Work Tales.

[Fist and Faith]

Among the best movies ever. Top several.

[peter]

Here's another story - difficult in a different way and with no humour at all in it.

Earlier in the week I'd done a shift with a lady who I rarely work with, but enjoy working with when I do. She's a nice, respectable sort of lady - but wayfriend's description I'm afraid about hit's the spot. She's my age (mid sixties) and seems to have lived without picking up much information about the world she has inhabited for over half a century. Here's how it went.

We were discussing the recent convulsions at the top of our government and I happened to make a comment about Kwasi Kwarteng, the recently departed chancellor of the exchequer who had, through his disastrous mini-budget, brought the UK economy to near ruin. She looked puzzled. "I've heard that name," she said, "Who is he."

Now at that point, given the news of the previous week, this would be akin to not knowing who Vladimir Putin is. We continued.

I explained who he was, and made a few observations about his failed policy, to which her response was, "But what I don't understand is why he doesn't go and live in his own country to do these things. Why is he doing them here?"

Now Kwarteng was born in London to parents who came from Ghana and is as much British as I am or she is. I told her so and then commented about his replacement who, I observed was more left leaning politically than the man he replaced.

"I'm going to sound silly," she said, "but I don't understand what this left and right business is. What does it mean?"

I tried to explain simply about the sliding scale of political belief, likening it to a ruler along which, between the left hand side and the right, your political opinion was likely to sit. On one side would be total state ownership and control - the left hand end - and at the other, the right, would be total freedom of private interest, the market and libertarian values (all couched in the simplest of terms you understand).

It is a true mystery to me how it would be possible to reach our age as a normal functioning human and not have absorbed even the most rudimentary understanding of the world, of your own country, of the society within which you have lived and been surrounded..... but there it is. As I say, this women is a nice person who has simply been failed by the situation of her life, which, in some way, has short changed her in provision of the most basic of information. But she saved the worst until the end, and I was truly saddened by it (not contemptuous, not angry, and definitely, definitely not amused).

We were talking about a lass who previously I had swopped a regular rota position with my workmate to work with, because the two of them had not been able to get on. I said that I was getting on okay because I simply kept working at my job and didn't let anything she said bug me too much (she can be a bit.... pushy, perhaps is the word). My lady colleague shuddered. "No," she replied. "It may be taking it a bit too far, but I'd rather spend time in Auschwitz than do a shift with her."

There isn't any way of winding up a story like this really. I'll leave it there.