My Old Man’s A Busman

Sometime in the early-70s Dad stopped driving a bus and started to drive a laundry van. This job meant collecting and delivering peoples laundry as some people still didn’t have washing machines in their house back then and chose to have it washed/laundered in this way to save going to the launderette and some were just well off enough to send it out. Each day of the week had a specific delivery route and each parcel of washing had a label on it. These labels were coloured to identify the day of the week e.g. green for Monday, blue for Tuesday etc. and had printed numbers on to identify the owner and address. There were sometimes spare reels of them lying around. One day Dad arrived home with two rolls of tickets, one for me and my sister which, looking back, was met with an over enthusiastic degree of excitement. For reasons, now lost in the mist of time, the allocation of these tickets was that the green labels, which had ‘A’ numbers printed on them; A1, A2 etc. went to my sister and the red labels, with ‘B’ numbers to me. These were to be used for cataloguing our music collections and so then, as is now, that Back Home single is number B1 in my vinyl collection and has the corresponding red ticket stuck on the top left hand corner of the record sleeve. Having been stuck in the loft and away in cupboards for years, a recent move meant the unveiling of my prized collection of vinyl to my girlfriend, however in what I had anticipated as being a magical moment of reverence and nostalgia as we thumbed through my singles collection, turned into one of almost derisory hysteria. She almost physically recoiled when she saw the tattered and battered yellowing file dividers in the box that denoted where each alphabetical section of artists or group started. Having followed Dad’s own system, groups beginning with ‘The’ were filed under their main name e.g. The Rubettes under R and singers being filed by surname, always, so Elvis Presley would be filed under ‘P’. When she plunged her hand into the box (not starting at A and systematically working through the strict alphabetical system as any normal bloke would do!) the first single she pulled out was by The Glitterband (she had obviously delved into G) and she quickly dropped it back into the box…with her eyes raised to the heavens and a disapproving ‘tut’. Not usually known for profanity (where not absolutely required), the next one to be pulled out however was my virgin purchase. My lovingly preserved (an almost pristine B-side), nestled in its original blue sleeve, Pye record ref 7N17920, Back Home by the England 1970 World Cup Squad. This was met with an, ‘Oh for god’s sake!’ and then, as it too was about to be plunged, vinyl crackingly back into the box, her eye caught the flash of red in the corner, carrying a now slightly faded B1 and she turned and calmly, but menacingly enquired, slowly, ‘What…the f***…is that?' Unfortunately, despite being of a similar age, her record collection is full of much cooler artists such as T-Rex (her first),The Clash and Siouxsie & The Banshees, leaving my collection, forever in her eyes, as being ‘crap’ (conveniently ignoring the fact that her collection includes David Cassidy). We’re still together, though she is slightly concerned where these tendencies may manifest themselves in the future. I have had to swear an oath not to encourage either my or her offspring to label and catalogue...anything. I tried to lighten the mood by telling her I knew that I was mildly CDO. When she responded, slightly condescendingly, by telling me that it was actually OCD, I replied that I knew that, but that I liked to keep things in alphabetical order. I think my comic delivery must have been slightly off that day given the reaction I got. Since then I’ve realised that it’s just one of those differences between the sexes due to the amount of arguments I’ve been told about from friends and colleagues. Some about prized collections of European beer bottles, to display or not to display? Or rows over men’s insistence on CDs being sorted into order, even whether the CD collection should even be on display or not. Really? A great example of this recently was when a friend, who having purchased new tech equipment for his home, including top of the range server and TV interface, decided to upload all of the family’s DVDs onto the system, which of course being male meant cataloguing them and, to my delight, asking me for help. Having spent days loading them all up, the day, well evening, finally arrived when they would be categorised. It took a couple of beers to decide how we should approach it, create a file first and start adding the films to it, or create all of the files just in case we changed our minds. Having settled on the latter, we then had to decide what the files would be called? Would we go genre or alphabetical by title? We’d already dismissed listing by director as going a bit too far, we’d face ridicule from his wife and accusations of being ‘sad gits’, so would we need sub files or sub categories? Daft question. As the evening went on, so did the debates. Should Blue Brothers be categorised as B, Comedy, Musical or Musical Comedy? Is Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Kids or Comedy and regardless, should it be under F for Ferris or B for Bueller? Was Watch with Mother, Kids or Nostalgia? La Dolce Vita, Black & White, 60s, Foreign Language or sub-titled? And Kill Bill, Action, Foreign Language or Foreign Language as a subset of Action? When it was time to go, I think we’d actually thought of about 20 file titles and numerous scribbled lists, but not actually got around to actually putting any films into files. We were pleased with our efforts though, which had taken a little over four hours. Before leaving I went to say goodbye to the wife, the kids were long to bed, telling her about our progress. “I wondered what you two were doing in there. You shouldn’t have wasted your time. I’ve already done it”. “What? What do you mean you’ve done it?” “I’ve filed all of the films, I did it this afternoon and thought you’d see”. “You can’t have done, there’s hundreds. How many did you do?” “All of them”. “You can’t have done all of them. It would have taken you hours”. “It didn’t, it took about an hour”. “How did you do that?” “It was easy, I did what you said to do. Set the files up and dragged the films into them”. “Yes, but what files did you set up?” We almost shouted in unison. “The obvious ones. Yours, mine and the kids”.