The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work - Alain De Botton [18]
Later, caught in a traffic jam on my way out of Hayes, in a landscape of discount-furniture warehouses and chemical storage tanks, I lost my temper and wished a biblical plague on the house of biscuits, so that its directors might learn to tremble before the right gods. I remembered a passage from John Ruskin’s The Crown of Wild Olive, written in 1866, eighty-one years before the invention of the Jaffa Cake: ‘Of all wastes, the greatest waste that you can commit is the waste of labour. If you went down in the morning into your dairy, and you found that your youngest child and the cat were at play together, and that the boy had poured out all the cream on the floor for the cat to lap up, you would scold the child, and be sorry the milk was wasted. But if, instead of wooden bowls with milk in them, there are golden bowls with human life in them, and instead of leaving that golden bowl to be broken by God at the fountain, you break it in the dust yourself, and pour the human blood out on the ground for the fiend to lick up – that is no waste! What! you perhaps think, “to waste the labour of men is not to kill them.” Is it not? I should like to know how you could kill them more utterly’.
Well-meaning friends advised me that I appeared to be slipping into an unfamiliar and somewhat hysterical mood, and might benefit from an interval of less stressful ‘me-time’.
8.
A week later, I received notice that the senior management of United Biscuits had approved my request to visit the factory where the Moments were manufactured, at a site in eastern Belgium, in hilly farming country between Verviers and the German border.
I chose to spend a few days driving there and so took a ferry to Ostend, then meandered along minor roads, stopping off at the occasional zoo or heraldic museum, afraid that I might otherwise leave Belgium sooner than I had planned. However, when it came to meals, I ran scared of the forced intimacy that provincial family restaurants so often involve and chose instead to eat in the anonymity of motorway service stations. At one of these, on the E40, I met a Turk who was driving a consignment of dates from Izmir to Copenhagen. We started chatting after I parked my car next to his articulated lorry, beside which he was shaving with a high-end Braun machine that cast a haunting green light across his face. Because I admired his chrome-plated cherry-coloured juggernaut, he invited me to have a look inside its cab, which had a small bunk-room at the rear fitted out with brightly coloured kilims, carved teak panelling and a window that looked out onto an incongruously flat northern European landscape on which a herd of Friesian cows was grazing.
In Liège, I booked in to the Holiday Inn, a concrete block which hovered on the outskirts of the town, seemingly fearful of entering its medieval centre and keenly nostalgic for the architecture of Detroit or Atlanta. In the evening, I ordered a breaded chicken escalope from room service, and ate it whilst sitting on my bed, reading a book on the history of art in the Low Countries. Some time past midnight, I began watching a television programme made up of a rolling succession of illustrated personal ads submitted by members of the public, including a baker from Charleroi who was on the look out for ‘l’amour et un peu plus’, a programme which continued for several hours deep into an insomniac night and revealed levels of longing