Milk
Ah, buxom, rosy-cheeked milkmaids carrying wooden pails, cheery, Ermintrude-like cows with flowers in their mouths… yuh, right.
The milk comes out of a pipe, into waxed cardboard boxes, which become the familiar tetrapaks. Tetrapaks are then fitted into trays of a dozen, which are shrinkwrapped. When the trays come out of the wrapping machine, they’re hot as hell, and guess who has to pick them up. Oh yes.
They then get placed on vast pallets. There’s a specific pattern. There’s a precise gap between each pallet. On the first layer, the trays go north-south, the next layer they go east-west. Sterilised milk goes on blue pallets, full-cream on brown. Twenty-four trays on each pallet, stack them six high, wrap with another layer of plastic. Unfortunately, nobody bothers to tell me this, so when the supervisor comes round after an hour and a half of wasted effort, I get a profound bollocking for slamming them down any old how. This, apparently, is very amusing, according to the mad-eyed fork-lift driver. Another worker joins in his laughter, then, when the driver leaves, informs me that his colleague is the only worker not in the local rugby team, because he’s “a queero” and “will shag any hole there is”. Did I mention we were in Devon?
I get the hang of the process, and the work gets… well, not “better”, maybe marginally less vile. Then we get a “burster”. A carton is slightly overfilled, and the pressure of the heatwrapping causes its warm contents to erupt over my face. It’s like an industrial bukkake video.
I become a vegan.
"I do nothing and then I do something. But it's taken years of investigating idleness in all its forms to be able to achieve this. My discipline is borne out of concerted study of idleness."