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Sounds about right. So many laughs though and the characters. I remember one epic complaint over the box to a guy we worked with called dirty Mickey, ordering him back to an account near old street that was threatening to close unless he came back to repair the pebble dashing he’d given their bog. Another fella called Andy Attack who claimed to have been declared insane. All the racing…jeez. I crashed so many times, more often than not just showing off.
Jung
Kind of. There were so many crashes that about once a week you could expect to do a pick up at the scene of another rider's accident. Maybe his bike would be there and you'd raid his topbox. Maybe there'd just be some broken glass or a puddle of radiator fluid and you'd pick up from someone who was looking after the package.
And once a day, I kid you not, you'd see the aftermath of some random biker's crash. A commuter or a scooter rider, strapped on to a stretcher with one of those neck stabilising straps. Everyone believed that 3 couriers per week were dying in London. Which sounds impossible, but there were so many of us. This was before email.
When you were waiting at the lights at a big junction there might be 6 or 8 other couriers alongside. At lunchtime the pedestrians would come out in force in the West End and fail to get out of the road before the light went green. So some of us would go down the left and some down the right, trapping the pedestrians in the middle of the road. The best place for that was outside John Lewis.