Lee-on-the-Solent

Driver Jatt

Right. Lee-on-the-Solent. To start off with, we got out late. 10 am! A proper civilised hour for some, a minor disaster for a courier.

In our defence, the collection was only booked for 9:30 am, which was annoying because the consignment had been ready since the night before. The only hold up was staff levels. They were short. One person doing the job of three, which meant everyone in the queue, including me, was just waiting. It happens.

But that’s the domino effect in logistics. A warehouse or office is short staffed in the morning. That one person is run off their feet. It means the driver, that’s me, is stuck waiting. That half hour wait at the start pushes the whole run back. That can mean hitting traffic you’d have missed, or arriving at a delivery point just after they’ve closed for lunch. Or worse, just after they’ve shut for the day. Then the customer at the other end is waiting. And when their delivery doesn’t arrive on time, they don’t think “warehouse staffing issue”. They might just think the driver, or the company, is lazy. That we couldn’t be bothered. It’s a chain, and that first link being weak bends everything out of shape. It’s not laziness. It’s often just one person having a terrible morning somewhere down the line.

To make it all more interesting, I was very achey painy from an over enthusiastic session at the gym the night before. Remember, health matters. Or in my case, it currently mattered with every gear change. A solid reminder.

I finally hit the road, with a quick stop in Nottingham to grab another job, before heading properly down south to a lovely place called Lee-on-the-Solent. The delivery itself was straightforward. The reward was the fish and chips. They were amazing. Proper, sit on the wall and stare at the water amazing. Worth the ache.

Then, because I’d been sat on my backside driving all day and my muscles were seizing up, I went for my 10k walk. Felt like a good idea at the time. Irony was, it was perfect walking weather. Little wind, temperature a steady 10-14c. Couldn’t have asked for better. The Solent was like a pond, just gleaming.

Afterwards, I drove back north via the road passing Fort Nelson. The view from up there was amazing. Something my trusty iPhone 8 struggled to capture properly, but I tried. The entire Portsmouth harbour and port area was laid out below. So many lights, so much going on even in the dark. Ships, cranes, the lot. A proper working view.

Turns out the fort is full of massive guns, not just a nice viewpoint. There’s all sorts of old artillery there. They’ve got a monster 36-inch mortar from the Crimean War right by the entrance. Weighs 42 tons. It was designed to fire a one-ton shell, but it was finished too late and never fired in anger. /A proper “folly” they call it.

The really mind-bending one they’ve got is part of something called the “Iraqi Supergun” or Project Babylon. They’ve got these huge steel barrel sections on display that you can literally look through. It was dreamed up in the 1980s by this bloke called Gerald Bull. The idea was to build a gun so massive we’re talking a barrel over 150 metres long that it could fire satellites into orbit from a hillside. Can you imagine? It was going to be built for Saddam Hussein. The whole thing got shut down, the inventor was assassinated, and parts of it were seized. Now sections of this never finished space gun are just sitting in a Victorian fort in Hampshire. Talk about a conversation piece. A gun meant for space, ended up as a museum exhibit.

I’m looking forward to tomorrow. No solid plans yet. Ideally, I’d like to end up in deep Wales. Only because I love the place. The roads, the quiet, the way a job there feels more like a trip. We’ll see what the phone brings in the morning. Maybe another late start. Maybe a perfect early run. That’s the job.

So, do you need a courier? Ideally one that’s heading to Wales?

Click on www.frigate-express.co.uk and use the calculator to quote you.

If you have any questions???? Get in touch.