By Andy Capp
Mercury Rising, Issue #6, Riot Issue, April 1992
It's dark. It's warm. I'm very uncomfortable, but something’s irritating my early morning blissfulness The longer it persists the more the noise becomes two sounds. One is my pathetic droning alarm clock. The other, the not-so-pathetic sound of rain on my window. I try to ignore it all and go back to sleep. Who am I trying to kid?
I realize that today, as always on the circuit, when it rains I'm going to make a lot of dosh.
Kiss FM says that Camden Road is like a car park this morning. This is something new? I thought they said that every morning -maybe it’s a recording. Camden Road is boring without traffic. I mean, you need some traffic first thing to wake you up and today is fun 'cos my braking distance is crap which makes for some creative last moment maneouvers. I ride a track bike, I find they're good for those last moment man maneouvers and I wouldn't ride anything else. Most people disagree, but you just don't need 21 gears,+ 27 lbs. of MTB in London. You can count the hills on 1 hand + our roads only have small dents in them compared to SF streets.
Wings is the firm work for now. Once a great company! 100 pound ($175) a day was not uncommon two years ago and the management-rider relationship was good, but now the recession has killed it all. We get to take 60 pounds home on a hard day and call the controller bastard on a regular basis. Many moons ago (86-87)remember working at OYB (On Yer Bike Dispatch) and it being probably the best company to be at. Working weeks varied from 1 to 4 days (never 8!). There were five control desks (cycles only). Most all the clients you use their phones without hassle and all the riders got to choose stupid names like: Major Tom, Buffalo Bill, Postman Pat, Ferrari, Bumble Bee, etc, it goes on and on...yawn!
On the street Joe Public would get well confused when they heard you shout "Andy Capp!" a few times into your handheld.
Anyway, back to the day in hand. And yes! It’s still raining, all the usual chaos that accompanies rain is out in force today. Whole office-loads of blind and deaf peds are running across streets like headless chickens, stuff like that. I have a drop in the "Temple." This is one of London’s intricate mazes of barristers’ chambers and obviously they are centuries old, causing lots of the building directions to be out of date. Because each building is home to about 100 lawyers on each floor finding the geezer’s name on your package involves scanning a totem-pole directories board which can be quite frustrating. More often than not, they're moved ’round the corner to No. 4, which means nothing in the Temple ’cos chronological order wasn't around when they planned the Temple layout. Normal procedure is to put 10 minutes on every Temple docket (tag).
One of my other favorites is High Holborn, This is a street of about, a mile in length. It comes in 4 episodes. It starts proper as High Holborn, where the #s run down the street, stop, hop over to the other side and run back down to the start again, causing No. 1 to be opposite say No.372. Part 2 is just called Holborn. There are very few no.’s here, just large buildings with names. Then there’s Holborn Circus. This is a mammoth junction where 6 roads cross (jumping lights here requires much practice.) The building no.’s here make no sense at all, but there’s only a large bank, Maxwell newspapers, and British Telecom to worry about, anyway. The last section is Holborn Viaduct. Doubles as a bridge. This is the end of our journey and as a consolation the no.’s actually make sense.
There are quite a few streets like this in town, but not quite as long - when confused ask a cabbie - they normally tell you where to go.
Sometimes I wonder why I do this job, the same answer always comes up and it’s not getting wet and dirty every day. It’s not mailroom geezers with senile dementia and bad attitudes. It’s ’cos I like to ride my bike, ’cos basically it makes me feel good. Sometimes I even get large endorphin rushes and if someone is gonna pay me to ride my bike, well, what can I say to that? Maybe they could put the rates up.
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