Boy have I had a day of it today.

I set off for work an hour early this morning because I had to go to see a client who is based an hour or so the far side of my office from here. I wasn’t sure how long it would take and I couldn’t guarantee how long the getting there would take so I gave myself plenty of time. I was on the M25 (the UK’s most notorious road) when my mobile phone started to ring. We have a law here that you can’t use mobiles while driving so I never have my phone in easy reach just in case I’m tempted to have a peek to see who it might be. This morning was no exception, my phone was in my handbag on the back seat.

For some reason it wouldn’t stop ringing, it would stop for a few moments then start again. Our motorways are designed so you can’t pull over easily you have to go to a service area to stop and use the phone. On today’s journey there is only one of these and so I pulled into it where I found out that the meeting I was travelling to had been cancelled. Pah, pah and pah again.

I turned around to go back to the office and the traffic on the motorway was completely stationary so I took a quick peek at my map and found an alternative route. I don’t know that part of the world well so I just followed the directions and my nose until I got back to the office. All-in-all it had taken me four hours to do a hundred mile journey and I was spitting fury by the time I got back. DM was moaning yesterday about doing two hundred miles in four hours!

While I was on my journey though a few crumbs of comfort were to be found. I passed Biggin Hill one of the many places I spent time as a child. When my Dad first went to Bahrain my Mum, Jan and I lived with my Auntie Peg, Neil, Keith and Uncle Stuart in Biggin Hill – it was one of the fourteen places I went to school. I don’t remember much about living there except for one night when my Auntie was throwing a party and my Mum, in a fit of misery since my Dad was away, sat on the stairs crying her eyes out while a party went on all around her. Poor Mum. We went to join my Dad a few months later and lived in Bahrain as a family for two years.

I also passed through a place called Beddington, the home of the Paynes factory where Poppets and Just Brazils were made. In my former life as a Nielsen person, I used to look after Paynes and loved working with them. One one occasion, they gave me a factory tour and I watched them making chocolate, panning the Poppets in big copper pans where they tumbled the centres around and sprayed chocolate over them – yum! I also watched them make Just Brazils, using a different technique called enrobing – they put the nuts on a conveyor belt and poured molten chocolate over them. When the enrobing process was done, they were packed into boxes that a lady sat and polished with a clean duster to remove fingerprints before they were wrapped in cellophane. It was like going to Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory.

We watched them pouring buckets of cocoa butter into the chocolate making machines and my colleague said ‘it’s not a precise recipe then’ the chap working the machine said ‘yes it is, it’s exactly eleven buckets!’ It was a truly amazing experience.

The company also made coffee and tea for supermarkets. The MD and Chairman used to attend my meetings and the prduct manager for one of the brands was an elderly gent called ‘Mr Payne’ – yep – one of the original family. How about that?

The sad thing was that the factory is now derelict and all my happy memories are locked up in there, with boarding all over the windows and graffiti on the walls. When I got back, I discovered the brands were sold on shortly after I moved to my current company and the factory had presumably been empty ever since. It was very sad.

So my precious time was wasted and in its place I got a trip down memory lane and a sad reminder that nothing lasts forever. This egg timer that symbolises my lost time is a cheap and nasty one out of a game so it’s all scratched and damaged from use!