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Tuesday 25 September 2018

Day 151: Echoes

I'm tired. Being a man is tiring. We put up a lot of wood today. Lifted a lot of light boxes. Hefted a lot of... No, that's all the names of Man Things that I know. Wood and light boxes. And lightboxes aren't even that manly, although when they're three metres long and being hoisted four metres in the air, they feel pretty manly.

Toolbars. That's another thing. Didn't really do much with them though. Twobeh. That's one. That's just wood again, but when it's thin planks of wood you call it two-by-four, or you just call it twobeh, so all the other men know you're in the gang.

Lunchtime is good when you're a real man. You get sandwiches and cheese and onion crisps and a can of coke and a little bar of Dairy Milk, and let me tell you, us real men looove our little bars of Dairy Milk.

What else do we like? We like the crisp morning frost on the windshield of the van before we drive out of the hotel car park when the sun is still rising and the sky is golden. We like how the voices echo in the empty convention centre early in the day. We like the repeating corrugated ceiling strips that go back and back into the distant mists, endlessly, making the hall look like the cavernous hangar from some dystopian science-fiction film. We like hanging tools from our belts. Taking the weight of a large lightbox above our heads with three other men, and knowing that none of us will let the others down. Being at the top of a ladder with a view onto the unpainted tops of all the displays, seeing people in high-vis vests scuttling about, feeling the energy and concentration in the air. We like working with our hands, the honest joy of a job grounded in the physical world done well. The smell of the wood. The strange mindfulness, tranquility, of the work. Looking at our achievements at the end of the day and thinking, We did that, that was us.

But most of all we like little bars of Dairy Milk. Oh boy do we love them.

Steve is out of the shower now so going to get ready and go for tea in the hotel restaurant, then some cheeky Switching, then a bloody good sleep. Aces.

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