How long is your beef string?

More stories from the road

Ah dear reader,

We’ve been at this thing a while eh?

All of this writing and reading stuff?

It’s been going on for almost five years.

Five years!

What more can I tell you?

I’ve been experiencing a bit of this lately with my driver, Ricky.

We’ve spent more time together than we have with our respective spouses.

In the last two weeks we’ve spent more than a hundred hours together.

A hundred hours of riding side by side!

For the first while we spoke excitedly about common friends, ideas, dreams and our pasts.

Now though?

As two men, we’ve settled into a bit of a working rhythm.

We say many of the same things at the same time in the same place each day.

And those things mostly relate to customers we either like or despise based on shovelled walkways, kind dogs or other package particularities.

Outside of that?

We often sit beside each other in silence.

But dear reader, there are times when things break, when our masks slip and some true intimacy shows up.

It’s a rare thing, this inter-male intimacy, but i…