Ulf and Taina 17 2 17 (11) 25 1 21

Well I met Taina first maybe a month ago and she was this person who used to work at the same company as I did for the last 20 years of my working life and so she knew of me first from company gossip: Mr K who came from UK as our R and D Director for a time and she an Environmental Science graduate who started work in the Waste Water Treatment Plant. Later she moved into the house diagonally left across the street from us with her second husband when their house in the town underwent repairs because of mould damage. Then they moved away to the next town and when I asked her where she was living she mentioned an area where I told her Ulf who joined the company as Chief Accountant was also living, which she agreed she knew about for he lived just around the corner, but that she didn't know him personally. We were just about to enter the same store in the next town where she now lives… 

At the time Taina was pregnant with a daughter shortly to be delivered and so I bade her good day and wished her all the best for her upcoming confinement and away she went agreeing to come round to our house when she and her family were next in our town during the upcoming summer. Now yesterday as I parked my car behind another in the car park of this same grocery store there she was again just getting out of her car in front of mine so we exchanged a few more words when I learnt she had got her baby girl and that everything went off to plan and what a relief it was for her to be able to come to the shops on her own again. I told her my wife and I had been visiting our elder son and his wife in the capital and how all four of us went to their boys' school to see them perform in the school's annual dance for the oldest pupils, showing Taina a clip of their dancing “The Lambert Walk” in the same group of olde time dancers in their elegant evening wear, the boys in tails, the girls in beautiful long flowing dresses. She noted how her eldest child a boy of 19 from her first marriage had had the same celebration a year earlier which was nice for her to relate too.

As I left the store to await the return of my wife, moving my car from behind Taina’s to be abreast and free to move off, on her left who should I bump into next but this same Ulf whose car was now abreast of mine on the other side… So I then stepped out of my car to confront him as he evidently didn’t at first recognise me it was so long since we last met. Of course as I began to speak to him in English his face broadened into this characteristic full grin as he recognised who it was. He volunteered that he was 59 years old and I responded that we had first met 2 years after I arrived in January 1988. November 1989 he corrected me, but almost ½ his age ago: now when his eldest child was 32 and his youngest of four 23, all grown up. How he had 2 grandchildren already with a third on the way. 

I related the story of how when he left the company we got a new MD whose job it was said was to get rid of people and of how I had to deliver 2 seminars on the two remaining topics I was working on, with a view to handing them on to someone, just ahead of my own retirement aged 65: the company’s patents and food contact legislation. And how around that time a product withdrawal in UK, involving a batch of Sudan 1 red pigment which was contaminated with carcinogens had got into a batch of Worcester Sauce and how because Worcester Sauce is used in so many other food preparations the total cost to the British Tax-payer was £100 000. Of the top of my head I used this as a graphic example of how important this work is to a company: whereupon Mr E turned to Esa (a colleague whom Ulf had hired) to ask him to ask me not to retire altogether but to stay on to complete this work myself… I told him also about being the chairperson of this International group for 5 years and how the group post my first retirement charged me with the task of writing the Guide to Good Manufacturing Practice for the Industry which as a Consultant together with the patent work provided me another 4 years of gainful employment. In turn he told how he too had become chairperson for another International group based in Brussels, but how he had a permanent secretary to handle all the business for him, his accountancy skills being the least required in this specialist group.

Just then Taina returned to her car followed shortly thereafter with A-E my wife and so he also got to nod his hellos to these two people from the past also.

We had our ups and downs over a good many years working for the same company I reflected later but when I had my heart attack 15 years ago this coming April I shall always remember how he advised me at the time “To keep my flag flying aloft on its pole!”

How nice to run into old but well know faces shopping in the next town….Have a good day everyone as I hope you are able to meet up with old colleagues after a gap of maybe 10 or more years and enjoy a conversation together as if it was only a couple of days since you last met one another.