The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work - Alain De Botton [19]
The next morning, I woke up, still tired, to the sounds of a vacuum cleaner outside. Dressed in a towel, I opened the door and saw a trolley and an abandoned room-service tray on which sat the strangely appetising remnants of a hamburger and fries. The door opposite was ajar and I glimpsed two cleaners inside laughing animatedly while they worked. Seeing them strip the bed, I remembered the book I had read the previous night, which had detailed the way in which the seventeenth-century artists of the region had sought to celebrate the skills involved in domestic service, honouring in particular the scrubbing of kitchens and courtyards, privileging such activities over more conventionally prestigious biblical subjects.
By the time I was ready to go down to breakfast, the neighbouring room had been transformed. It had been turned into an immaculate history-less space awaiting its next occupant, motionless except for particles of dust whirling on the back of invisible eddies of air in a shaft of morning sunlight.
As often happens before an important appointment, I arrived far too early at the biscuit factory in the village of Lambermont – and so drove to a nearby archaeological museum, where I learnt about flint and axe manufacture in Neolithic Belgium. There were records of nasty disagreements and, in one display cabinet, the remains of a man whose head had been broken open with an axe, and who had been found by archaeologists curled up in a defensive position, hugging himself from the blows of his opponent. The agony of death long ago became so vivid that the importance and solidity of the present were for a time thrown into doubt.
Because my appointment to tour the factory had been scheduled to start at the ambiguous hour of twelve-thirty, I had earlier that morning given thought to whether I might be offered lunch or should eat beforehand, eventually deciding to make some cheese sandwiches at the breakfast buffet, a snack I now ate in the car while listening to a radio interview with the Belgian finance minister.
When I pulled up at the gates of the plant, Michel Pottier, the manager, was waiting for me in person, carrying with him a spare white gown, a pair of rubber shoes and a hairnet, an outfit forced upon all visitors which, by giving one a sense of adhering to an extreme millenarian movement, was apt to lend a peculiar tone to conversations.
A warm-hearted and garrulous figure, Pottier had prepared a second lunch for me in a corner of his office, and expected a hearty appetite, so I consumed three additional sandwiches and several Moments which had come off the line only that morning. As we ate, Pottier took me through some of the challenges attendant on the making of biscuits, placing special emphasis on the need to cool the dough rapidly enough to prevent it from melting the chocolate with which it would subsequently be coated. Years of working around noisy machinery had left my host mildly deaf in one ear and given him a concomitant habit of leaning in uncomfortably close during discussions, so close that I began to dread his enunciation of a word with a p or a g in it. Pottier’s disquisitions on topics such as the plant’s annual biscuit tonnage and the ideal viscosity of chocolate did not always accurately gauge the levels of interest of his interlocutor, but they communicated clearly enough a surprisingly intense pride in the plant and its workers.
Alongside the Moment, the factory also supplied a number of leading brands for the European market, including Delichoc, Gateau and Teatime. Pottier informed me that this last, a chocolate-covered digit, had recently been marketed in a limited-edition tin bearing an image of two minor members of the Belgian royal family cradling their newborn baby.
When we entered the main production hall, I was reminded of the peculiar feeling I had experienced in other factories upon seeing modestly sized domestic objects emerge from the jaws of colossal machines housed in hangars