Oh for the glory days before health & safety.

Like you & many others of us who wandered off the secure career path into the transient employment jungle, due to putting someone else as no.1 rather than ourselves, I recognise your old job. I've done a few of those myself.

I must say though that my present job, though nowhere near as well paid as some of those earlier ones, is definitely 'the best', so much so that I'm still enjoying doing it 4 yrs after retirement age. I can't help it if I'm lucky.

There's a car park in Stoke-on-Trent & various other places round & about there, where you could park an ocean liner & it wouldn't crack. That's because old mine workings were stabilised by pumping liquid concrete into them. The guys who drilled the holes & pumped the concrete were paid by  the cubic metre used.

I was one of them, & boy did we pump thousands of those fuckers, the trick being to keep going when the pressure gauge on the pump went into the red. Why stop when there's money at stake. The whole rig would either shoot out of the ground in a fountain of concrete, which happened only once to me, or would burst through underground to another cavity, whoopee.......those holes just drank money & we got a grand share.

You get worn out fast earning big blue collar wages though, so that wasn't for me.

The owner/operator of the rig was ex British army & his 2 associates were both Irish. One was young & a convinced IRA supporter, the other was much older & already going deaf due to the noise. Someone who thought nothing of flying to Australia for a few months to get a job when things were slack, then coming back to hitch up with the crew when it picked up again. That blew my mind.

When it comes to making a living political differences go by the board is my observation.