UK now 4th biggest exporter

But in stark contrast the first two weeks of that holiday introduced me to the world of manual work as done by the uneducated.

Today, if you walk down the road from the Whitchurch Crossroads in what is now a suburb of Cardiff's Urban sprawl towards Llandaff, you will come across a field by the river Taff, between the grounds of Whitchurch Lunatic Asylum and what was Llandaff railway station.

In 1975 this area housed a tinplate works, now long derelict, flattened and probably yuppie housing enjoyed by idiots who have no idea how poisoned the land they have their lawns on really is. The factory in its heyday took sheet steel made at East Moors Cardiff, rolled flat and then coiled, loaded onto railway wagons built for the purpose and transported up the Llandaff spur of the Taff Vale Railway iron ore railway line that ran where Eastern Avenue does now, where the cils were offloaded, cut into sections, cold rolled, pressed, acid cleaned, cyanide treated and finally pressed into car bumpers before a final electroplating process

My job, for two weeks, was to work with a crew hired through Manpower (the temping agency) to clean the lace during its two week shutdown. It was a ten hour shift with an hour for lunch in the moddle of what I reckon was the hottest summer to date (the drought of 1976 was yet to come)

I spent my first few days pushing yard brooms to clear areas where lorries would arrive with raw materials and collect finished car bumpers, painting yellow and white lines to mark out the reversing bays and loading areas, red hatching to identify the hazard areas where failing to watch where you were going would probaby mean a coil of several tons of steel being dropped on you, or maybe a decapitation from the moving steel sheet. I spent the rest of the time cleaning and oiling and greasing grimy machinery under the supervision of one of the factory's permanent employees whose job was to keep the equipment working. My introduction to surviving a factory environment where Health and Safety was a joke would merit a thread of its own.

It was an interesting fortnight. For a start I thought i would have problems "fitting in" but not a bit of it, if asked (and I was !!) I said i wanted to make money to put away so i could actually afford beer and stuff whie at University. 

I grew up very quickly that fortnight. It was my first exposure to hardcore porn magagines for a start. I never did pluck up the courage to ask my then girlfriend to explore the physical possibilities of some of those centre page illustrations.... and for some of them, well, forty five years later i still haven't worked out the engineering needed.

But the most interesting moment occurred when after about forty five minutes of sitting around doing sod all i decided to actually pick up something and start doing some of the job i was being paid to do. This caused a certain amount of alarm amongst my fellow loafers, one of whom actually asked has i seen someone coming ......

I very quickly replied that I wasn't sure but out of the corner of my eye I had seen a door swing open about 100 yards away, which indeed I had. One of the others risked a gaze in the direction I mentioned and told me not to worry, that was down by the loading bay and the wind sometines did that, but from that point on during the seriously extended lunch breaks they used me as lookout ............

I came away from that fortnight with a turn of phrase embedded in my mind. Although it particularly applied to unskilled manual labour, it has served me well at all occasions where i have some managerial or mentoring responsibility

That phrase is "People Do What You INspect, not what you EXpect