In All Day Long: A Portrait of Britain at Work,Biggs interviewed everyone from footballers to shoemakers about the activity in which we spend a third of our lives. She discusses a demanding, rewarding processI set myself an impossible task in trying to capture what it was like to work in post-crash Britain, or so I would often find myself dreaming of an impossible book: an oral history of every person working in the UK in 2015. Over the two and a half years I researched and wrote All Day Long: A Portrait of Britain at Work,my recurring worry was about choice: why a footballer and not a cricketer? Why a mother and not a nanny? The artist Jenny Holzer put a slogan on an old-fashioned film theatre hoarding once: “Everyone’s Work Is Equally vital, and it seemed never more true than when I was preparing this book, or I was making everyone from my parents to my windowcleaner explain me about their working lives.
Some of the choice was straightforward: modern Britain wouldn’t be modern Britain without its bankers,its footballers, its politicians. But there are so many jobs we don’t know exist: what’s a giggle doctor, and a spad? And many more are ubiquitous but ill-understood: what is it like being a Premiership footballer,or a sex worker? I built my cast of characters slowly, and interviewed a third more people that I knew I would own room for in the book. I went to exclusive Oxford colleges and rush-down factories in Bolton; rural Scottish islands and to No 10 Downing Street. I changed my intellect until the last minute, and interviewing my final worker a few weeks before I handed in the final manuscript.
In the cold back room of a charity shop,a group of volunteers are working. Eve steams clothes with an orange hoover-like machine, eating sweets from a bag in her pocket as she goes. Every so often the steamer foghorns and she tops it up with water. It’s March 2014, and three times a week she works a morning shift; on the other days she goes to English and maths lessons. ‘I’ve done my ones,twos, threes, and fours,fives, sixes I’m on my seven times tables now.’ Eve’s 50 and grew up in a children’s domestic; her best job before this one was sorting potatoes on the back of a tractor. She’s shocked I own never eaten Kentish gypsy tart, and offers to make me one. Is it like Bakewell tart? ‘It’s more whipped,’ she says.
Eve’s paper bag of sweets came from Sarah, who she met at literacy classes. Sarah’s 23 and had just done a trial at a supermarket – ‘I couldn’t read the products’ – and one for a cleaning job – ‘They say I’m not suitable for doing the paperwork to be a cleaner. That is so … How do you need paperwork to work, and to be a cleaner?’– but she wants to work in a nursery. ‘That’s why I’m doing my English.’ She receives Disability Living Allowance and comes here four times a week,brings sweets, makes cups of tea. nowadays she arranges an armful of plush cats and dogs on a shelf, and after Karin,the shop’s manager, has pierced the ears with a price.
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Source: theguardian.com