The Idler

Nasty Cheese Dreams

After an unpleasant incident with my bank manager in the summer of 1996 (he physically threatened me in his office due to my immense and unauthorized student overdraft) I was reluctantly forced to get a summer job through a temp agency.

As I lived in a remote Cheshire village and had no transport the only job open to me was working in a cheese factory. I did this for three months and every time I think about it now I have to hold back tears of pain and regret.

My job was working in the packing room for �3 an hour (�3.30 for late shifts!). Huge, heavy blocks of stinky cheese sweltering in the humid factory heat would trundle along a conveyor belt into the packing room. One of the deranged cheese packers would slap it into a 3-part tin box and stick it in a compressor where it had all the lovely sweet smelling cheese juice squeezed out of it.

When it was ready the cheese in a box would be passed down to me on a conveyor belt. My job was to grab the heavy metal box, slam it down and wrestle the cheese out, chucking it into the storeroom to the waiting hands of a wry, piss-taking Scouser.

I’d then bang the box apart and put it through an industrial washing machine to a fat middle aged man on the other end who hated me because on my first day I put the the parts through in the wrong order and fucked up his ’system’.

The boxes came thick and fast, all day every day. If I stalled on a box they’d pile up and crash off the conveyor belt, causing the packing ‘team’ to laugh hysterically. Humiliating. By the end of the first week my hands were in tatters due to the sharp box edges, I’d lost half a stone in weight due to the heat and constant toil and I stuck of rancid Cheshire.

The only relief from the job was being sent to the ’scraping room’ for a day. This was like Cheese Factory R n’ R. It involved scraping bits of mould off huge slabs of cheese. The smell was indescribable. After a week in the mould scraping department my co-worker, a middle aged violent Teddy Boy confided in me that he occasionally liked to make holes in the blocks of cheese and have sexual relations with them. I asked for a transfer back to the packing room.

The only high point of the job was watching a deranged Mancunian take a �5 bet and jump fully clothed, into a huge vat of curd. The final straw was when I staggered into the factory with a chronic hangover one sweltering morning. The manager took one look at me, gave me a knife and pointed to a huge stack of plastic wrapped cheese in the factory forecourt. I had to slice the bags open to release the cheese sweat that had built up inside the bags. I can still recall the sound of the cheese juice-sloshing out on to the concrete.

I still can’t look at cheese without it bringing back all sorts of painful memories.

Matt - Brighton