Perhaps, I should have mentioned it sooner - but, to understand what my part-time job involves, it might make sense to offer a brief outline of the way in which my employers operate.

Essentially, they 'deliver' vehicles for specific sectors of the commercial vehicle market in the UK and Europe and, although a proportion of their business involves mobile cranes and fire appliances, the majority of their work is for the Passenger Carrying Vehicles (PCV) industry.

The main function of companies like ours is to deliver new vehicles to bus operators and (apart from taking them back to the makers for repair-work) we are not needed again until they are replaced. Accordingly, many of the buses and coaches we move are either brand new or very old.

In these circumstances, the vehicles are often not licensed or taxed and 'trade plates' are required in order to drive them. These are temporary registration plates issued by the Department of the Environment to registered operators.

Often drivers using trade plates (red letters and numbers on a white background) can be seen at the side of the road thumbing lifts as they try to make their way from one job to the next.

Fortunately, the company I work for usually provide a hire-car for drivers to get home from the point of delivery. This might seem extravagant; but, this enables the drivers to be diverted (often at short notice) if another job comes in or around where they might be at the time.

Because of this 'knock-on' effect, there may be occasions when a driver might be away from home for a few days and, in these circumstances, the company are generous enough to pay for the drivers' accommodation.

Although there is quite a high turnover of staff within the company, generally there are about a dozen drivers 'on the books' - two or three in Scotland and similar numbers in the north of England, the midlands and the south. They are made up of a mixture of full and part-time drivers employed by the company and some who work on a self-employed basis.

For my own part, officially retired, I have an arrangement where I let the company know when I'm NOT available and, for the rest of the time, I'm 'on-call' - as it were.

When I'm needed, the office telephone me to make sure I'm still available and send an e-mail containing details of the job (contact names, addresses, post codes, telephone numbers and type of vehicle etc.....). Then, if there's time, I find maps on the interenet and print a copy before leaving home.

One of our major customers is based quite close to where I live in the south of England. Their engines and chassis are assembled down here and transported north to factories in central Scotland and east Yorkshire to have the coachwork added.

Quite often when a driver collects a new vehicle from the factory in Scotland, for example, another driver will head north in a hire-car and they meet at a convenient point. After exchanging vehicles, each driver heads back in the direction from which they came and goes home for the night.

I'm quite often involved in the aformentioned change-overs. However, being quite close to the capitol, I am often involved in moving buses in and out of London Transport garages and, on these occasions, I usually use public transport - because hiring a car would be uneconomical.

April, 2008, was an interesting month.

In addition to 'normal' work - which involved delivering buses to (or from) Knutsford, New Cross, Purfleet, Blyth, Bristol, Wakefield, Leyland, Guildford, Folkestone, Henley-in-Arden, Ampthill, Hounslow, Alton, Sheffield and Southampton - I enjoyed what might be described as a busman's holiday by driving my elder son (a singer/songwriter) to concerts in Bolton, Leicester, Cambridge and Brighton. Later, I joined him at Dublin - where he was recording his first 'live' album.

I've never 'done' one of these before and, since I understand a blog is a diary (of sorts) and this web-site is about my part-time job, I might as well use this feature to record what, where, when, from whom and to whom I deliver a vehicle. When I remember to take them, I will continue to post photographs in the appropriate page (listed at the top of the page).