Introducing Myself

I guess that the photos could tell quite a story.  I'm only guessing, but is the first one Nepal and, maybe, the second one the sumit of Ben Nevis?

Many years ago I worked with one of your predecessors. What a character! We had been cutting a section out of a large pipeline using an air-motor driven cutting machine. It was a long, steep uphill track back to the road from where we were and the driver wasn’t confident that the Sherpa van would pull the compressor back up to the road without doing itself an injury.

I went to our local forestry depot a couple of miles away and enlisted the help of one of the guys there ( never met him before! ) and his four wheel drive Zetor tractor. He duly follows me back to the worksite where everyone is packing the kit away in the van. “That the compressor?” he asks. It was a great big numb Ingersol affair that would support two jack hammers at the same time. I said to him “Hang on a second and I’ll get the lads to hitch it up for you”. “Nah, it’s OK” he replied and grabs the back of the tractor with one hand and the towing ring on the compressor with the other. We all stood open mouthed as he calmly pulls the two together, and drops the towpin in, gets in the cab and departs with a “I’ll leave it by the roadside for you?”.

The general consensus was that “you wouldn’t want to fall out with him, would you?”

A couple of days later I was at the forestry depot again and said to his boss “Who the bloody hell was the guy you sent to tow the compressor the other day?” He explained that he’d not long retired from a job based in Hereford! I don’t ever remember meeting a quieter more unassuming guy. Come to think of it, you don’t need to make much noise when you can act like he did!