4 February 2018

Social media is a wonderful thing.  I joined a FB closed group re-living via photos and anecdotes scenes from my home town.  At 16 I got a job with W & T Avery’s, a weighing machine foundry in Smethwick. I reminisced  about my time there as a junior, where every morning I had to fetch from the works canteen everyone’s order of hot ‘breakfases’ as they called them. Horrible hot, greasy, brown paper bags and woe betide me if I got anyone’s order wrong. We all had to clock in at a punch machine and at 4.55 pm all would line up to clock out, then wait for the siren. Complete bedlam as hordes would then surge out homewards onto the cobbled inner foundry road, risking life and limb from all those men on bikes, khaki haversacks on their backs, wheels squeaking on the greasy cobbles. Who’d have thought that today, 50+ years later, someone would publish a photo of a colleague from those days? Yes, FB can dig out a past murky memory and remind you it all really happened. Great for people of a certain age, even aiding against rising dementia!

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