No Way To Make A Living » embodiment

Routine and Creativity

Lynne Pettinger — Thu, 03 Jun 2010 16:16:26 +0000

Routinisation is usually seen as deskilling, as alienating, as the opposite of creativity (Braverman, 1998; Leidner, 1993). Austrin and West (2005) suggest that the routinisation of how casino staff manipulate cards acts as mechanism for surveillance. Standardising and controlling how staff hold their thumb and fingers limits the chances for them to cheat.

Routines are supposed to feel demeaning, to destroy our imaginations. I like routine, perhaps because whatever routines I have are not imposed by anyone else. In Ways of the Hand David Sudnow (1993) reflects on learning to play jazz piano. The routine of practice gives him a baseline from which being creative becomes possible. His fingers learn where they need to be to make certain chord shapes, and that means they know where they need to go next to make certain sounds. Unpredictability — new sounds — relies on this knowing. It’s a process that becomes un-thought, and once it is un-thought, Sudnow says creativity is possible.

Nick Dunn is a freelance shoe designer.He draws shoe after shoe after shoe, tiny variations, maybe 50 at a time.Then he takes a few of the best and refines them. It’s someone else’s job to build a prototype, to make them real. There is joy in seeing the prototype, sure, especially as the trainer moves from the page into three-dimensionality, and Nick is fully engaged in the conversations that make this happen. But the biggest pleasure of his work is in the routine, the repetition and the refinement of the sketches. Nick describes drawing as therapeutic, occupying a calm space beyond thought. Creativity needs the routine; creativity is in the routine; the routine permits flow.

In the sketches, this flow is present in the pencil lines that outline the shape of the trainer, and that mark the details. I didn’t expect from Nick’s description that each idea comes in three sketches, showing the left side, back and top. Whilst he draws on flat, seemingly translucent, paper, the three dimensional trainer that ends up on your foot is already in his imagination. It’s not that routines end up with creativity; to say that would be to viciously misrepresent the experience of controlled, routinised work such as that portrayed in Pravda. It’s that creativity is not well-conceived when it’s seen as a product of free-floating inspiration produced by a romantically starving artist. It stems from practice, skill and routine.

References

1. Austrin, T and West, J (2005) ‘Skills and surveillance in casino gaming: work, consumption and regulation’. Work Employment and Society. 19 (2) 305–326.
2. Braverman, Harry. (1998) Labor and monopoly capital: the degradation of work in the twentieth century. New York : Monthly Review Press.
3. Leidner, R. (1993) Fast Food, Fast Talk: Service Work and the Routinization of Everyday Life. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press.
4. Sudnow, D. (1993) Ways of the hand: the organization of improvised conduct. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

Branded Workers

Lynne Pettinger — Tue, 04 May 2010 15:12:14 +0000

For Boltanski and Chiapello (2007), capitalism’s existence and evolution requires that its workforce understand and accede to its demands. For a capitalist system to operate there must be a ‘spirit’ that achieves the inculcation of norms (e.g. a norm of a work ethic). They argue that the norms through which the workforce are incorporated change in response to criticisms of the earlier modes of capitalism. The 3^rd spirit of capitalism, the current hyper-individualised neoliberal market economy is, they say, forged by the critiques of 1968 and after. Particularly relevant to this post is how the ‘artistic’ critique, which suggested that work was alienating when it was without scope for autonomy or creativity, came to be adopted into managerial knowledge and practices. The managerial solution to the artistic critique is to bring workers into the tent by giving them voice and autonomy through Kaizen, Quality Circles, performance related pay and the like. Contemporary working practices outside the factory require a particular form of inculcation into the newest Spirit of Capitalism, and one of the places this is visible is the ongoing development of personal branding: the individual is engineered as a good worker beyond the confines of a workplace, as a portfolio worker, a freelancer, an entrepreneur of the self (du Gay, 1996).

Celia Lury defines the brand as “the object or medium for the exchange of information between ‘producers’ and ‘consumers’” (2004: 74). Retail workers are configured as extensions of their employer’s brand values, through the aesthetic labour they do and the sorts of customer service they are expected to offer (Pettinger, 2004). Brands produced by marketing specialists through analysis of the consumer market are presented back to the customer not merely through logos, the arrangement of the shop and such like, but also through the bodies of employees, whose consumption practices reflect the brand’s idealised consumer.

Branded workers embody the exchange of information Lury talks about; they are simultaneously producer and object; their working lives are always of the brand. The personal branding industry goes beyond this, objectifying the worker as brand and so collapsing the person to the object — as in the current election when we’re no longer voting for a party, or a local MP, but for Brown, Clegg or Cameron.

Some people might quite like being the brand. Mike Allen, author of Washington insider dealing, agenda setting gossip sheet Playbook exemplifies a man who seems to delight in being reduced to a brand; cagey about his history and apparently living without a private life, Allen is always on and always making news. It’s an alarming vision for other journalists if this is what they are to aspire to: not sleeping, being in touch, at work all the time. Work becomes all-consuming.

What does this mean for the consumer? The consumer is not neutral recipient of the brand, but qualifies the market too through their attachment to objects (Ilmonen, 2004; Pettinger, 2008). Retail consumers don’t passively accept brand stories. Mike Allen’s consumers are people like him, politicos who need to be in the know, even ahead of the game for their own work. They’re always on too, they can’t be behind the times. But most of us consume journalism more casually (one of the nowaytomakealiving team prefers to read the week’s newspapers in reverse chronological order; the other couldn’t do this, but does do a month’s worth of New Statesmans at a time). How do we experience branded journalism?

I’m a Guardian reader, of course. My parents get the Telegraph though, and when I’m visiting them I look at it with gritted teeth. Whilst I think I’d very happily go to the pub with some of the people who write for the Guardian, I suspect I’d never give the time of day to a Telegraph journalist. In my naive understanding of how recruitment happens, I reckon the Guardian must handpick its staff according to whether they’re good guys. But then it turns out that the author of how to cope with a Tory government is also writing for the Telegraph’s banker’s wives’ shopping guide Stella. So how do I make sense of this? For me the Guardian reader, the Williams’ personal brand is conditioned by her location in the Guardian and is subverted when it appears in the Telegraph. Brand advisors say that trust is the key reason to have a brand, but my readerly trust is easily attacked by the nature of the individualised freelance media industry that means my Guardian journalists publish elsewhere. The branded worker is vulnerable to consumer rejection as well as to a mode of organising work as though it was the only thing that mattered in life.

References

Boltanski, L. and Chiapello, E. (2007) The New Spirit of Capitalism. Verso, London, trans Gregory Elliot.
Du Gay, P. (1996) Consumption and Identity at Work. London: Sage.
Lury, C. (2004) Brands: the logos of the global economy. Abingdon: Routledge.
Ilmonen, K. (2004) ‘The use of and commitment to goods’, Journal of Consumer Culture, Vol. 4, No. 1, pp.27–50.
Pettinger, L. (2008) ‘Developing aesthetic labour: the importance of consumption’. International Journal of Work, Organisation and Emotions. 2 (4): 324–343.
Pettinger, L. (2004) ‘Branded stores, branded workers: service work and aesthetic labour in fashion retail.’ Consumption, Markets and Culture 7(2): 165–84.

What does The Working Lives of Londoners collection of photographs tell us about the working lives of Londoners?

Dawn Lyon — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 18:10:13 +0000

The Working Lives of Londoners is a series of photographs by Harriet Armstrong on display at City Hall (22 March to 7 May 2010) which shows Londoners ‘going about their daily routine in the capital’ (The Guardian). A selection of images was published in The Guardian in March, but more can be seen on Harriet Armstrong’s website. There are some quirky and original images and together they make an interesting contribution to the recognition of work in today’s world, and some of the spaces that people inhabit in their everyday working lives.

A number of the images are portraits, including of people who are in the public realm, such as Shami Chakrabarti, Director of Liberty, and Boris Johnson, Mayor of London (who I happened to see going into City Hall just as I was leaving this afternoon!). In other portraits we can understand work by the context within the image, for instance the policeman standing outside Number 10 Downing Street, or workers posed amongst theatre props. In these types of photograph, the worker and the job are one (for now at least) and the portrait of the person in their working environment carries the idea of what it is they do in their working lives.

Other images show workers engaged in something and these are the ones I especially like. They show us people, places and activities we don’t usually see, such as the clockmakers inside Big Ben, and they show us people and work that we might not usually notice. The stonemasons of Trafalgar Square, a station supervisor on the Piccadilly Line, and the black cab mechanics all caught my attention; and the London Marathon course measurer was certainly work I had previously taken for granted!

: Neon Light Engineer by Harriet Armstrong

The composition of some of the photographs is stimulating for thinking about work sociologically. In one image, a Neon Light engineer, suspended alongside a building, is pictured from below, the sky becoming the backdrop to his working world. He looks alone up there, only tenuously connected to the world as he holds onto the light he is working on, although in another image, someone else appears to be keeping an eye on him from the ground. We can’t see exactly what the light engineer is doing so we don’t get an insight into the activity of work per se but we do get some sense of what his working life is like from seeing him in the sky like that. The stunning picture of the rope access abseiler cleaning the No 1 London Bright Building is equally evocative.

Although the image of statue cleaners is taken peering into a vehicle, what looks like a harness on one of the workers suggests that his work also takes him off the ground. His co-worker, seen snoozing in the background, is taking a moment out, and this draws our attention to the ways in which working routines include pauses, and are shot through with other activities and meanings.

The materiality of work is very present in the photographs too. The cinema projectionist at the Barbican is seen surrounded by and connected to his equipment, as is the fire-fighter, whereas the organ tuner at the Royal Albert Hall must quite literally get inside the object of his labour.

Work is not presented in these photos in the restricted ways we sometimes see it celebrated, mostly of men doing dangerous things, however fascinating images of these worlds are. Bell-ringers – presumably an unpaid commitment – are shown in perfect coordination in a space lit by what looks like early morning sunshine. The hairdresser in a centre for homeless people might be there on a voluntary basis or as an employee. Overall, the collection transcends rigid categories of work, including artisans, gardeners and protestors alongside teachers and engineers. These photographs encourage us to ask questions about the basis on which work is undertaken, and to recognise the enormous range of work that goes on in London.

Overall, this series is a refreshing look at what we do from a young woman photographer. Thank you, Harriet Armstrong.

Ordinary Misbehaviour

Lynne Pettinger — Wed, 07 Apr 2010 15:54:33 +0000

I write for a not-for-profit music website. The site is run by one extraordinary man, ‘John’, and it’s quite a management task. The staff writers get together once, maybe twice a year. The recent meet up in a cottage in the rainy Peak District was fiery. Office parties often are. There would be no reason any of us staff writers would ever meet if it wasn’t for the site: we live miles apart, with lives that scarcely connect. The difference between us, and the irregularity of our contact, produces conflicts that – I suspect – would differ if we met daily in the same workplace.

Let me explain why I described the meet-up as fiery and then perhaps you’ll see the point. In the red corner, ‘Muriel’, the pink-haired vegan activist and Lynne, the lecturer in the sociology of gender. In the blue corner ‘Des’, attention-seeker with wandering hands, every other word a swear word. Face-off: I shout at him not to fondle me. Later, there’s been more drinking. Des throws my King Creosote[i] cd on the fire. Acrid smoke and no-one knows quite what to do, certainly not Des, who laughs. I don’t understand such pointless destruction. Now the fall out: I get Des to replace the cd; John must manage his future involvement in the site.

Whilst organisations appear to operate in the sphere of rationality, anyone who has ever worked in one knows this is an illusion: emotion is never absent; and nor is sex (Brewis and Linstead, 2000). The office party appears – in public discourse — as a liminal space where boundaries, particularly around sex at work, are transgressed. Holliday and Thompson, however suggest that

far from being a space where one is beyond organisational control, the real function of the office party is to further refine the organisational subject.

(2001: 127)

That is, Des forced the group to notice him as the opposite of a desexualised, disembodied, rational worker: at the office party he was re-embodied (as was I, through his actions). And he then must be scrutinised and his future behaviour regulated. I had no qualms in complaining about Des’ behaviour, as I didn’t have to face him on Monday morning.

That we did not have an established daily relationship might also have contributed to his actions; would he have dared to behave badly if he had more to lose from being known as a wrong ‘un? On the other hand, I wonder if Des wouldn’t have been shamed more effectively if surrounded by people who see him day-in, day-out; if the collective strategies for managing him had been refined over time, if there was a well-established idea about what was acceptable. Working in proximity to colleagues produces a sort of cohesion in the way home-working never can, even as it also makes for daily frustrations.

It might seem like this is an unusual case and therefore has little to say about the ordinary experience of sex at work. Certainly, few organisations are as decentralised as this one, even as homeworking, flexibility and outsourcing have been growing for years, producing organisations that are not made up of company men, but individualised workers. Cohesion and collectivity are hard under such atomised circumstances. But too often harassment is seen as rare and individualised, not systemic and therefore impossible to generalise from. Sex, violence and work are entwined in ways that are simultaneously ordinary and extraordinary, wound into the fabric of working lives.

References

Brewis, J. and Linstead, S. (2000) Sex, Work and Sex Work: Eroticizing Organization. London:

Routledge.
Holliday, R. and Thompson, G. (2001) ‘A Body of Work’ in Holliday, R. and Hassard, J. (eds.) Contested Bodies. London, Routledge: 117–133

[i] Flick the Vs, since you ask, folk-electronica, and really quite good.

Bodywork

Dawn Lyon — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 14:58:56 +0000

‘Christy, Southwest Airlines’ — Brian Finke

I was looking for images of ‘bodywork’ recently for a seminar discussion with students and came across Brian Finke’s collection on Flight Attendants (see: http://www.brianfinke.com/). I was drawn to this photograph because of the circularity of the different forms of labour it reveals. Bodywork as the work of maintaining a body in the right shape for the job (Shilling, 1993) – also a form of ‘aesthetic labour’ (Witz et al, 2003) — is clear, quite literally, in the pre-defined form of the eyebrow. At the same time, bodywork in Wolkowitz’s (2002) elaboration of the term, where one person’s body is the site of another’s person’s labour, is shown in the hands undertaking the shaping of the eyebrow. But this looks like something that’s happening (or staged as happening) between colleagues. So it also suggests a moment at work infused with intimacy, a back-stage time of informal preparation and relationship, before the aircraft interior itself becomes a formal workspace and the performance really begins.

References
Shilling, C. (1993) The Body and Social Theory, London: Sage.
Witz, A, C Warhurst, D Nickson (2003) ‘The labour of aesthetics and the aesthetics of organization’ Organization, 10(1): 33–54.
Wolkowitz, C. (2002) ‘The social relations of body work’, Work, Employment and Society 16(3): 497–510.

The Postman’s Uniform

Lynne Pettinger — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 11:59:48 +0000

Life as a sociologist of work isn’t inevitably amusing, but Friday’s news that a group of French postal workers had taken La Poste to court for recompense for the labour involved in cleaning their uniforms made me smile. I did enjoy the challenge this court case makes to the idea that all labour that (re-)produces the working body is most appropriately done in the private sphere.

I have done some writing on the subject of ‘aesthetic labour’, the work of producing and presenting an acceptable working body, seen very clearly in Dawn’s post. In clothing retail in the UK, the cost of work clothing is usually borne by the employee and often has to come from current stock. Although employees may get a discount, the need to stay in fashion can be a burden to a worker on low wages; conceptually we can read this as showing how workers are implicated in consumption work as well as the labour market (Pettinger, 2008). Organisations’ demands for aesthetic labour reflects their presumptions about the importance of protecting and enhancing their ‘specific’ brand values (Pettinger, 2004), and marks a similarity between the postal worker and the sales assistant: both are configured as the embodiment of the corporation.

These postal workers will now be getting 5 euros a week for keeping themselves tidy; retail sales assistants are unlikely to start a similar campaign, tending instead celebrate the chance to “live it, love it, be the brand”, by buying themselves a nice new frock.

References

Pettinger, L. (2008) ‘Developing aesthetic labour: the importance of consumption’. International Journal of Work, Organisation and Emotions. 2 (4): 324–343.
Pettinger, L. (2004) ‘Branded stores, branded workers: service work and aesthetic labour in fashion retail.’ Consumption, Markets and Culture 7(2): 165–84.

A short exchange with Miriam Glucksmann about ‘Women on the Line’

Miriam Glucksmann — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 11:45:02 +0000

In 1982, Miriam Glucksmann published a book about the experience of women working ‘on the line’ at a factory in West London which produced speedometers for cars. She had left her higher education teaching job to work in this factory, not with the intention of producing an ethnography, nor with any illusions of ‘joining the working class’, but as something which arose from her involvement in feminist and socialist politics. When she later decided to write about and publish her account, she was obliged for legal reasons to do so under a pseudonym, Ruth Cavendish. Last year, Routledge decided to republish Women on the Line, with a new introduction, and this time, under Glucksmann’s real name. Here Miriam Glucksmann responds to some questions posed by Dawn Lyon about the original book and its republication in 2009.

Women on the Line is often described as a seminal ethnography of 1980s British sociology of work. Its republication in 2009 has attracted considerable interest, especially in the US. How would you describe the reception of the original publication of the book?

The enforced pseudonym and anonymity the first time round meant that I got very little sense of its reception. I couldn’t give any talks or publicise it at all. People wrote to Routledge asking to be put in contact with Ruth Cavendish, and they forwarded everything to me but of course I wasn’t able to reply to anything! Yet for many years afterwards I often met people who knew me, and were familiar with Women on the Line, but were unaware of the connection between us. It kept on happening right up to the appearance of the new edition published under my own name. My sense is that the book was quite widely read both in the UK and abroad, and by feminist and other activists as well as academics over the next few years, especially given the greater interest in studying and campaigning around work during the 1980s.

In terms of ‘method’, although your working at the factory was not intended as research, what do you think about the approach of ‘knowing by doing’ as a way of understanding work, in your case, quite literally working on the line – especially in a context in which the interview has come to dominate qualitative research?

Knowing by doing was certainly crucial, in the sense that my understanding of what was going on in the factory and how it affected the women would have been impossible without experiencing it myself. The ‘doing’ included not only the work itself, but also the numerous interactions with the women around me. The chatting that this involved ranged far wider than what would normally be covered in an interview, and of course I wasn’t determining the course of the conversation either. However, the interpretive ‘knowing’ part of it relied also on my pre-existing knowledge and analytical frames, and all the ‘doing’ was necessarily filtered through and mediated by what was already in my head, and my political preoccupations and questions in doing the job in the first place.

There are more photographs in the republished version of the book than in the original. Can you comment on the place of images in representations of work, and on the relationship between the written and the visual in this book.

I would have liked to include far more photos than the publishers would allow, and in colour. The black and white ones don’t really do justice to the situation and don’t come over nearly as well as the colour ones on the cover. I hope it makes a difference to readers being able to see what some of my work-mates looked like, especially those whose life stories are recounted. Similarly the spatial and physical layout of the shopfloor, and some examples of machinery should help to bring the narrative to life. There are so very few images available of the faces of women doing this kind of work (like the one of Alice who is looking straight at me taking her photo) so the more we can collect the better, especially when the women are engaged in the process rather than being objectified as ‘women workers’. However, these photos were taken during the strike/lockout, so everyone is looking more relaxed and happier than they would have done if they had actually been working!

The covers of the two editions are different. What is the story of them?

Cover of original publication, 1982

I have always disliked the cover of the first edition because it is so misleading. So many of the women came from the Caribbean or Indian subcontinent, yet the picture suggests white women only. The first version was even worse as they were all given long blonde hair. I objected and asked for black or Asian women to be represented. The concession was to give one of them curly hair, but I think she still looks white. Routledge wouldn’t budge further. The portrayal of the line was also misleading showing the women facing it rather than at right angles to it, so contradicting my description of how the spatial layout affected social and physical interaction.

Cover of republication, 2009

So of course I am much happier with the cover of the new edition, which I chose and which uses two of my own photos taken in the factory back in 1977. I was surprised how well the original negatives scanned in especially as it was only a little instamatic camera. In fact these are much better quality than the original prints. So that’s a lesson to keep old negs in a safe place! Now we have older black women on the cover, as well as a very young Irish worker, suggesting the age and ethnic composition, and you can see the line, and all the clutter. The ‘product’ is also clearly visible, and of course this would not have been possible in the 1982 edition.

A Day’s Work at Billingsgate Fish Market

Dawn Lyon — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 13:24:08 +0000

Earlier this year, I started hanging around Billingsgate, London’s wholesale fish market. I tell the fish merchants there that I’m trying to understand the whole process, of where the fish comes from and goes to, how it gets distributed, who’s selling what, and more generally what goes on at the market. It’s part of an ongoing project on fish, on all the work that’s involved in brining fish ‘from sea to table’. ‘Well, if you really want to understand, you should come and work for me one day!’ Roger, a long-established fish merchant at Billingsgate, challenges me. ‘OK,’ I say, ‘When can I come?’ We arrange a Saturday in November so I can see things when it’s busy, Roger insists. I start to prepare myself. ‘You’ll need waterproof boots and a body warmer,’ he instructs me – and a lot of nerve, I think.

Roger Barton is a force of nature. He is variously described as the King of Billingsgate or, in the radio show he does on a Friday for XFM, the Legend of Billingsgate. On my first visit to the market, I approach someone else on the stand: ‘Are you Roger Barton?’ ‘Oh, you mean the Bastard of Billingsgate! He’ll be back in a moment. And that’s how you should address him.’ I take a chance when the man with the boater and moustache returns. He laughs and we hit if off straight away.

Roger Barton

He said to call him the day before to confirm. ‘What time should I arrive?’ ‘Between 2 and 2.30.’ He means in the morning. I try to sleep at 9pm and set the alarm for just after 1am. With three layers of clothes, I arrive at the security barrier an hour later. ‘I’m going to work with Roger Barton,’ I say to the guard and we both laugh. I walk up the steps from the car park with the view of Canary Wharf behind – a very different kind of market. I go over to the stand. ‘Ali, give Dawn her coat,’ Roger says within a breath of hello. He turns to the others: ‘Tell her what we’re doing, show her, make her work!’

The so-called ‘new’ Billingsgate market (the site since 1982) is a covered hall with adjacent buildings for additional cold storage, as well as a shellfish boiling room and an ice-making plant! (see: www.billingsgate-market.org.uk.) There are 54 merchants in all, selling from stands organised along three back-to-back rows lengthways with several cross-cutting paths at intervals along them, and from shops around the edges of the hall. There’s nothing but fish and seafood on sale, broadly divided into so-called ‘fresh’ or ‘wet’, exotic, frozen, plus smoked and different kinds of seafood. The floor of the market hall is green and gleaming with water that reflects everything around. There is a whole network of pipes overhead which bring water hoses to the stands. There’s a phone at each stand and plenty of mobiles. In fact, there’s a lot of talking to the world outside. And there’s a lot of moving about. Porters are everywhere, each with their number, either working directly for a stand-holder or ‘freelance’, getting work according to the demands of the day. On the first-floor there are the merchants’ offices, some directly overlooking the market, plus the Clerk and Superintendent’s office, the Fish Merchants Association, inspectors, maintenance, police and first aid, as well as the Seafood Training School which offers courses in fish cookery.

The first thing that’s striking as you enter the market site is the smell, not bad, just there. Even the freshest fish in such quantities smells of something. It’s as if there’s an odour from all the wetness and cold too. At this time, the place is relatively empty, although the two cafes are already doing a good business. Roger tends to set up early, and it can take a small team of people a couple of hours. By the time I’ve moved a few boxes of prawns and look up, there’s already more going on. The activity creeps up on you with cries of ‘mind your legs’, ‘… your legs!’ and the rumble of trolleys. It’s the porters’ space and it’s up to you to get out of the way. I’ve no idea what time it is most of the time I am there. At one point it is still only 4am, at another it is suddenly 7.30.

Everyone works very fast. I know this because I am trying to keep up with them and it’s a struggle. There are a lot of boxes of prawns, at least 7 sizes, all 2 kilos. Some have different coloured labels, sometimes the labels are the same colours but the size is different. You have to read them then put them in the right pile. I find it hard to see where the size is written and keep getting it wrong.

‘Give Mike a hand with the congers,’ Roger says. Yeah, right. 30 kilos a box. I can’t shift them an inch. So someone tells me to lay out the snappers. I start by trying to pick up a 3 kilo fish. By the tail with a hand around its slippery body. ‘Pick the fish up through the eyes,’ I get told. I hesitate for a moment but once I get beyond the idea of it, it’s actually quite easy. You can get a firm grasp though the sockets, the bones are hard there and can take the weight. But only two fish in, I put my bare hand – ‘did you bring gloves?’ Roger had asked like I was supposed to know – into the ice and catch my thumb on the razor sharp gills of the snapper. My coat is no longer white and pristine.

By the time I come back from finding a plaster, the snapper are all laid out and I’m directed to help Jo with the prawns. ‘You need a knife and a marker for this job,’ says Roger. The marker is like a chunky black Pritt stick and the knives are varied. I use the one with the smallest blade and try to imitate the others by making a cross in the plastic packaging which I then tear away. I feel moderately helpful doing this. Then Roger says to take away the rubbish, next to the cold storage area outside. It’s piled on one of the pallets with a hand-held steering device underneath. It’s simple if you know how. I don’t so just pick up an armful of rubbish. ‘Leave it to me,’ someone says immediately. I feel useless again.

There are two clear sections to the stand. One end is run by Billy, Roger’s right-hand man. This is where most of the large fish are – halibut, grouper (brown and spotted), all sorts of snapper, tilapia, red bream, conger eels and salmon. Plus some fish from the Indian Ocean, pomfret and other things I’m not familiar with, such as doctor fish and rabbit fish. At the other end, which faces one of the exits, there’s a big selection of other smaller fish and seafood. That’s where the squid are, and smaller farmed sea bass (10 for £12), plus sardines and all sorts of other things. The effect is of abundance. Between the two is the section with the prawns, then there’s another stretch before Roger’s ‘office’ (a space to write orders underneath the phone) and the ‘till’ (a drawer!). This is my patch for the day.

Everyone sells actively. ‘I want to hear you selling,’ Roger says, ‘not waiting for people to ask you things. So, what’s your pitch?’ Now I’m comfortable, I can do this. There’s a lot of cod, £3 per kilo. ‘I want to see all that gone,’ he says. Then there’s wild sea bass, £12 but I can go down to £10, I’m told. Next to that are chunks of tuna, £12, swordfish, £10, and marlin, £9, all vacuum-packed in clear plastic. In front, there are lobsters, £16. On the side, there’s a pile of razor clams, £5, and along the top, clams, £18 for a 2 kilo box, scallops (out of the shell, £18 for a 1 kilo tub, £29 for a 2 kilo one), dover sole (small, £7, and medium, £12), and packets of crabmeat, £2, and smoked salmon, £5 – but £25 in Harrods as Roger is fond of saying. I write out the prices either on the back of one of the boxes, or on a polystyrene lid as a reminder.

When the customers come, I talk about the eyes and where everything’s caught. I spot the middle-class people and tell them that the sea bass is wild, what a treat it is. I aim the cod at the Londoners, emphasise how it’s a bargain. The quantities are not small. I talk about how you can feed a lot of people with this fish, and realise that I’m saying that more to the tired-looking white middle-aged women and young and middle-aged black women. I emphasise sociality and play on their roles of being a host or provider. None of this is planned, this is what comes out, what I find myself doing when I’m not thinking about it. Of course it’s young and not so young men who want to flirt. Three people say they want to buy me. Yeah right, I reply flatly.

Lots of people seem to buy second time around, after checking out other fish and prices at other stands. A French couple buy the largest Turbot on the stall for £50. Then they come back for 2 kilos of scallops, £29. They know what they want, and don’t treat me as if I might be a source of knowledge. Others do, however. ‘What do you do with those [razor clams]?’ ‘How do you cook a sea bass?’ Now I am really in my element![1] I offer recipes and wise-sounding guidelines: ‘With fish,’ I pronounce, ‘the principle is always not to do too much’, and so on. I am getting into my stride and thoroughly enjoying myself. One man remarks, ‘You’re in the wrong line of work, you should be a TV chef!’ I’ve been laughing at that ever since.

When I think back on the day, I have a strong image of myself swinging a cod! I’m really getting the hang of it after a while and start to be able to feel the weight. ‘This one’s heavy, more than 2 kilos,’ I say to a customer. ‘Yeah, 2.4,’ Roger states after no more than a glance at the fish I’m throwing on the scales. He knows so well through sight and hold over the years he can now bypass the weighing altogether. He’s always right.

I get faster at mental arithmetic quite quickly. The first time something weighs 3.2 kilos I can’t calculate the 0.2. I’m embarrassed by this but own up and Roger gives me a calculator. Then I get the hang of how they round up and down and I more confidently let myself know the price, taking a few moments to check it in my head – or with the calculator if someone is buying several items – while I’m weighing the fish. No one challenges me. In fact, more generally, people treat me like a fishmonger assuming that’s what I do, seeing the role ahead of the person. I’m quite chuffed that I can carry this off, at least to the general public. I’m not selling to other fishmongers, Roger deals with them.

Roger tells me to tidy up at some point as gaps start to appear in the display. ‘Presentation is everything,’ he proclaims after getting out more tuna and swordfish, ‘line those up,’ he says. I do so then repeat the process with the cod and even reach under the stand to rearrange the sea bass. Water drips down my neck. I must smell of fish all through by now. By the end of my shift, the front of my coat and legs are soaked.

It’s gone quiet without me seeing it coming and I’m sorry it’s nearly over. Some of the stands are back to their bare metal frames as some merchants leave as soon as the market officially shuts at 8am. In other places there are large amounts of rubbish and people hosing things down. I’m tired now and a bit frazzled. Roger asks me to count up the money in his drawer, a pile of assorted notes and handfuls of change. At around 9am he says I’ve done enough. ‘So, what are you going to give me for dinner?’ I say. That was the deal. ‘Whatever you want,’ he replies and sounds as if he means it. I end up with 2 large cuttlefish, 4 dover sole, and a kilo of scallops. This feels like a good exchange. I drive home very happy. And grateful that I don’t have to do this every day.

[1] See recipe for Fisherman’s Cuttlefish at: http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/food-and-drink/features/mark-hix-cooks-up-your-favourite-recipes-418693.html.

A Job for Life

Dawn Lyon — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 12:29:34 +0000

In tune

I recently went to the workshop of a double bass maker and repairer. My friend was taking his battered bass there to see what parts might be glued and otherwise made to hold together again. ‘Can’t you clean it up whilst you’re at it?’ I asked naively, attending to the finish rather than the sound. Apparently there is value in layers of varnish and Roger is cautious. It seems to me that he’s sort of ‘reading the wood’ as he looks at the instrument, and he knows not to touch where he can’t be sure of the impact of changing something. ‘No, you wouldn’t want to do that…’ he concludes.

Waiting

The workshop is an extraordinary place for an outsider. There are pieces of instruments all around the single room, sections and strings and bridges and necks, and a pan of glue on the boil on an old camping stove. I can’t take it all in, and I can’t see how Roger manoeuvres his way through the arrangement of objects. As well as making new instruments, what he does here is to work on things produced through the craftsmanship of others, undoing and remaking them. It takes a careful eye and a trained ear, an understanding of the whole process of creating a double bass, a lot of patience and dexterity, and a kind of respect it seems to me. He’s not an old man but he’s been doing this for a long time already. Several years ago, he decided to take a break. ‘I tried being a driving instructor,’ he said. ‘I lasted a year.’ When he was doing his apprenticeship, the man who taught him had already told him his future: ‘You’ll never do anything else.’ And here he is, in his own workshop, in tune with his instruments.

The Right Trousers

Dawn Lyon — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 13:32:02 +0000

Left leg

Glue and silicon, paint and varnish, grout and wood-filler. Traces on his clothes. The trousers especially tell the story of my friend’s most recent jobs. There was that shower to fix urgently in Hackney one night last week, and the bathroom to sort out after a would-be plumber with too many tools and too few skills had been let loose in Hampstead. At the ongoing job in South London, he’s supposed to be doing the plumbing and not general building work, but it’s hard to keep the boundaries firm once on-site and when the other guy is not so confident. And working on his own place in the meantime means more varnish and paint than usual.

Right leg

The photos show the sides of his trousers, where his hands reach his upper leg. The marks on them are more than evidence of what got spilt or dropped. They indicate gestures of work. And how the right side (yes, he’s right-handed) takes the strain. And how if you’re going to do stuff like this, where you can’t help yourself wiping the residue of the materials that fix and cover and generally hold things together in houses and bathrooms, well you wouldn’t want to have the wrong trousers for the job.