There is something salubrious about chocolate production, after all. It’s an amiable
In the American Midwest of hte 1970s and 1980s, 'factory in ruins' was a stock phrase with all the force and familiarity of 'farm crisis' and 'long cold winter'. At least 2.5 million manufacturing jobs in the industrial heartland of the US were lost in just the period 1979 to 1983. [...] There was …
[...] This was in the late 1970s, before Thatcher, during the years of industrial unrest that preceded her election victory. We were talking about an imminent strike on the railways.
‘Your mother reckons the communists are behind it,’ he said. ‘But it’s not communists. You got to stand by the un…
n 1965, we moved to a new three-bedroom council house with a garden and a lot of green in front of it. My father still did his two weeks of days and two weeks of nights but he had learned to cope: this was now normal life, a human being can get used to almost anything. Then the factory managers cam…
But the constant disturbance to my father’s sleep cycle wore him down. For the two weeks of the day shift, he was morose. My brothers and I, and my mother, too, saw less of him than we had when he’d been working in the park. He’d get home from work around the same time as I got home from school, un…
