Low life | 28 June 2018

I heard the last and final call for flight 6114 to Nice while shuffling forward in the unexpectedly long queue for security. My chances of catching it now looked slim. They looked slimmer still when my bag was nudged into the line of those needing to be searched, and I despaired at my rotten luck. Eventually, my bag was placed on the metal search table and I presented myself as the owner. Across the table, I faced two women, both aged about 60. One was in command, the other subordinate. The commanding one had a smoker’s face with a touch of the eldritch about it that wouldn’t have looked out of place in a Richard Dadd fairy painting.

It was immediately clear, however, that this woman dealt only in material realities and that she took no prisoners. If I had told her that the last call for my flight had been broadcast ten minutes earlier, and any further delay would scupper me, I would have got short shrift. She had a job to do and she took that job seriously. I am not, though, someone who despises people who take their low-paid job seriously. For five years I was a dustman. I walked like a dustman, talked like a dustman and was proud to be a dustman. ‘I’m not taking that,’ I used to say, officiously, to selected liberty takers. One can be serious about one’s job or one can be un-serious. It’s a choice. And although, inwardly, I was doing my nut about a pointless delay, this woman’s utter seriousness about her job was so impressive that it made me pause and speculate about it. Had her decision to treat her job with the utmost seriousness been taken whimsically to begin with, then become an ingrained habit? Or had she, in her later years, through poverty, decided to turn a disillusionment with life, and a cynical disposition, to pecuniary advantage? Or was it perhaps all an effortless act and in private she was actually amusing and fun? Whatever lay behind her decision to take her job as seriously as this, I was respectfully cheering her on.