A customer came into the shop today and exclaimed: “I haven’t seen you for a while. Have you been away?” No, says I, remarking that since my mother’s illness and inability to help out in the shop, I have worked solidly, without any afternoons off or time to myself, for a month. From Boxing Day (including New Year’s Day), myself and The Missus have worked liked trojans holding the business together with help from our morning person. I surprise myself that despite having the worst flu for a long time and the constant workload of early mornings and lugging bales of newspapers into the shop, I am still able to function. If this doesn’t make a man of me, then nothing will. Hard, honest work is good for the soul and I defy anyone who says otherwise. We have become lazy as a race and lazy of body and mind and I think more people should try this existence. The devil makes work for idle hands, etc.
Of course, I half expect a day when I get poleaxed by some other illness and I cannot rise promptly at around 5am to greet the storage bin brimming with the daily news, to move these bundles, to unpack and arrange, to enter the arriving magazines into my computer system and to print out the morning rounds and to bring in the crate of milk and load up the empty fridge and to put the papers on the racks and have the shop ready and waiting for the local farmers on the strike of 6am. A minute over 6am and the jokes begin:
“Oh had a lay in this morning, did you?” says one farmer in his yokel drawl.
Boy, do I never get tired of that doozy. I grin and nod and think to myself that even though you are taking the piss out of me, even though I am tired and I wonder if my body and mind is strong enough to sustain such a punishing existence of 13-hour days, seven days a week, I would rather be here suffering and slogging away to provide a future for my child than being shut in an airless office at IPC on the SouthBank, in a room full of people I don’t like, who giggle like children as they “chat” via Instant Messenger, eeking out a day’s work so that it lasts a week and watching the clock to signal quitting time. Yup, I’d rather be here, poor and working hard, than earning lots of money for very little and being a part of that shallow, shiny media industry.
Bitter…no? I was just punching way above my weight when I worked in the media. Within this chest beats a working-class heart and you can’t escape who you are.
