The Steaming Rants of Ernie Wight

Frosty Airs and Icy Glares

The cold room of the dairy is a place to either wear wool, or to be working. Stand still for too long and you won't be able to move, although the shivering should break any ice that starts to form on you. The sensation as you push through the thick polythene flaps with a trolley loaded with White Stuff and emerge into the warm night air is of shock, because it is cold enough outside for breath to steam and glass to frost up, but still warmer than the dairy.

The dairy manger is still giving me advice on what amount of white stuff to load, and what little extras the customers expect that won't appear on the load sheets. Some shops like to have a couple of tubs of cream on Fridays, but I have to remember which ones, and how much cream they want. On a Wednesday I have to deliver to a school because the roundsmen have Wednesdays off. I haven't been told where the school is, or how much one-third pint cartons it has, and so for the past two weeks I have missed it. The manager is a quiet and patient man who I have never seen flustered, even when customers where complaining about our late arrival, or the shortness of the expiry dates on the milk. He has tolerated my continual mistakes without even a single exasperated gesture or word of criticism.

Despite my best endeavours things are still going wrong. Mostly I have left the wrong amounts of the wrong type of White Stuff at the wrong places. I have a few excuses, the sodium light and grainy print on the loading sheets are the principal ones, but on several instances there was just not enough of the particular type and size of White Stuff in the cold room when I was loading. Since the customers are mostly selling the White Stuff on to their customers, it is not possible to leave them 5 2-litre bottles when they wanted 10 1-litre bottles. When such shortfalls occur I have to phone them back in on my mobile, and someone drives out later on with the missing amount. This is the down side of the "Just-in-time" philosophy that so many businesses operate today, there is no way to build into it measures to deal with lorry breakdowns, roadworks, unexpected customer orders, or just plain old life.

Also, there is no manual or set of procedures I can read up on to know what to do in odd circumstances. So when I arrived at a school and discovered that I was 20 thirds short, I carried on, and later on phoned back with the bad news. The foreman was not happy. "That's a long way for someone to have to come out, why didn't you leave them a few pints to make up ?" Because I didn't know, and the phone wasn't answered when I rang through the first time.

I am still steaming in the cab as I drive around, mostly know about the injustice of the Fast-track-visa system, and about the callous behaviour of the contract agencies. One of the problems with having no mentally-challenging job is that the mind goes off on it's own tracks. It is possibly this wandering that is causing me to make so many mistakes, but try as I might, I can't switch off my own thoughts.

The windscreen of the van was still coated in ice when I had finished loading. Although it felt warm in the night air, that was only compared to the cold room. It was still several degrees below the frost point. I asked the manager of there was any de-icer. "Yes", he said, "I usually use hot water from the boiler". I was carrying out some paper rag soaked in hot water when he stopped me again and spoke in his normal quiet direct voice. "In the cab, you'll find an ice-pick."

It might have been his quiet tone, it might have been my tired brain, it could have even been nothing more than I book I had forgotten I had even read, but I experienced a moment of intense paranoia and disorientation. I realised again I was a sleeper, programmed to wait for one vital moment in my life when I would be given a task to accomplish, a task of such significance that it would justify all the hard times and peculiar reversals of fortune I had experienced. I was going to be told to drive into Chippenham, wait at a certain roundabout until a large Jaguar approached, back the van out with hazards lights on and walk normally from the van to the stopped Jaguar, where I would use the ice-pick to ventilate the brains of the man in the rear of the car, shouting "So Bronstein is avenged!"

"I use it to scrape the thick ice off the window before using the hot water", he said. I searched the cab, but couldn't find anything resembling an ice-pick. I did find an old and blunted scraper that refused to remove anything except four thin parallel stripes of ice from the glass, but it gave the hot water an edge to work at and the ice was soon clear from the outside of the screen. The inside of the cab took a lot longer to clear. I am still waiting for my mind to clear.