Men in Smocks

My good friend, C Day, was helping me with some maintenance work at the studio. The job stopped because we were one nut short of a full nut and bolt.  Luckily, there's a hardware shop in Slaithwaite that, I was confident, would sell me a single nut. It's that kind of shop. It's also the kind of shop which has that yellow plastic film on the windows and that makes it feel like you're looking at its contents through an old fashioned bottle of Lucozade. 

     I showed the owner my nut and asked if I could buy one, just like it, from him. In total silence, he slipped his slim, Pound Shop, gilt–framed specs down from his forehead and onto the end of his nose. He held my nut between his finger and thumb, and inspected it, as if it was an odd shaped toffee he'd just chosen from a bag of sweets.

     "What pitch is it?" He asked, starring at me over his specs.

     Blimey. I wasn't expecting that. Like I'd know what pitch it was. I didn't even know that nuts had pitches.

     I could have made a witty comment, if I could've thought of one, but something in the way he was starring at me for an answer told me, for once, to keep it shut. I decided that pleading ignorance was my best option. Actually, it was my only option. Well, that's not strictly true – I could have driven 7 miles to the nearest B&Q and spent a couple of hours finding the Nuts & Bolts aisle, then another hour trying to compare my little nut with the ones in the bags of 20, to see if it looked similar. That's really hard to do without furtively making a tiny rip in the corner of the multi-pack and slipping one out to see if matches. But that would be bad form, and anyway, I still might have ended up buying the wrong 'pitch'.

     So, I came clean and confessed that I didn't know that nuts had pitches etc. 

"Oh yeah..." He started, enthusiastically. " That's the thing with threads y'see.." 

     Luckily I knew what a thread was, otherwise he'd have double stumped me. But I listened with interest  to his mini, master class on Pitchism and came out of the shop with a new twin brother for my little nut. Result.

     But here's the thing: That hardware shop owner was wearing a smock. A brown one as it happens. I clocked it as soon as I walked in. Experience tells me that, when faced with a man in a smock, I'm going to come in for a beating. Why? Because men in smocks know shit. Think about it. Butchers, Fishmongers, Doctors...They all wear smocks, and they wear smocks for one reason and one reason only: Intimidation. The wearing of a smock to work says: " I'm an expert." "I'm an expert and you're not – otherwise you'd be wearing a smock as well – and you're not, so, vis a vis, you're screwed mate.

     And I can provide more proof to this theory. 

     When Alf, another one of my good friends, was helping me install a new central heating system at home, he sent me out to buy a load of plumbing stuff. He wrote out a list and gave it to me, along with various sound bites of technical flack that I managed to forget as soon as I drove away. As it turned out I should have payed more attention. 

     I arrived at the plumbers merchant, list in hand – like a schoolboy with a note from his mother, asking if he could be excused from metal work because all that filing plays havoc with his new fillings. Actually, that's a point: Metal work teachers - they wear smocks too!

     I digress. The man behind the counter at the plumbers merchant spotted me straight away. And I he. He was a member of the Smocked Generation and I knew I was in trouble. He could sense my fear. He could probably smell it as well.

"Yes young man, what can we do for you?"

     Young man? Young man? Nobody, other than people with less than average vision, calls me a 'young man' these days. He'd got me rumbled. If he thought, for a moment, that I was even tenuously aligned with the plumbing trade, he'd have definitely greeted me with something like "Morning Mate", or "Ayup Fella". 

     Game over. I handed him my little boy list. As he took it from me, his eyes expertly scanned my hands for any tell tale signs of active, manual labour. What he witnessed were the hands of a fop. A mouse pusher. A keyboard monkey. I felt like showing him the tips of my fingers on my left hand and saying "Look!" And that I play guitar and they're really quite tough, just there on the tips, 'cos those guitar strings can be jolly hard to press down sometimes. But I didn't.

     Instead, he asked me a question. Quite a few questions, actually. But it just sounded like one long question.

"These end fit caps doodah: Do you want push fit cosy snuggle ups, or twisty–snap–bosh, high pressure linkage verdigris? 

"God knows. What's it say there?" I asked, gesturing to Alf's list.

"I dunno. I can't make it out". He said.

     He turned the list around so I could have a go at trying to read it.

     It was written in hieroglyphics, so that immediately ruled me out. But I remembered some of the words that Alf's mouth was making as I left, so I thought I'd try those on Mr Plumb:

" I think Alf said something about H two Oh, barrier cream, 3 degree, obscene elbow spigot?" I said confidently.

     I wasn't fooling anybody. Not even myself, and certainly not Smock Man.

"Tell you what" He said. "I'll give you these ones and if they're wrong you can bring em back. O.k.?"

"O.K."

     I wasn't exactly sure what my options were at this stage. I wasn't even sure if I was a Male anymore.

     I paid Plumb Bob, loaded up my car (not van) and drove back home, smarting from the thoroughly good Smocking I'd just received.

     It was only one of many.

     I don't know. Maybe it's just me. Maybe I was traumatised by a man in a smock when I was little.  Perhaps my mum left me in my pushchair for a moment whilst she went into the bakers, and the next thing I knew I was looking down the business end of a row of biros, neatly arranged in the top pocket of a smocked mister who was trying to get in my pram.

     Come to think about it, I grew up in a suburb where the bakers was next door–but–one to a hardware shop. Maybe that's what really happened. That could well save me a bob or two in regression therapy.

     But there we have it. Me and The Smock just don't hit it off. Having said that, my best mate Dom wears a smock for his job. Luckily I don't have to deal with him during working hours, but I bet he's a right clever Dickie once he slips into that grey button–up baby.

     So, if there are any experts out there who can help with my phobia, get in touch. But don't bother if you're going to be wearing a smock.

Middlesborough Extension

Door Buzzers in Prague

Sunday Morning Car Park

No Butts

Saturday Morning at t'Mill.

Sometimes I go in to work on a Saturday morning. There’s a certain energy about a workplace when you’re the only one there. The phones look poised, as if they are always about to ring. But they don’t ring. In a way, that's as disturbing as if they were to ring. I hate phones. Ringy bastards.


The Saturday silence, the emptiness, the abandoned film set atmosphere of a deserted workplace – it's always made me feel like I’m the only person left in the world – like the bloke in Nevil Shute’s On The Beach. It also makes me feel hugely self–righteous that I’m ‘working’ when every other man in the world is watching Football Focus, or Swap Shop, or eating bacon. I’m so selfless, me.


My studio is a converted mill, in a small, former textile village, in Huddersfield. The village is called Slaithwaite but pronounced “Slawit” by its indigenous pie eaters. There is a penchant for the shortening of place names in Huddersfield. Nearby Skelmonthorpe is referred to as “Shat” (sic) by its dwellers, whilst neighboring Linthwaite has been truncated to “Linfit”.


I’ve no idea why these locals got themselves involved in the business of abbreviation. They are fiercely protective of their bit of the world and God forbid you mispronounce their beloved town’s name. So why do they muck about with it? Perhaps they do it to create a linguistic trip wire to trick and thus expose the unwary ‘comer-in-er’. Or maybe the omission of a few, key, consonants buys them valuable time, which they can spend doing other things, like drinking. Or maybe they just enjoy sounding retarded.


Anyway, back at t’Mill I have all the peace and quiet I need to write and design for my customers. I stopped referring to them as ‘clients’ a few years back because I decided it sounded pretentious – definitely too pretentious for a lad in Slawit anyway. Our studio (I share it with my partner Ruby, a fashion photographer) is what Grand Designs’ Kevin McCloud would lazily refer to as “A great space”. Tall, smooth white plaster walls and modern desks, on which perch Apple Macs with screens the size of billboards. The thick Millstone Grit walls insulate us from the cold trans-Pennine winds that whip down the valley and they help to silence the hum of the little passenger trains that shuttle back and forth, from Huddersfield to Manchester, atop a colossal soot-black Victorian viaduct that dwarfs its landscape.


Like all good northern mills, ours has a yard. The stone setts of its floor have long been entombed in a thick strata of tarmac, across which the forklift trucks perform their daily waggledance; to and from the dark warehouses that border the yard. But, not on Saturdays. The odd worker is usually knocking about – bagging a bit of time and a half –  but other than them, it’s as quiet as the looms it once owned.


This Saturday morning I was outside my studio door, having a cigarette, watching a man using his boss’s jet wash to clean down his 4x4 off–road vehicle. I’m not talking about a Chelsea Tractor here, I’m talking about something that looks like it was made from left over bits from a Mad Max film. I recognized its grill because it had a badge on it that said LandRover, but, as he blasted away the mud crust, the rest of its body parts were just a mysterious combination of home made angular aluminium panels, drain pipes and dodgems.


He finished thrusting his water gun about and stood back to admire his efforts. His face and spectacles were splattered with the rehydrated slurry from last weekend’s meeting and, for a few moments, he just stood and looked, like a loving artist, at his battered, red, V8, off road thingy.


He spotted me watching him.


“There!” 

He said, 

“ Na tharrits clean, acan see what’s bust onnit so as a can fix it f’ tommora’s meeting.”


“Ah, I see. Presumably so you can drive it into a big rock and break it all over again?” I replied.


He fixed my stare for a moment, stuck his thumb in the air, gave me a huge, muddy grin, and said:

“Aye. It's worrits all about”.


At that point I felt as though I had a decision to make: Was that a deeply philosophical statement he’s just made – or was it just the enthusiastic response of a man who still likes playing about in mud?


I went back inside and pretended to do some more work.