Monday, March 30, 2009
Take heart, workers of Brackley. Your efforts weren't in vain
This post is about the workers of Brawn GP and is therefore about Brackley and is therefore about me.
My life is basically shared between three cities, except labelling one of them a ‘city’ is like comparing a stripy kitten to a tiger. Stretched between Madrid and London is my working life, social life and an excruciating journey from one to the other that I make on a rather too regular basis. The third setting is the sleepy town of Brackley, Northamptonshire where little ever happens and residents can find themselves getting snared against their will if they get too complacent about future plans. I was born here, and save for the grating all-fours crawl across broken glass that was the school experience and the dredge of a two-year stint working in a chicken factory I have difficulty giving much of an account about the location itself and how it figures in my life since I, like everyone else I knew, wanted to get out and live a little, and didn’t stop to note down the surroundings in any great detail while hatching the plans to effect this escape. The fact that Brackley was so small and insignificant that someone took its railway station away hardly helped its would-be emigrants on their exodus from despair to where.
To those that want to know where they can find this place, I helpfully tell them it is between Banbury, Milton Keynes and Oxford, then wait for those clued-up on British geography to point out that none of those places are in Northamptonshire and that therefore my town must occupy some freakish recess of an English Bermuda Triangle (Telling them that it is near to Turweston, Croughton and Hinton-in-the-Hedges merely serves to confirm this assumption). To those who want to know what it is like in Brackley I helpfully tell them that if you swept away the indignant pro-hunters, stuffy Tories and prissy, clueless, self-righteous toffs who seem to think the word “irony” is an adjective to describe it the status of your clothes when they are all warm and without creases, it would be alright and full of good, well-meaning people. At least, provided that the irate kids quit trashing bus shelters and other street furniture with the lousy (yet accurate) pretext that there is shit all to do.
But profiling my place of birth gets a bit easier if the enquiring new acquaintance knows a thing or two about the world of Formula 1. Silverstone race circuit, soon to be withdrawn from the F1 calendar, is only a few miles down the road, while on Brackley’s south side (a bit ridiculous to define it as a ‘side’, given that if you orientate yourself in any direction and walk for ten minutes you will find yourself stranded in a field with wide expanses of grass as far as the eye can see) are the warehouses for the Japanese team once known as BAR Honda, now reborn as the equally boringly named ‘Brawn GP’. Under-performing BAR Honda had been feeling the strain of the financial crisis and last year pulled out of Formula 1, creating the very real chance that everyone involved could be out of a job, from the drivers to the local workers . Yet by yesterday morning Brawn GP managed a feat so incredible that even I, who cares little for the spectacle of cars shaped like space-ships racing in circles around a track, sat up and took notice. This debut team sensationally managed to take first and second place in the Australian Grand Prix.
Given the astronomical sums of money that even so-called minnows have access to in F1, it is hard to see this story as a classic fairytale, despite the obstacles to the victory being formidable indeed. Millionaire drivers Jenson Button and Rubens Barrichello will get the plaudits, as well as Ross Brawn, who bailed out the dying team only a few weeks before this victory. But there will be a bitter after-taste to this triumph and hopefully a thought will be spared for the workers in the Brackley plant, 270 of whom were today made redundant . That’s over a third of the workforce, who suffered not just because of the credit crunch, but also due to restructuring following the new ban on testing during the Formula 1 season. I can’t find out how many of these unlucky souls are local workers who will have to move on to something else, or specialists who have had to decamp to the wilderness of Brackley for the last nine years and may now find themselves preparing to zoom off to some other far-flung corner of the world to continue to same career path. It’s a sad footnote to the win, but things could have been a lot worse.
Workers of Brackley, god bless you. Guest workers of Brackley, I salute you and hope you enjoyed your time here.
Brackley: I live here. Carry on ahead and go down the hill and you will come to a roundabout. On the right hand side is Tescos, on the left is BAR Honda, sorry, Brawn GP.
Appendix.1. Other slightly uncalled for digs at Brackley that were not used in the writing of this post:
- Brackley is so insignificant that the spell-check on my computer doesn’t even accept it exists.
- Brackley is so one-dimensional that organisers of North Korean party rallies are currently researching it for ways to reduce levels of variety in opinion among their members.
- Brackley is so stuck in the past that the mayor’s carriage is towed by two woolly mammoths.
- Brackley is so dull that 17 people were hospitalised with heart attacks after the Antiques Roadshow was hosted there.
- Brackley is so unknown that the council is etching a giant penis into the market square so Google Earth can pick it up.
- Brackley is so conservative that the title of this post alone will get me imprisoned on charges of being a communist if my identity is ever revealed.
- Brackley has an artificially high number of ridiculous twats.
This post is about the workers of Brawn GP and is therefore about Brackley and is therefore about me.
My life is basically shared between three cities, except labelling one of them a ‘city’ is like comparing a stripy kitten to a tiger. Stretched between Madrid and London is my working life, social life and an excruciating journey from one to the other that I make on a rather too regular basis. The third setting is the sleepy town of Brackley, Northamptonshire where little ever happens and residents can find themselves getting snared against their will if they get too complacent about future plans. I was born here, and save for the grating all-fours crawl across broken glass that was the school experience and the dredge of a two-year stint working in a chicken factory I have difficulty giving much of an account about the location itself and how it figures in my life since I, like everyone else I knew, wanted to get out and live a little, and didn’t stop to note down the surroundings in any great detail while hatching the plans to effect this escape. The fact that Brackley was so small and insignificant that someone took its railway station away hardly helped its would-be emigrants on their exodus from despair to where.
To those that want to know where they can find this place, I helpfully tell them it is between Banbury, Milton Keynes and Oxford, then wait for those clued-up on British geography to point out that none of those places are in Northamptonshire and that therefore my town must occupy some freakish recess of an English Bermuda Triangle (Telling them that it is near to Turweston, Croughton and Hinton-in-the-Hedges merely serves to confirm this assumption). To those who want to know what it is like in Brackley I helpfully tell them that if you swept away the indignant pro-hunters, stuffy Tories and prissy, clueless, self-righteous toffs who seem to think the word “irony” is an adjective to describe it the status of your clothes when they are all warm and without creases, it would be alright and full of good, well-meaning people. At least, provided that the irate kids quit trashing bus shelters and other street furniture with the lousy (yet accurate) pretext that there is shit all to do.
But profiling my place of birth gets a bit easier if the enquiring new acquaintance knows a thing or two about the world of Formula 1. Silverstone race circuit, soon to be withdrawn from the F1 calendar, is only a few miles down the road, while on Brackley’s south side (a bit ridiculous to define it as a ‘side’, given that if you orientate yourself in any direction and walk for ten minutes you will find yourself stranded in a field with wide expanses of grass as far as the eye can see) are the warehouses for the Japanese team once known as BAR Honda, now reborn as the equally boringly named ‘Brawn GP’. Under-performing BAR Honda had been feeling the strain of the financial crisis and last year pulled out of Formula 1, creating the very real chance that everyone involved could be out of a job, from the drivers to the local workers . Yet by yesterday morning Brawn GP managed a feat so incredible that even I, who cares little for the spectacle of cars shaped like space-ships racing in circles around a track, sat up and took notice. This debut team sensationally managed to take first and second place in the Australian Grand Prix.
Given the astronomical sums of money that even so-called minnows have access to in F1, it is hard to see this story as a classic fairytale, despite the obstacles to the victory being formidable indeed. Millionaire drivers Jenson Button and Rubens Barrichello will get the plaudits, as well as Ross Brawn, who bailed out the dying team only a few weeks before this victory. But there will be a bitter after-taste to this triumph and hopefully a thought will be spared for the workers in the Brackley plant, 270 of whom were today made redundant . That’s over a third of the workforce, who suffered not just because of the credit crunch, but also due to restructuring following the new ban on testing during the Formula 1 season. I can’t find out how many of these unlucky souls are local workers who will have to move on to something else, or specialists who have had to decamp to the wilderness of Brackley for the last nine years and may now find themselves preparing to zoom off to some other far-flung corner of the world to continue to same career path. It’s a sad footnote to the win, but things could have been a lot worse.
Workers of Brackley, god bless you. Guest workers of Brackley, I salute you and hope you enjoyed your time here.
Brackley: I live here. Carry on ahead and go down the hill and you will come to a roundabout. On the right hand side is Tescos, on the left is BAR Honda, sorry, Brawn GP.
Appendix.1. Other slightly uncalled for digs at Brackley that were not used in the writing of this post:
- Brackley is so insignificant that the spell-check on my computer doesn’t even accept it exists.
- Brackley is so one-dimensional that organisers of North Korean party rallies are currently researching it for ways to reduce levels of variety in opinion among their members.
- Brackley is so stuck in the past that the mayor’s carriage is towed by two woolly mammoths.
- Brackley is so dull that 17 people were hospitalised with heart attacks after the Antiques Roadshow was hosted there.
- Brackley is so unknown that the council is etching a giant penis into the market square so Google Earth can pick it up.
- Brackley is so conservative that the title of this post alone will get me imprisoned on charges of being a communist if my identity is ever revealed.
- Brackley has an artificially high number of ridiculous twats.
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Thought you should know that this post managed to get referenced on 'Business Article Source' website:
http://www.businessarticlesource.com/2009/03/page/15/
The guys there must have thought your article worthy of sufficient significance to the business world. Either that or you've been writing for other people and cheating on this blog. In which case you shall be blogging on the couch tonight.
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http://www.businessarticlesource.com/2009/03/page/15/
The guys there must have thought your article worthy of sufficient significance to the business world. Either that or you've been writing for other people and cheating on this blog. In which case you shall be blogging on the couch tonight.
<< Home
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