Ripple Effect

"For each life stolen, more than a dozen people need immediate and ongoing support...Homicide's tentacles stretch into every area of its victims' lives and beyond into the wider community."
News.com.au, accessed 2nd July, 2017

My father is a great believer in patronising local businesses.  This means that when you want a service it should still be there - at least that was his theory.  For many years, in fact through most of my childhood, my dad cycled to work - I once calculated the sum for how many times he cycled past (almost 50,000) Sculcoate's Lane corner - the street the factory he worked in was situated.  There in the morning, and back home for dinner then a return trip, followed by the hard cycle back home again after the grind of the day.  He rode a yellow racing bike with a fixed wheel: once I tried to master this in the back alley of our house and still have the scars.  Another time, he cycled all the way to work with our cat in his saddle bag.  Now, at 81, he proves the medics right: exercise helps - he has smoked and drunk, but he is still as fit as a fiddle.

When I was 14, dad learned to drive.  His first car was a red Cortina Estate, the car of a family man.  It was a beast of a car and could accommodate all four of his children and enough luggage to take us on holiday to Scarborough.  (Facts: my brother T was sick and my mother - annoyingly - requisitioned my Hallmark paper bag with Snoopy on to catch it, and, after throwing it from the car window,  the bag split so T's spew splattered across the whole of the back window the rest of the journey and - to add insult to injury - my sister KM (aged 15 and a half), desperate to go to the toilet, lost control of her bladder whilst dad was looking for somewhere straight-forward to park.  My mother bought her a pair of hideous trousers from Boyes' in Scarborough to replace the wet ones that had a military style stripe down each leg which KM hated but had to wear regularly for the next two years as a badge of her disgrace.)

The red Cortina was already an old car so to counter this my dad found a good reasonable garage that would service and fix it without fleecing him.  He immediately liked Belcher's - they were friendly, reliable and local.  Cliff Belcher was a good and decent man.  From that point on, my dad took all his cars there: his ex-salesman's Talbot ("A bloody big mistake" was his verdict), his various Rovers, and his Astra ("Seats are thin!") until such times as he no longer could.

The rest is here