I once saw this piece of graffiti displayed in tall white scrawled lettering, high up on a wall in Shakespeare Road, in South London. I've either driven or cycled down that road more than a dozen times since, but I've never thought to look for those words again.
This was the type of written graffiti displayed way before those books of collected graffiti became so popular. I can't remember now, but I'm pretty sure I bought at least two such books. I even started to write my own witty one-liners too.
For some reason, though, those words have both amused me and horrified me equally. I am amused, or had been amused because I've always been a hard grafter, and it just amused me how some people would think that work is bad for you. And yet, in the same breath I know how work can work against you, especially if you're doing a rather energetic job and you incur an injury, say.
I'm doing a rather energetic job myself. One which requires my total fitness. I work a 10-hour day, 4-day week. Lucky old me, you might say, but even though we have our '318s' to show us the details of our duties with things like meal breaks, we rarely have the opportunity to follow them to the letter, as we're almost always on our feet for those ten hours, or more.
It's a killer of a job, and this is the first time that my job has really scared me. I can do my job, but only if I can get fitter as I get older, and be able to take all the shit that Royal Mail will be throwing at me.
Maybe I'm exaggerating my predicament, but I've got a strong feeling now that I may not make it to retirement age, which for me is in about 15 years time.
Right now, I'm trying to get myself as fit as possible, so that when I reach a certain age when most people should be doing little or sitting down jobs, I, hopefully will have enough fuckable energy left in me to stave off from being well and truly fucked by work before I can enjoy what's owed to me.
