The End of Toil*
In one of those poetic confluences that happen only once in a while, and have the capacity to pass you by if you do not stop and contemplate them for a spell, my jobless life has been replaced with seasonal employment at a soup factory - I work at Riverside, on the soup line that is called "The End of Toil*". How ironic then that my working day is filled with what you could call the limit of toil. I love it like no job I have ever had, even when I was the painter and decorator for the guys at New Media Scotland, which was great because I got to wear a boilersuit, dictate my own work schedule (in at 10, paint 'til lunch, bacon roll and The Guardian at 1, sleep until 2, home 5:30) and join the secret brotherhood of white van man. Starting on Monday, with no health and safety training, no induction and the merest hint of a clue what we were doing there, I entered a world that had previously terrified me. To elaborate, most of the people who work there are from east of Fochabers, most of them from Buckie or Keith or Portsoy or any of the other dead-end towns out that direction. It's such a pronounced (and let's get onto pronunciation forthwith) difference to towns to the West, and one which saw me wrestle for all of five minutes with my middle-class, man with an MA ego until something strange and unexplainable and pleasant happened to turn it all on its head. And it involved convincing myself of the notion that there is some kind of genetic manual labour trait that seems to go back many generations. Let me try to explain.
In what might turn out to be the genetic trait I pass on to further generations of my own, I was horrendously hungover on Monday. I decided that because it was the last Sunday of my twenties that I would get drunk on red wine and confront something of the milestone that turning 30 represents, or claims to represent. Pressured more by friends' comments than by any epiphany of my own, I found myself this last little while counting every small event as some marker of leaving my twenties behind and entering a new phase, one where I might start to grow into myself and not be so dependent on clinging to a notion of youth that, really, petered out a long time ago and was blasted into dust when I split up with the ex. The truth is that I am no closer to feeling 30 than I am to feeling 21, or any of those other ages with import. I realise that in the past 4 or so years the process of ageing, that for so long the facet of youth held at bay - nay, poked its red tongue at - was now becoming more visible. A widening of the middle that was not just the evidence of a large meal; the slight yellowing of the incisors that spoke more of tobacco habit than negligent oral hygiene; the laughter lines that my Spanish novia in Japan thought were cute becoming trenched crows' feet; less "snap" to the skin on the back of my hands - thickening veins underneath. Like irritating party guests, all these things crept up with stealth but refused to leave once they had arrived. They did not bother me in the same way that the scars and broken bones and abrasions I have had through 16 years of skateboarding have not bothered me. Quite the opposite seems to have happened; I take a kind of pleasure in the slow degredation of things (I suppose that is quite the most unhealthy perspective to take), the breaking down and the breaking-up.
But today, and these past three days, I have been part of a workforce, and that word itself has so much more meaning than it is generally attributed with. When I worked as a web designer, the techies and managers and creative directors combined were not a workforce, in the same way that a Ford Transit is not a juggernaut and companies that use the suffix "direct" in their name are not literally connected to your home through a system of pulleys and levers. "Sofas Direct to your home!" they say, and you picture a man aiming a giant couch-cannon that fires a 3-seater leather reclining set through the air, missing all power lines and other obstacles and that reaches a certain velocity before being slowed by invisible wires so that it plops with a carpeted doof on your doorstep. No, to be part of a workforce you should be aware at all times of your place within the chain. I don't mean that you should know that your boss hates you (s/he probably does - that's why they're the boss) or that your promotion prospects are slim this year (and probably next) or that the presentation you gave last week where you told the joke about the horse and the nuns was infinitely more excrutiating to listen to than to tell. I mean that in the workplace where physical graft is a necessity, that you should aim to be as well-oiled as the rollers beneath the conveyor belt, maintain that kind of loose, confident ease of movement that you saw on that Foreigner video of the guys building the skyscrapers. I have too much to write about it tonight (it's pushing 1am, and I am riding the adrenalin high of 8 hours humping heavy machinery), but I'll end for now by saying that there is a perfect "h"-shaped bruise on my right inner arm that is so much like the yin to the metal basket yang that I have worked with today that it looks like a kiss rather than an abrasion. Goodnight, for tomorrow I may make Rotormat Man.
* Addendum: It's actually the end of TOYO, not T-O-I-L. I apologise for my misinterpretation of the accent. But doesn't TOIL sound better?
In what might turn out to be the genetic trait I pass on to further generations of my own, I was horrendously hungover on Monday. I decided that because it was the last Sunday of my twenties that I would get drunk on red wine and confront something of the milestone that turning 30 represents, or claims to represent. Pressured more by friends' comments than by any epiphany of my own, I found myself this last little while counting every small event as some marker of leaving my twenties behind and entering a new phase, one where I might start to grow into myself and not be so dependent on clinging to a notion of youth that, really, petered out a long time ago and was blasted into dust when I split up with the ex. The truth is that I am no closer to feeling 30 than I am to feeling 21, or any of those other ages with import. I realise that in the past 4 or so years the process of ageing, that for so long the facet of youth held at bay - nay, poked its red tongue at - was now becoming more visible. A widening of the middle that was not just the evidence of a large meal; the slight yellowing of the incisors that spoke more of tobacco habit than negligent oral hygiene; the laughter lines that my Spanish novia in Japan thought were cute becoming trenched crows' feet; less "snap" to the skin on the back of my hands - thickening veins underneath. Like irritating party guests, all these things crept up with stealth but refused to leave once they had arrived. They did not bother me in the same way that the scars and broken bones and abrasions I have had through 16 years of skateboarding have not bothered me. Quite the opposite seems to have happened; I take a kind of pleasure in the slow degredation of things (I suppose that is quite the most unhealthy perspective to take), the breaking down and the breaking-up.
But today, and these past three days, I have been part of a workforce, and that word itself has so much more meaning than it is generally attributed with. When I worked as a web designer, the techies and managers and creative directors combined were not a workforce, in the same way that a Ford Transit is not a juggernaut and companies that use the suffix "direct" in their name are not literally connected to your home through a system of pulleys and levers. "Sofas Direct to your home!" they say, and you picture a man aiming a giant couch-cannon that fires a 3-seater leather reclining set through the air, missing all power lines and other obstacles and that reaches a certain velocity before being slowed by invisible wires so that it plops with a carpeted doof on your doorstep. No, to be part of a workforce you should be aware at all times of your place within the chain. I don't mean that you should know that your boss hates you (s/he probably does - that's why they're the boss) or that your promotion prospects are slim this year (and probably next) or that the presentation you gave last week where you told the joke about the horse and the nuns was infinitely more excrutiating to listen to than to tell. I mean that in the workplace where physical graft is a necessity, that you should aim to be as well-oiled as the rollers beneath the conveyor belt, maintain that kind of loose, confident ease of movement that you saw on that Foreigner video of the guys building the skyscrapers. I have too much to write about it tonight (it's pushing 1am, and I am riding the adrenalin high of 8 hours humping heavy machinery), but I'll end for now by saying that there is a perfect "h"-shaped bruise on my right inner arm that is so much like the yin to the metal basket yang that I have worked with today that it looks like a kiss rather than an abrasion. Goodnight, for tomorrow I may make Rotormat Man.
* Addendum: It's actually the end of TOYO, not T-O-I-L. I apologise for my misinterpretation of the accent. But doesn't TOIL sound better?
posted by Albie Clark | 12:12 am
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