At the time I was second deputy spring tester for the Sleepytime Mattress Company and as jobs go it was how can I put it, it was a job. If there is one thing I can really say is that there was not much I did not know about springs, in fact there is not much to know about springs, they are curly things that go boiiiiiingg when you press them down and let go.

The thing is when you've tested one spring you've tested them all and it was my job to test them all. Some people would say this was a really boring job but I speak from experience and yes it is a boring job.

However two deputy spring testers left alone in a large laboratory with an unlimited supply of springs can do many things to liven life up a bit. Springs tied to the shoes means you can bounce all round the lab all day. The coat of many springs, no matter which way you fall you bounce up again. The Springlaphone eighty two spring all different sizes and played with little hammers. Who says springs are boring.

In those days I had a wife called Etherline, she was a librarian and specialised in sub index cross referencing. She would tell me all about the problems she was having with her sub index cross referencing on the long winter evenings while we sat by the open fire watching Coronation Street on the television. Fortunately for me I never understood anything she was talking about so was not too troubled about the problems she was having indexing indefinite verbs.

We had two children Monomer and Polyester although you would not have noticed them much had you visited because they were not very exciting. One collected stamps and the other collected pictures out of magazines of anyone wearing anything red. They were so unbelievably average at school that some of their teachers had failed to notice that they were even attending. On parents evenings got into the habet of taking along photos of them to remind the teachers who they were.

I drove the car that all the car magazines had voted as the best family car. I was so exciting to drive that the little nodding dog in the back window had died of boredom.

We lived in an average semi-detached house in a semi-detached street in a semi- detached suburb of a totally semi-detached town. Life was back the extremely simple,, contented, predictable, happy, that's the word happy.

This was of course was all a very long time ago, perhaps it was a million years ago or at least it seems like a million years ago. It was in fact ten zillion gaga trillion years ago. It was that time we often refer to as the good old days. Marked in the sands of time, no more hacked out on the granite of eternity as BD. The time Before Digger.