Posts Tagged ‘A17’
The girl who had been to Newark
It was a road trip. In fact this was a spectacular road trip. From my home near Ipswich in Suffolk, I had volunteered to address a breakfast meeting in Swaffham in Norfolk – a distance of some 71 miles before 8.00 a.m. From there I drove to Sheffield for a team meeting with a distributor who had been inactive for a while because of family difficulties but who was now keen to get started again. Then it was on to Birmingham for the Opportunity Meeting – and then home. A round-trip of 426 miles and it involved the A17.
The A17 made it seem longer. I don’t know if you know this dead straight and depressing stretch of tarmac. It starts in Kings Lynn and tramps endlessly across the fens through places with names like Fosdyke and Swineshead and Stragglethorpe until it fetches up at Newark in Nottinghamshire. In fact that’s only 63 miles. It just seems like forever. The landscape is nothing but vast fields and sky, there don’t seem to be any bends and since it is single-carriageway, there is nothing to do but pootle along at 50 miles and hour looking at the back of a lorry.
In fact the only reason for mentioning the A17 at all is so I can introduce you to the girl in the filling station. I can’t even tell you her name because – to my shame – I didn’t ask. I was that fed up and in a hurry that I just pushed a card at her and hit the road again… not at all your successful network marketer.
But the conversation was a gem – particularly because I didn’t even start it.
She said: “Going anywhere nice?”
- Sheffield. Is Sheffield nice?
“I don’t know. I’ve never been. I’ve been to Newark and Leicester and Switzerland and Notts.”
Switzerland? How did Switzerland get in there? Was it down a B road south of East Heckington?
But she pulled me out of my gloom – especially when she smiled.
“You’re cheerful,” I said.
And then, like an actor who has been given his cue, I blurted out: “I’m always looking for cheerful people. They can make some really good money. Are you in the market for extra money?”
And that was how I came to give her the card. The whole exchange had taken no more than a minute before I headed off to Kirby La Thorpe and Coddington.
The last I saw of her, she was looking at the card as if it was a missing fragment from the Lost Scrolls.
“Cool,” was what she said.