Making cars

Yesterday, after a week of waiting and false starts, I finally got some work out of the temp agency. The lack of work was really a blessing as I’ve been able to play dogsbody for Lucy and Jeff about the house but it did also feel good to be off earning again. Only the shift was from ten to six. That’s 10pm to 6 am. Night shift joy awaited. Luckily I had some advance warning so, after visiting Isobel and Lucy at the hospital with new step-grandma April in the afternoon, I caught a couple of hours kip before setting out.

One of the nice things about Banbury is that for a small town it’s very varied. Being on the Birmingham-London commuter line close to Oxford means there’s a fair bit of money floating around the place but there’s also a very substantial number of industrial estates bringing things down to earth somewhat. I’ve always been fascinated by industrial estates – large swathes of resolutely non-residential land full of hulking blank warehouses and factories with alien names. The company I was working for was called Stabilus which sounds like a Greek restaurant only not really. My directions to get there were wonderfully complicated so Jeff gave me a lift (it was actually very simple) and I stood in the car park having a last fag. The huge shutters were up and bright lights were pouring out into the dark clear night as a pounding mechanical beat filled the air.

My job was simple. I was to place a small plastic cap in the middle of the hydralic lifty-thing that raises the boot of a car to prevent corrosion. Because this corrosion has only recently been identified as a problem there isn’t a big clunky machine to do the job so they pay two gimps £7.00 per hour to do work through the thousands of lifty-things instead. I was working with Aki, a 19 year old Asian kid who was really cool and talkative which since we were sitting opposite each other all night was a very good thing. We went through music, films, politics, religion, the works before he suggested a game. After a few false starts due to a lack of overlapping interests (my film knowledge isn’t so great these days and his music tastes stretch as far as hip hop and R&B from 1998 to the present day) we eventually played the game of “how many girls names do you know”. Starting with the letter A one player says Alison, the other retorts with Abigail and so on until you’ve exhausted Shakespeare, contemporary pop (Beyonce) and slightly androgynous boys names and one player falters. If the other player can then come up with a final name they win a point.

We got as far as P. I lost.