Now I’ve been retired for over ten years, I sometimes sit watching the world go by, pondering the decisions of my younger life. There were a couple of young ladies who I might’ve ended up married to. But, if I hadn’t met and married the current Mrs Black, I wouldn’t have met her uncle Mitch.

I got my class 1 licence working for National Carriers, a subsidiary of British Rail. They had their own driving school with the same manoeuvring yard you would find at the official test centre, and they taught some of their drivers to operate their semi-truck and trailer outfits. I got my class 1, but the company kept me on my three-ton box van delivering parcels. The only time I drove anything that pulled a trailer was when I worked a Sunday shift loading vans for the Monday morning. If you went in on a Monday and your truck wasn’t loaded, you had to get a clerk who would come with his chair and sit on the platform next to the pile of parcels at the rear of your truck. The driver picked up a box and read out the name and address for the clerk to write on his sheet. If you knew your route well, you could arrange the parcels in the order you were delivering them as you loaded them.

No computer-generated delivery sheets back then - everything was handwritten and required the customer's signature on delivery. Today it’s a photograph of you holding the parcel taken on the driver’s phone. 55 deliveries were normal for a Monday-to-Friday week. If you worked on Sunday, you did 75 deliveries and got double time. Double time- whatever happened to that? After I’d been there for the mandatory period (you had to stay or pay back the cost of your training), I left to drive full-size, full-weight trucks.

Archibald Brechin was totally involved in whisky haulage, empty and full barrels in a sealed box van, or whisky in tankers going to bottling plants. I found out later that they had a high driver turnover. They would take on just about any driver when they were busy, then pay them off when things got quiet, usually around Christmas. Merry Christmas, you’re sacked.

I’d been there about a year when I met Mitch, and who knows, if I hadn’t met Mitch, I might have spent my life pulling tankers, or bulk grain trailers. Unlike today, back then you didn’t need a special addition to your licence to pull a tanker full of whisky. Now you need to sit through a hazardous goods course. Whiskey, who would have thought it was dangerous? After getting some experience on the tankers, I might’ve got a job pulling gas tankers; the money on the gas tankers was way above what ordinary drivers were getting. But of course, all good things must come to an end, as eventually the gas companies made all their drivers redundant and subcontracted the transport out to the highest bidder.

I spoke to a driver who had worked for a gas company; in addition to redundancy money, there was an offer of a job. The hourly rate was about half of what he was used to, and the depot he would be working from was about an hour’s drive away from his house.

Mitch was a real old-school trucker, a big man from the north of Scotland. In the lowlands we call highland men teuchters, it’s pronounced choochters. Although we don’t call them that to their face. I was just a rookie driver when we met; I had never pulled a flatbed trailer or put a tarp on a load and tied it down. But, like all old-school drivers, Mitch and the other two drivers in the

company, who were also pals of his, taught me all I needed to know. Mitch also had a book he’d compiled over the years; it was a list of the best places to get a return load home from just about anywhere in the country. And that was the start of my life as a truck driver, where every day’s a school day.