The first day of my holiday was spent working harder than I have done for probably about 18 years.
I went round to my friend Andrew Mackay's house to help him build his patio.
After weeks of sitting at my computer writing (or failing to write) I have to say that this was enormously satisfying work. I spent all day outdoors, mixing up the mortar and carrying huge slabs of concrete around. It made me feel like a man. Not that I'm not a man. I am a man. But you know, it's not often that I feel like I am a proper man. It was stupidly enjoyable!
To actually help create something real and palpable was an enormously gratifying feeling.
Like my grandfather who worked in various manual jobs (he built roads and was also a miner) I am short and stocky and fairly strong (or would be if I spent more time in the gym!), and I wondered if this was the kind of work that I should actually be doing. Fifty years ago, no doubt I wouldn't have had much choice.
Mackay told me that if I really enjoyed the work then I could make £120 a day cash in hand doing it professionally. I am giving it some thought. It's all very well writing jokes about cocks, but you can't have a barbecue on a knob gag can you? A merry quip may bring fleeting pleasure to a few like-minded idiots, but in a hundred years the people of the future will be standing on the patio I helped build (or possibly hovering slightly above it), eating space burgers and drinking a blue drink. That is genuine immortality.
Mackay correctly pointed out that helping him for one day was probably not the same as having to get up at 5 and then go and wait with loads of other men, hoping that someone will come in a van and offer you work, that some Bosnian men are prepared to do for half the cost, but he was failing to appreciate my blinkered romanticising of an unpleasant and dirty profession.
I know that if my grandad could have made a living writing about cocks he would probably have not been that bothered about having to miss going down the mine.
But he still had a pride in who he was and it's a pride that a man can only have by being like a man. We may search for meaning in art, fine wine or the smile on a baby's face, but all we are put on this earth to do is to lift objects that women can't lift because if they try their wombs will fall out.
Mackay didn't give me money for my day's labour, but kindly provided me with cups of tea, a hearty lunch, a curry for dinner and a big load of Budvar beer when we'd finished. I am considering standing on the streets of London with a sign saying "Will work for food (but only good quality food. It's not that I'm hungry.I just like food.)"
If anyone has any manual labour they need doing in August, then let me know. In a month's time I will return to the world of the poncy writer.
Rather than the world of the poncy writer pretending to be something he isn't.
