs, I did my probation at Ripon nick, could you pop in and see me, only take a minute.”

I duly popped in, and as I sat down in front of her she told me that I was free to go. Turned out they weren’t actually interviewing people, they had a description and if you fitted it they would arrest you. Just out of interest I enquired as to how they intended to track everyone who had attended the fair to see if they fit the description. “Oh we don’t, we are only interviewing people off the actual fair!”

So there might well have been 100,000 people visit the event. But the suspects were strictly limited to the couple of hundred showmen. Who would actually have been hard at work during the time of the fair. Sometimes in compiling these myth busters I truly despair as to the levels of prejudice.

Harrogate

A similar thing occurred a few years later at the Harrogate stray funfair. It seems that someone had been knocked off of their bike and killed on a country road leading to harrogate. Because that particular week the fair was in town, it was decided by the local Stasi, erm sorry constabulary, that it must be a funfair vehicle that had hit him. I mean, there was at least 20 funfair vehicles used that road on that day compared to only a few thousand non funfair vehicles, so its obvious isn’t it.

Anyway said local force turned up armed with paint scrapers to scrape paint samples from all the vehicles on the fair. I must admit this still annoys me all these years later as I had just had my vehicle resprayed, some two weeks before. Again I asked if the paint vandalism was being carried out on all the local hauliers vehicles. Silly question that I knew the answer to before it was asked.

They Don’t Pay Taxes

Another common misconception that we can use in our myth busters. Oh, if only. If I didn’t pay taxes I would be able to afford that 4 seat Cessna airplane I fancy. Or a nice motor cruiser. Obviously there will be some who don’t declare everything to HMRC. But the proportion will be no different to the wider world who aren’t showmen. I don’t for one minute think there are enough funfair operators fiddling their books to keep all those tax inspectors in employment.

Myth Busters They Just Turn Up And Set Up

In January I used to be able to tell you almost every fair I would be attending that season. There would be an occasional gala I might pick up at the last minute. Or occasionally the weather would cancel a fair and I would manage to secure a plot at an alternative. But by and large the events I attended were regular events. That had in some cases been going on for hundreds of years. Even the smaller events would still need permission from landowners, liaison with the police and other local emergency services, sometimes road closure orders, and all would need the layout and mixture of rides and attractions sorting out well in advance. We also needed to advertise the event in advance to ensure we had enough patrons to make it worthwhile.

I cannot remember in 50 years, once ever just turning up and deciding a plot of land would be nice for an immediate funfair to be opened.

Hopefully we can add some more myth busters to our list in the future.

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Fun Story

Mixing Idiots And Electricity.

1 July 2020

Tales Of Misadventures.

For some reason, many of our tales of mishap seem to involve electricity. This one however really wasn’t our fault.

When I was still a youth, before I made the jump into the corporate market and I was still operating at traditional funfairs. I had a sideline, I used to design and build lighting control systems. When you see the lights flashing on the funfair rides, or at Blackpool illuminations, they have an electronic control system to flash them in the correct sequence. My first ever business was building these controllers.

A friend of mine in Scotland, used to act as an agent for me. I would build the units he would sell them. Now, many of the funfair rides at that time didn’t operate from standard 240v household type electricity. Instead they used a 110 volt Direct Current system. This was an older, but safer form of electric. You can hold a live wire in your hand without any ill effects. The one drawback to it, was if two wires touched they tended to spark and arc very badly. You could touch two cables together and move them apart a number of inches and keep a flame of electric present between the two.

Blinded By The Light

The lighting systems for these 110v powered rides tended to be very high current. Often needing to power three or four hundred amps of lighting. The mains connection tended to be brass bolts of around an inch diameter to carry the load. There were three main connections, one for the negative supply. One for the positive supply, and the final one for the common feed to the lights. The last two were actually joined together by a large brass busbar because they were of the same polarity.

My friend turns up one day with a unit for repair. Looking at it, the common and positive brass bolts had been melted down to nothing.

WTF!, happened I asked. When he finished laughing he managed to tell me. The guy that had purchased the unit, had misread the wiring diagram, and connected the positive and negative supply to the two bolts that were joined together. Basically a dead short. Now, he couldn’t start the generator. Not surprising as the dead short basically presented an infinite load and the engine wasn’t powerful enough to turn the dynamo over.

So, he had the bright idea of having a member of staff hold the cables ready. He would start the generator and when it was running, the said stooge would push the cables onto the brass bolts connecting the electricity.

The result he reported, was a massive flash of light. What he rather though Hiroshima would have looked like just after the bomb dropped. This was followed by a huge flame. Which not only melted the bolts to nothing, it also removed the poor staff members moustache, eyebrows and most of his fringe. In fact he said, the guy very much resembled a chimney sweep. One who had just cleaned out a particularly filthy chimney.

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Event Planning, Fun Story, Funfair Rides

My Kingdom For A Welder. Tales Of Misadventures.

18 June 2020

What happens when you don’t take a welder.

We put a lot of work into being professional, giving our clients an excellent service and hopefully securing regular repeat business. Sometimes though I think we are a bit like ducks, all calm and serene looking on the surface, whilst paddling furiously underneath to keep things going.

We seem to go for extended periods of time, without any major problems or issues. Then all of a sudden the gods of spite rear their ugly heads to slap us about a bit.

A few years ago we were contracted to provide a small family funfair for the opening of NUS Mutuals new headquarters. I wrote about our run in with Princess Anne’s bodyguards at the same event.

In the event, we got set up in the nick of time, operated to the clients satisfaction and was all derigged ready for the road by about 11pm. That should have put us on getting back home for around 2am.

We sent the girls on ahead in the car, I was in a lorry towing a children’s ride, and Arthur was in another lorry towing a trailer loaded with equipment.

Arthur

I’ll introduce Arthur, he could loosely be described as a business partner. There was nothing official, but we tended to do some of the larger jobs together. Physically he looked a bit like Austin Powers, only much much shorter. Think of a 4ft 10 version of Austin Powers, glasses and all and you would be on the right track.

Anyway, I was just approaching Tamworth services when I gets a phone call from Arthur.

“One of the wheels on my trailer is hot”

“How Hot” I enquired.

“Too FU*&^NG hot to touch”, was his expert opinion. That sounded like a wheel bearing was on its way out. I told him I would wait for him in the services.

When he arrived I found he was pretty accurate in his diagnoses, It was too hot to touch. I told him to jack the wheel off the floor so we could see how bad it was. When he did the wheel promptly fell off. The bearing wasn’t on its way out, it had left the building, deceased, kaput, as dead as a very dead thing.

Collapsed Wheel Bearing — **Not our bearing, but one remarkably like it.**

When Spares Are A Good Idea

Luckily, the bearing was the same type as used on the wheels of the children’s ride I was towing. I always keep a couple of spares in stock, as they have failed on me in the past. No probs, half an hour and we would be back on the road. We cleaned the stub axle up, changed the bearing, put the wheel back on, and I told Arthur to tighten the locking nut to hold everything in place.

Slight problem he told me, the threads had been damaged and the nut wouldn’t go back on. Crap, we will have to weld it on. “Got a welder” he asked, I did in fact have one, 100 miles away back at base. Why havent you got one was my retort, “Because I didn’t know my FU*&^NG wheel bearing was FU*&^NG going to FU*&^NG fail” was his eloquent reply.

My Kingdom For A Welder

So there we were half past midnight stuck in services on a Sunday morning with no welder. Luckily I thought of my Uncle Michael. About 60 miles away in Nottinghamshire, at that time he would have just been coming in from the pub. A quick call and he agreed to leave a welder at the gate of his property for us to pick up.

Cue a 2 hour round trip for the welder. We got back set the welder up, ran a cable to the power generator, started it up, and welded the nut on. Only we didn’t, as Arthur touched the welding rod to the nut, the generator stopped.

Having just installed it the day before, it didn’t have a fuel tank fitted, instead the fuel was in a five gallon plastic drum. This had moved en route and pulled the fuel pipe out so the engine was starved of diesel. Not an issue, we have purged the fuel system of air plenty often in the past.

My Kingdom For A Battery

We did that, turned the key, and nothing happened, the sodding battery was flat. Now we needed jumper cables, which were also back home. No problem, we were in a services, you could go and buy a set from the garage. You know the type, they are £3.99 a set, only in the services they add a 0 on the end.

No matter the cost we needed the bloody things. We connected them up and yay, the damn thing started. Only the rattling and crunching indicated that the starter motor hadn’t disengaged. It was now being torn apart by the engine running.

Arthur looked at me, “Just weld the FU&*^NG thing on and we’ll repair the starter tomorrow.”

We limped home just as it was becoming daylight, a three hour trip turning into around 8 hours.

Cheap Jump leads — **Our Highly Valuable Cheap Jump Leads**

Read one of our earlier tales of woe.

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Fun Story, General

Modern Technology, A Brave New World

14 June 2020

Like everyone in the country, or indeed much of the planet. We are all sat here in isolation. But that got me thinking, imagine if this pandemic had occurred say 20 years ago. How much different would things have been without modern technology.

We all had phones 20 years ago granted, so we could talk. Now however look at the options. From video calls on your mobile, to Skype, Portal, Echo Show, zoom, numerous methods of larger screen face to face communication. Sometimes for the isolated just seeing someone as you talk to them can make all the difference.

One of our Photo Booths is a Del Boy Trotter 3 wheeled van. The props for the booth are all themed around the series, so we have Grandad’s hat, Triggers broom etc. We also have a couple of the original Motorola ‘Brick’ phones. You know the ones, size and weight of a house brick, battery lasted a week, put them in your trousers and the weight would pull them down. And if you were ever mugged you could use it to beat the attacker senseless.

Anyway we did a couple of days at a shopping centre in West Brom. Kids and their dads would rummage through the props box. When they came to the phone the kids would ask ‘Whats this dad?’

When told it was a mobile phone it was like, ‘What, no way, where’s the screen, how do you look at Facebook.’ Now phones are that small you can slip them up your left nostril. Though I can remember when this brick phone was modern technology, the original mobile phone came with a separate battery that you could just about lift.

Information

Besides Google and the other search engines, we also have the NHS 111 number. Checking if your symptoms could be Corvid-19 is only a phone call or search engine away. At one time none of this existed. Instead you would have been calling your local GP. Or more accurately trying to. With thousands of people all worried and panicking, how long would it be before the local health services had to take their phones off the hook. They wouldn’t have a hope in hells chance of coping.

Not connected to the current situation, but think of the way some of the other sources of information have changed. We all had telephone directories, and Yellow Pages. Both of which were a struggle to lift they were that big. You try looking for something in the Yellow pages, it meant hours of wading through adverts trying to find what you wanted.

Now, you type it into Google and the information comes to you. Modern technology at its finest.

Medical Facilities

I had the misfortune to avail myself of our medical services recently. A burst appendix meant emergency surgery. I now have 4 tiny little puncture marks across my abdomen, 2 for the keyhole surgery, and 2 from the drains fitted to remove the poison. It wasn’t that long ago when I would have had a large scar across my body where they would have opened me up to remove it. Indeed at one time even an operation such as an
appendicectomy would have carried a high risk. I made the mistake in hospital when talking to the surgeon, of calling it an appendectomy, only to be told off because evidently that is an American term.

It is forecast that, like Italy etc we are going to see a lot of deaths from this terrible pandemic. But imagine if this was 20 years ago, how much higher would the death toll be. It seems that ventilators are going to be one of the key items to save lives. A consortium of tech companies are ramping up to massively increase our supply of the device. Could we have really done this twenty years ago, heck could we have done it ten years ago in the same timeframe?

Entertainment

At one time we had the 5 terrestrial channels. Sky, and a few cable services, if you wanted a particular film you needed to walk to the local Blockbusters and hire it. Now we have the massive list of freeview stations, Amazon Prime channels, Netflix, Youtube, Spotify and so on. There is an unbelievable amount of entertainment that can be accessed, streamed downloaded. Fair enough much of it is crap. But amongst it all there should be enough to keep everyone entertained to some degree.

We are all spoilt with access to almost any movie we wish on demand. At one time you visited your local video tape store, where hopefully they had the film you wanted in stock. If it was a popular one then the chances are you would struggle to get it. Once hired you fetched a tape like the one below back to play on your video machine. What you then got was a sometimes grainy fairly lowish resolution picture, with garbage sound. If the tape you had hired had been well used then the picture quite often would begin to degrade and become grainy, or have bits of the dialogue drop out. None of this 4k or 8k super hi res, with Dolby surround sound processing.

Working From Home

With the country in lock down, we have been told to work from home where possible. Now obviously a lot of us can’t. You would find the wife kicking a stink up if you tried to build cars in her front room. And most gardens aren’t going to be big enough to fabricate wings for Airbus.

For much of the service industry and creative media industry however its a different story. A multiplicity of conference software, and collaborative office and design software mean that this is a real option for a lot of people. Fast internet speeds are the secret sauce facilitating this. The dial up speeds of yesteryear just would have had us working at the speed of a British Leyland worker in the 1970’s. Instead some parts of the global economy are still ticking over, and hopefully can hit the ground running once we are released from lockdown.

Online Shopping

Part of the lockdown is that all non essential shops are closed. But how much of an inconvenience is this in practice. Unless we need something, like, now, we tend to buy online. The mighty Amazon stocks an awful lot of what we need. With its Prime service, delivery tends to be overnight, or indeed on some items same day.

Almost anything else you want can be ordered online, with rapid delivery, and in many cases for less than what you would pay in a bricks and mortar store.

Indeed my daughter has a steady stream of deliveries from various fashion and beauty outlets. So much so that a recent delivery driver remarked that ‘your daughter must have come back off holiday’, ‘How do you know shes been on holiday’ I asked. Dead simple was the reply, ‘Our deliveries dropped by 50% whilst shes been away.’

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Fun Story

When You Are At The High Rollers Table

29 May 2020

Tales Of Misadventures

Our catering company is called Candy Floss Crazy. Our first ever offering was candy floss. However in the very early days we didn’t actually own a candy floss machine. We used to borrow them from family members until we could afford our own.

On one occasion, when we were contracted to give floss out at the opening of a brand new casino, we borrowed a machine from my wife’s uncle.

On the night of the event, we were situated next to what turned out to be the high rollers table. The Chinese guests were throwing chips down on the roulette numbers like they were going out of fashion. I counted up one spin that come to about £20,000. And they were all like that.

When You Deal With Cowboys

Anyway, about 30 minutes before the end of my hire I hit a snag. The family we had borrowed the machine from, were a bit of a cowboy outfit. At some point they had changed the electrical cable inside the head of the candy floss machine. Now, this part of the machine heats up to 186C so needs special heatproof cabling. Not so on this machine, they had used cheap two core flex from B&Q. The result was when it eventually touched the heating element, it burnt through and caused an electrical short.

This resulted in the electric tripping off. Shit, that also put the roulette table out of action. Things then got worse. Because it was a brand new casino, no one knew where the trip switches were located. SO, call the maintenance guy right. Well no, it was a Sunday evening and he wasn’t working. So they couldn’t get hold of him.

The upshot was it took them about 25 minutes to restore the power, all I could do was keep clocking up mentally how much they were going to charge me for lost earnings. Once the power was on, the manager shouted across to me your good to go you can start making it again. Gulp, “Oh, it takes 10 minutes to warm my machine up and I finish in 5”, I lied. Luckily he bought it and I packed up and came home without a bill for the £250,000 I had racked up. Candy floss crazy indeed.

Nowadays we only buy new machines, and have them professionally serviced regularly. So if you want to hire a candy floss cart then get in touch.

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Fun Story

8 Hours Stuck Up A Tree!

25 May 2020

I used to read how suicide was a major killer of men. That’s something you don’t really take notice of until it happens to your friends. Since hitting 45 I have lost a number of friends. Some to illness, an accident or two and one acquaintance with a drugs overdose.

Recently an old friend from my childhood took his own life. Now, usually the death of a friend brings a feeling of profound sadness. In this case it was a mixture of sad, and anger. Some days the anger drowning out the sadness.

Growing up on the fairground, there was a real tight gang of us. Hitting our mid twenties, most of us found love and some of us moved away from the North East, losing touch in the process. JJ and I had been friends up until we both moved. We didn’t see each other for probably 20 years, then we met up at a mutual friends funeral. We ended up sat talking that long, that both of our spouses rang to see if we were ok, as they had expected us back hours before.

Catching up on things we made a commitment to get together again. He was particularly impressed that I had acquired my pilots licence and we agreed to take a flight together. In the run up to Christmas we had been texting each other to try and arrange a night out, but our respective diary’s stopped this. On our last text we agreed to pick it back up after Christmas

That was the last contact I had with him. A few days into the new year, my dad rang to tell me that JJ had killed himself.

There aren’t many funerals I cry at, its just not in my nature, but I did at that one. All the old gang were there, except Cliff, who is in prison. I was struck by how everyone had turned into a hugger. That wasn’t the macho gang I remember from my youth. But is that part of the problem. Men are expected to be macho, not to cry, to be inscrutable with their feelings.

It Can Be Frightening

Deciding to talk about this with my circle of friends, what I discovered was frightening. Probably 90% of them were on antidepressants. A couple admitted that they had seriously taken steps towards ending their lives. One described how he had sat there with a gun to his head trying to pluck the courage up to pull the trigger. Something snapped him out of it thankfully, and he threw the gun down, only to have it go off and narrowly miss shooting himself in the head! I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry with him.

If you read the government statistics then it shows that the so called Generation X, basically my age group are most at risk of dying from either suicide or drugs overdose.

Man shot in the head — **Can You Accidentally Commit Suicide**

Killer Bulls

So whats this got to do with the headline. Well, one of the funfairs we used to operate at when I was a kid, was in a little market town on the Yorkshire Dales called Leyburn. One day me, JJ and Cliff, the one in prison now, had gone fishing. Three of us sat there with one rod, when JJ suddenly jumped up and ran away.

As I sat staring at his back, Cliff suddenly jumped up and ran the other way. Still puzzled I set off after him, catching him quite quickly due to my longer legs I asked between gasps what was up. “They are coming to kill us he screamed”. ???? Looking over my shoulder I suddenly notices a herd of young bullocks stampeding towards us. Now I don’t know if they intended harm, or they had just set off at a gallop because we were running. And to be honest I didn’t care at that point. We reached a tree, which thankfully was climbable and both shimmied up as far as we could get.

The herd of bloody cows, formed a circle around the tree, then all promptly laid down looking up at us. WTF. Eventually they slowly dispersed, probably bored waiting for their meals to come down. In the event we were up their almost 8 sodding hours.

And what of JJ, the one who got away. He went home watched some morning TV, had his lunch, played with some of the other kids, then near teatime decided to tell what had happened. We ran into the rescue party as we finally managed to come down out of the tree and were making our way home.

Suicide is so bloody final! And truly frightening when you look at how it seems to be increasing.

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Fun Story

Rover SD1, British Leylands Finest

21 May 2020

In the picture above is a blue Rover SD1, . My dad bought that when I was about 18. I remember it coming and thinking wow, its the same car as the police used. It sure did look modern and impressive for its time, and I think it was a European car of the year.

Now, truth be told, the impressive police version used Rovers venerable V8 power plant. Ours was the paltry 2 litre version. Which to be charitable was a bit asthmatic on the power front.

Once we started using the car I found it a mixed bag. The space and comfort was far superior to anything I had driven before. But its short comings soon became apparent. One advantage of the smaller engine version was that when you put your foot down less bits fell off inside. You would turn a corner and bits of interior trim would whizz pass your head. The fit and finish looked like Stevie Wonder had done the final quality control.

When Your Best Friends With The AA Man

During our Rover experience we were members of the AA. Which was quite fortunate seeing as quite often the car returned on the back of an AA transporter. I think in the end the AA wrote to us and told us that we were overusing their service and they were going to have to rethink our membership.

In the 3 years we owned it, it had 2 replacement engines. The second engine then had to have a total rebuild.

Other items failed at random intervals, the gearbox, differential, electrical components. In fact midway through our final year of ownership a fuse had blown for one of the electrical windows. When we looked to replace the blown fuse, we noticed that 2 were blown, so we changed them both. Suddenly after 2 and a half years we discovered we had central locking.

Fuel Pumps And A Work Out

One of the items that seemed to fail regularly was the fuel pump. This was a small cylindrical pump about the size of a bobbin of cotton. It lived in the actual fuel tank and would fail with depressing regularity. At the time it was about £200, which 30 years ago was a not inconsiderable sum.

My dad eventually got sick of paying for this and bought an electronic aftermarket pump that bolted on the side of the engine. At only £100 this was a nice saving.

I was out one day in the car towing a small tourer following dad, when the car once again chucked it. Because this was such a common state of affairs, It no longer caused a panic, and we carried a comprehensive tool kit in the boot.

Whilst investigating which of BL’s finest components had stranded me this day, an absolutely stunning woman pulled up behind me in a brand spanking new Jaguar sports car. Dressed to the nines she was walking down the side of my trailer when she asked, “Do you need a lift, you can jump in with me.”

As she actually reached me she suddenly realised that I was not only wearing an absolutely scruffy boiler-suit, but both my hands and face were scruffy. Some will say this was a rare occurrence for me to have engaged in manual labour, but we had just finished derigging at an event before hitting the road. As she took stock of me I could see her heart sink as she suddenly thought about her new leather seats. I smiled sweetly and thanked her but told her I could repair it. She made a feeble attempt to argue then beat a hasty retreat.

Electronic Genius

And you know what, I could fix it, my first business was building electronic control systems, so I had a good working knowledge of how electronic units worked.

What I managed to work out was how the pump worked. Basically when the ignition was turned on and power applied to the pump, the electric solenoid pumped once. As it pumped it broke a light beam on an optical switch. This immediately cut the power and the solenoid dropped, whereupon the light beam connected and supplied power for another pump cycle.

Unfortunately said opto switch was defunct, deceased, as dead as a parrot. But being a bit clever with electrics, I disconnected the positive feed. Tapped a wire on, and ran it through the door into the car. By tapping it on the cigarette lighter I could pump enough fuel to start the engine.

Trouble was whenever I came to an hill, the engine would splutter and I would have to tap faster. By the time I caught up with my dad, my left arm felt like it belonged to someone else.

I think I flagged my dad down and got my sister out of the cab of the lorry. She was promptly given fuel pumping duty.

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Fun Story

The Customer Is Always Right

17 May 2020

But Boy Sometimes You Want To Slap Them

The majority of our enquiries come through our various website’s. We are happy for potential clients to ring us, but email is easier, as when they put all the details down we can work out a price and get a quote to them quickly and efficiently.

But sometimes you get some clients contact you, and you end up thinking “I just don’t need their money this badly”.

A couple stick in mind. The first an enquiry from a lady who wanted to potentially hire a Flying Frogs Ride. The initial enquiry was as follows on our website;

Website Enquiry

Name Jane Doe (not really but we are keeping her details anonomous)

Telephone No 01234 567890

Email [email protected]

Date Of Event 1st June 2012

Requirements I would like to hire a jumping frogs ride.

Venue My House

Now, most of the details are here. But, to give an accurate price, I need to work out where our equipment is going to. The venue of my house narrows it down to approximately 25 million possibilities. However she could be in Europe or anywhere.

I emailed back to tell her I needed her to be more specific about where the event was taking place. Her answer;

In a field at the bottom of the drive outside my house.

That is I suppose more specific, but of no real help. So I politely emailed back to her, informing her that as I didn’t know her personally I had no idea where her house was, and could she enlighten me.

The answer?

Next Door To My Mams!

At that point I gave up.

The second was a guy who rang to hire a burger van. Now, because of the amount of people who wanted to hire an empty catering unit for their own use, we actually used to have it state on our contact page that we don’t hire empty units out for anyone else to use. The customer would understand this surely?

Telephone Enquiry

The phone conversation went like this.

Caller “Hello, I know you don’t hire empty burger vans out for other people to use, but could you give me a price on an empty burger van?”

Me “Sprichst du Deutsch?”

Caller “You what”

Me ” Et le Francais?”

Caller “I dont understand”

Me “misschien ben je nederlands?”

Caller “Listen mate why are you speaking foreign languages to me?”

Me “Because I am trying to figure out what language you speak”

Caller “Well I speak English don’t I”

Me “Do you, so what part of we don’t hire empty burger vans out for people to use are you struggling with?”

Caller “Well I just thought you might hire one out to me!”

Me “Oh I do apologise, I didn’t realise you were the Duke of Kent”

Caller “Eh, I’m not am I”

Me “Well in that case we can’t help you.”

Now when they ring up for something similar I find it easier to give them a hire price, then inform them that there is a £35,000 cash deposit required to cover damage. That usually shuts the combination down pretty quickly.

So as they say, ‘The customer is always right’ but jeez.