This week I’ve been experiencing that blank page syndrome; you know what I mean, you stare at the paper, or the empty laptop screen and nothing comes to mind, and the paper stays like that, blank. So in an effort to boost my creative powers I took a look back at some of my old blog posts.

I see that I started this blog page back in 2014 and my first post went out on the 23^rd of May. It wasn’t anything exciting, in fact it was pretty much a sort of advertisement for my book Floating in Space which had just been published on Amazon to an overwhelming gush of cyberspatial silence.

Floating in Space was my first book and I put it together many years ago. At the time, I was writing lots of science fiction and espionage stories based on my love of television shows reflecting both those genres. I had begun to realise though that for fiction to be worthwhile it has to have a basis in real experience. All I knew about sci-fi and espionage was what I had read about or seen on TV so I started to write about myself. I wrote about the insurance company where I had worked and also the bus company where I worked later after a short trip to Europe that was supposed to last for a year but ended up covering about four weeks.

After I had compiled a few essays, I thought I could put them all together into a fictional story about a young man who packs in his job as an insurance clerk, goes to Europe and returns home penniless so gets himself a job as a bus conductor. Throw in some real life experiences and a healthy dose of fiction and the result was a short novel. I have to say that I love Floating in Space. Reading it today is like taking a trip back to my younger days and it brings back all sorts of memories and I do hope that I’ve managed to communicate that time in my life in the mobile phone free and non digital late 70s to my readers.

There have been plenty of times when I’ve struggled to produce an essay or a post and I started one off a few years ago which began, pretty much like this one, in a sort of rambling fashion hoping that something would come to me. I ended up writing about some training which I had undertaken at the time. Here’s an excerpt:

I’ve been on a training course this week, a pretty interesting one but unfortunately not one I can talk about much as it relates to the data protection act and the computer misuse act and all sorts of legal stuff. Still, the training reminded me of a fairly funny training story that happened nearly ten years ago. It was when I had just started at the Highways Agency and in fact I was one of the first batch of operators to be recruited for the North West, a fact that I regularly bore my colleagues with.

The HA sent us to some establishment in Salford for an induction course and I have to say, as much as I like my job, that course was pretty dull! It was fun meeting some new people and doing some interesting team building exercises but after a while, they started to get a little boring and we were all thinking when will we be able to start learning the nuts and bolts of our jobs?

One of the exercises, and to this day I don’t know the point of it, was for us to split into twos and one member of the duo went into another room where they thought of a holiday story to tell, and the other was asked to completely ignore their partner when they returned and began to relate their story. In this instance my colleague was the storyteller and I was the ignorer! So she came back in and began her story. I polished my nails, yawned in her face, checked my watch, hummed a little tune to myself and so on. After a while some inner instinct made me turn to take a quick look at her, and it was lucky I did so because later on I reckoned I had been only a split second away from taking a hefty punch to the nose, however I was able to calm her down and explain it was all part of the exercise!

Just reading that brought lots of training memories back. We did lots of role playing at Highways in fact I had to do one during the interview for the job,. In that one I had to deal with a woman on the phone who supposedly was being chased by someone while on the motorway. I’m guessing the idea was to see if I could stay calm during stressful situations. Anyway, I managed to calm the lady down, told her the police were on the way after working out her exact location by careful questioning. I got the job so I must have done reasonably well.

Towards the end of the induction course, boredom had truly set in. I remember one hot afternoon in this stuffy office cum training room and the lecturer going on and on about the chain of command and how issues had to be escalated to one’s line manager and one’s line manager would escalate things further if need be. I feel rather embarrassed to admit this now but I nodded serenely off into a private world of slumber. Later, and whether it was minutes or even hours later I really don’t know but I was jolted sharply back to reality by the voice of our instructor calling my name. A sea of blank faces were looking at me so I tried to think back: What was the last thing we were talking about? Oh yes, I remember now:

“I’d escalate that to my team manager.”

“Escalate what to your team manager?”

“Well, er. . .”

I glanced over to my left, perhaps hoping for some help, but one of my new colleagues, actually the lady from the storytelling incident earlier, was looking at me in disgust. Over to my right two other colleagues were in a strange sort of state. One had gone almost purple in the face as he tried to hold in a tumult of suppressed laughter and another was covering his face and making strange noises as his shoulders pumped up and down hysterically.

Finally, the lecturer, looking at me with contempt, observed that it might be better for me if I paid attention more and moved on.

Not the finest training course but not my finest hour either.

My absolute favourite training time was something I wrote about a few weeks back, bus driver training.

In those days circa 1979, we trained in old back loader manual gearbox buses sat in a small cab at the front and steering with a huge steering wheel and having to double the clutch to change from first to second gear as those old gearboxes weren’t fully synchromeshed.

The moment I climbed up into the cab I felt at home and I loved my time in the driving school. Every morning we used to check the bus over and top up the oil and water if required. Then our trainer would choose somewhere in the vast Greater Manchester operating area for breakfast. We might have a drive to perhaps Oldham garage or bus station. I’d start off and our trainer Bill sat behind me in the first seat. The window to the cab had been removed and Bill would give directions and off we would go. His main instruction particularly on narrower roads was to ‘ride the white line’ because our big bus needed the room, car drivers in smaller vehicles didn’t.

Bill knew all the canteen staff in all the canteens in Manchester. Sometimes we might just have tea and toast because on the next run Bill might designate Stockport as our next destination as the new canteen there always served up something good for lunch. To be honest though, I always preferred a breakfast. Back in those days the GM Buses canteens served a breakfast special which was egg, sausage, bacon, a slice of toast and a choice of either beans or tomatoes, all for a pound. My own breakfast favourite though was two eggs on two toast with beans and a sausage which is still a favourite today.

Well, I think that’s it for today’s blog post. I’m pretty pleased with myself. I started out without the faintest idea what to write and managed to write 1400+ words and I know I pinched a few from a couple of old posts but either way, I managed to break the curse of the blank page!

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