Friday April 01, 2005

Product of the week Heinz Tomato Sauce

Only the sauce from Heinz will do. I do hate it in places where they have the Heinz bottle with the right label on it only to fill it with an inferior brand. I am afraid to say we have this on many of our meals especially my shepherds pie . I used to like the big glass bottles of the stuff but have finally accepted the plastic version.

Early jobs while at school

I thought I would remember my first part time jobs as a schoolboy. My first job was a saturday job in an old fashioned hardware store where all the sales people wore grey coats. Nothing was prepackaged so you bought nails by weight. People also bought paraffin by the gallon to heat their houses.

I then graduated to a butchers. Baxters in fact. I cleaned the store on saturdays with a friend. I have no idea what we were paid. We started with the large glass windows, first scraping off this weeks paper adverts ( glued well on) with a razor blade in some kind of tool. We then put whitening on the glass and rubbed it off to produce a clean window. I worked on the outside, my friend on the inside. After rubbing the whitening off we then showed each other where we had missed bits of the stuff. The display cabinets were next. Each was empty but needed cleaning, ice removed, trays cleaned etc. The glass on these was also polished. We then worked in the back ,first on the wooden blocks used to cut meat up on. These were washed, covered in sawdust and then a strange brush was used to scrape the surface clean. I think we then did the knives and other implements. Finally the floor.

We often were given pies to eat or bones for our dogs. One day the lid of a pie fell of and revealed a mouldy surface of meat. We never accepted the pies again. I'll write about my time in a chicken factory soon..