I Hate Christmas!

Not, you understand the mistletoe and wine, the blockbuster films, mince pies, turkey and stuffing, nor do I hate the carols, candles, cards, presents, tree or the Christmas pudd.  To me there is nothing better than watching the wide eyed excitement of a child, or I my case now, a grandchild, catching the first sight of a pile of Christmas presents, and realising that “Santa has been!!”

No, I love that part of Christmas, what I hate is that, as a truck driver, for us Christmas starts about the middle of June! It starts as a trickle, the odd container from the docks, full of fairy lights, false trees, tinsel and other cheap plastic decorations, made in one of those fine Christian countries such as China, Vietnam, Cambodia or Malaysia. Follow this with the first tins of roses, Quality Street and various biscuit assortments as the momentum slowly builds up. After august bank holiday, the serious stuff really starts. A typical day in September or October goes something like this:-

Arrive at the RDC 15 minutes early, get told to come back in half an hour as goods in is full. Return 30 minutes later to be told by a different security guard that you are late. Join the queue for goods in, you are currently 10^th in line. Walk to the goods in office; be ignored for 10 minutes while a young Polish girl is chatted up by a fat, balding warehouse supervisor. Hand in paperwork and return to your cab, noticing that of the 6 goods in curtainsider bays, 4 are full of empty roll cages, damaged goods, broken equipment and various dustbins and skips. Of the other 2, only on is being used for tipping. Out of the other one, a forklift driver spends all day driving around with the same stack of blue pallets looking busy. Eventually, after 3 hours of waiting and slowly creeping forward, you get on a bay; sods law says it’s got to be tea break. You finally get tipped, and are told to park up and wait for your paperwork. In the goods in office, you get a sugarless coffee from the machine, pick up a 3 day old copy of the Sun and find the only plastic seat available is between on one side, the fat slob with chin resting on his chest, eyes closed, saliva dribbling down his chin and occasionally a loud snore emanating from his mouth, and on the other side, the tramper who has been away from home all week, and has failed to find a shower or anywhere to wash. After what appears to be an eternity, but is in fact only 2 more hours, you finally get out of the RDC, safe in the knowledge that it will all be repeated tomorrow.

Now come October and November it’s the booze runs. Not trips to Calais in a transit to top up with beer, but delivering 20 odd pallets of beer, wines and spirits into the same RDC’s which by now are bursting at the seams. Many will have “outside storage” some Farmers barn on a totally unsuitable site for artics, and after queuing for hours at the main depot, you will be sent down there with some hand drawn map to queue up once again.

As we get into December, we start to tug around trailers full of frozen turkeys, sprouts and black forest gateaux, vast quantities of chocolates, nuts, crisps and snacks of all types. Everywhere you go now, there is a long queue. You can’t even get away from it when your off duty, as by now every other commercial is for Christmas items, with those annoyingly mundane songs that you can’t get out of your head, On the 1^st of December it really starts to get to you when the BBC start playing all the old Christmas favourite tunes on the radio. Slade, wizard, john Lennon, and the pogues. By the second week of December, you are just about ready to tear the radio out of the truck and deposit it in lane 3 of the motorway if you hear “oh I wish it could be Christmas everyday” one more time. On your rest day, you take the wife shopping to find millions of £’s of Christmas goods blocking the aisles, while a horde fat, lard arsed women fight each other for the last box of after eights.  Mind you, you can’t find any sugar, or bread, or eggs, but who needs them when you can buy a musical illuminated Santa clause that drops his trousers to the tune of jingle bells!

Now we get to the final week, everything is now time critical, you MUST get there on time, otherwise the whole load of fresh sprouts, gammon hams, fresh cream and joints of pork and beef, will be refused because you are 20 minutes late.

At one time you could look forward to at least 3 days, and often 4 days off in order to recover, these were times when milk lasted for a day or 2, same for bread etc., and yet we managed not to starve when the shops were closed, now, with even the most perishable of goods having a weeks’ shelf life, can anyone tell me why shops need to open on boxing day?

After your one day off, your back to restocking the supermarkets with booze, or the non-food shops with sales items, the week between Christmas and new year used to be a quiet time for us, a time to catch our breaths, but not anymore, we have to cram the stores full, I’m surprised they don’t issue us with giant shoe horns so that we can squeeze a little bit more into the warehouses. If you’re lucky you might just have enough of a break at New Year to have one drink, but chances are you will be working New Year’s day restocking the shops with, yes you’ve guessed it, EASTER EGGS!