Here is a tale of misalignment. The setting is Sweden…thirty seven years ago…and my first job. In January 1969 Swedish clogs were standard issue on Stockholm building sites. By six in the morning Hallonbergen was bitterly cold and it took an hour for the industrial heaters to get the site warm. My job was to have everything ready by seven when the proper workers arrived. Then breakfast.
Clogs keep feet surprisingly warm but nonetheless I was overjoyed to be sent to Hammakullen for a couple of weeks. Gothenburg winter days vary between grey & wet and black & wet but the Gulf Stream ensures that the climate of Sweden's western capital feels positively tropical compared to its ice-bound Baltic rival in the east.
We were putting the final touches to an estate of factory-built apartments. The factory-built units with their triple-glazing had been supplied on a design & build contract from the company's Växjo factory in Småland several months before. We were tidying up by furnishing the gardens and playgrounds on the roof of an underground car-park. I was given the job of marking out where the lamp posts were to go.
Off I went with the architect's drawings under my arm...chalk, ruler and measuring tape at the ready. Later that day the proper workers came along with their Clipper concrete saws and Hilden hammer drills and busied themselves interpreting with my runic messages.
By clocking off time the next day the six plinths were ready for their lamp posts. We signed off on the job two weeks later. The platschef took his Alsatian dog and his work gang to another site and another employer and I never saw him again. As it turned out this was just as well. I went back to Stockholm to freeze until the first of May and gave the matter no more thought...until later that year when my boss came to my wedding and was persuaded to give an impromptu speech. To the amusement of the assembled company he chose to tell the tale of the Hammarkullen lamp posts. His story went like this.
The lamp posts arrived late and were erected an hour before final site inspection. Skanz the platschef was there; my boss drove from Stockholm to be there; his boss had come from Småland to be there; and assorted local dignitaries from Gothenburg’s planning and housing royalty were there. To my eternal gratitude nobody thought of asking me to be there. As fate would have it the worthy gentleman chose to assemble themselves for the signing off ceremony at the end of the row of six lamp posts.
With pen poised and our firm's final contract instalment of millions of kronor just seconds away, one of the dignitaries chanced to look up, frowned, deftly placed his hand between pen and paper, and pointed in the direction of lamp post number four. It was a half a metre out of line. As I have pointed out on numerous occasions it wasn't all bad. Lamp posts number one, two, three, five and six were in perfect alignment. Five out of six. But four was in the wrong place and this undoubtedly ruined the effect.
Swedes tell a good story and my boss was not one to miss the chance. But the story rings true. Skanz, we were told, went ballistic at this point in the proceedings and swore to do some rather nasty things to various parts of my anatomy. The planning dignitaries spent several minutes calming him down. They were so pleased at their success they signed off anyway on a promise from Scanz to sort it. It was unclear whether Scanz agreed to sort me or the misaligned lamp post.
Our real honeymoon was to be in Mamaia on the Romanian Black Sea Coast after the English wedding guests had gone home several days after the wedding. The wedding night was to be spent at Saltsjöbaden's Grand Hotel...the setting for a famous agreement between the Swedish Social Democratic Government and the Labour Unions. Unfortunately it was less than an hour's drive to Saltsjöbaden so there ws no early retirement. I spent the wedding evening explaining myself endlessly to each guest...one at a time.
My excuse got lamer and lamer with each telling. I couldn't get away for my mini-honeymoon soon enough...for one or two reasons. Here is the case for the defence for the very last time. I should have stretched a length of string like brickies do. Instead I diligently marked off the distance of each lamp post on the architect's plan view, scaled it up and laid it out in situ with my tape. Number Four must have been six millimetres more than the other five. Surprising that I didn't notice. Sod's Law no doubt...the canteen truck arriving with coffee and sandwiches between setting out three and four.
I chanced across my old boss Roger Everett at Västerås airport last year and was invited to his seventieth birthday. He told me the 'remedial work' was easy to spot from inside the garage. I don't think I'll bother to find out.
