Chapter 19: Don't Work Too Hard

Aylesbury to Oxford

Tomas came here to make money and learn to speak English. 12 years later, he had no money and could barely speak English. He had thick, oil-stained hands and wore a threadbare grey T-shirt. His rimless square glasses did nothing to hide his tired blue eyes.

“So something has gone wrong…” he said despondently, letting out a self-deprecating laugh.

We were making our way out of Aylesbury, winding through busy fields. His car was filthy with dust and oily rags and it smelt of fried chicken - an empty box lay on the floor in front of me.

“I’ve made a lot of very bad choices in my life,” he sighed. I asked what. “Women, mostly,” he confided with a snort.

Tomas was originally from near Krakow in Poland. He’d hoped he wouldn’t be in Britain long, that he’d make his money in just a few years. Now he couldn’t see any way out. He arrived in Leicester one winter and found work in a meat factory. Every day he’d chop huge chunks of red raw meat, chucking the heavy slabs into buckets to be taken off. Splayed carcasses swung from giant hooks as they squeaked and rattled along the production line shining under the naked white lights. He hated it but it wasn’t the horror of the blood, bone and meat or even the lingering smell that most stuck with him. It was the biting, unforgiving cold. It crept under his blood-stained coat and through his flimsy gloves and lived now in his abiding memory of the godforsaken place.

His colleagues were all Polish. He lived with Poles, watched Polish TV and spoke only Polish. When he finally escaped the job and became a laser cutter in a steel works, nothing changed. After 7 years he moved to Sussex. Suddenly he was no longer surrounded by Poles and finally, he began to pick up some English.

Now he lived near Oxford and was a mechanic with his brother. The work was gruelling and endless. Car after car came in and he worked 7 days a week. You could see the gnawing sense of exhaustion in his weary slouch and hear it in every sigh. I asked why he didn’t take fewer cars and have some time off. He looked at me like a fool, “Better to have too much work than not enough.”

“Do you regret coming to Britain?” I asked.

He looked indifferent. “You’ve got to work,” he shrugged.

“Have you made any friends at least?”

“No.” The response was blank and honest, “I work too hard. I haven’t got any time for friends.”

I thanked him for at least taking the time to pick me up as he left me on the edge of Thame and accelerated off to his garage.

Luckily I wasn’t waiting long. A man in a red car with a smooth, perfectly clean bald head and a neatly trimmed beard picked me up. His name was Isi. I told him what I was doing as we pulled out.

“Fuck me you’re a brave man!” He exclaimed. “I would never do that!”

“Why not?”

“Pfffff….” He contemplated his answer carefully before answering, “Can’t be bothered to be honest mate.”

Fair enough.

I asked him if he’d watched the Queen’s funeral. It had been that morning and everyone was still talking about it. He wasn’t much bothered by that either. He didn’t like the Royal family, unsurprisingly perhaps given his Pakistani heritage.

“You know, the jewels in the crown aren’t theirs,” he began, “That family has a lot of stuff that doesn’t belong to them. They just took it. It’s like walking into someone else’s house and stealing everything they’ve got and they can do nothing about it.”

Isi knew full well that the past is a complicated and nasty place. Shit happened. But nevertheless, the Royal family’s blatant display of its colonial past was an unsavoury reminder of some of that shit. Their flaunting symbolised, for millions around the world, the causes of their present suffering.

“Britain invaded most countries in the world,” Isi continued. All but 22, I interjected. “Those countries may have now left the British Empire, but it’s too late, they’ve got nothing. The British took everything.”

He spoke matter of factly as a historian might, unaffected by the long-reaching hand of the past.

“They don’t pay their taxes either,” he said referring back to the royal family.

“Do they not?”

“Nahh…” he replied with a shake of his perfectly groomed head, “Even if they had to, do big corporations pay taxes? No. It’s the same thing. They all find ways to get around it.”

He sensed there was corruption up there.

“The other day I was driving out of London yeah,” he took a long draw on a brightly coloured plastic vape and puffed out the cloud. Its sweet, candy smell momentarily obscured his floral aftershave, “And I saw this massive queue. It was really long and I thought what’s that? And then I realised. Fuck me! It’s a food bank!”

I told him there were more food banks than McDonald’s in Britain at the moment.

“Why have we got that in this country?” He asked me rhetorically, “Why? Don’t get me wrong this is a good country. It really is. But why do people need to go to a food bank man? That should not be happening.”

I thought back to that morning and how I’d been pushed with the crowd through the streets of Mayfair en route to Hyde Park. The crowds had silently broken around glistening Ferraris and wound under the golden porticoes of unattainably expensive hotels.

Isi turned back to me and asked if I knew much about Islam. I said I knew a bit. It turned out though I didn’t know that most Muslim men pee sitting down. “You know otherwise all those splashing drops go all over you,” he explained. I looked it up after and discovered that while it’s not haraam to urinate standing up, it is strongly encouraged to do so sitting down for the exact reason Isi had illuminated.

Conversation turned for some reason to Myanmar. Perhaps it was the persecution of the Muslim Rohingyas I don’t recall. I explained how I’d stumbled across a party of soldiers tramping across through the jungle in a far-flung civil war there. They’d posed for photographs with us and their RPGs, machine guns and bullets hung across them like sashes. “Why can’t people just be nice to each other?” Isi wondered, “It doesn’t matter if you’re pink, yellow, green, brown whatever man! You just gotta help each other out. If you can, great. If you can’t, thank you!” He wafted his hand. “It’s as simple as that!”

If only it were, we both thought to ourselves.

Palaung Region, Myanmar

Palaung Region, Myanmar

He couldn’t take me all the way to Oxford so dropped me a few miles out. Dusk was settling as we pulled up. “Bye man,” he called cheerfully adding a final piece of advice, “Don’t work too hard.”

I promised him I wouldn’t.

It took barely a minute to be picked up again. The backseat chair didn’t work properly so I was wedged at a very acute angle for the few miles to Oxford. It was two guys on their way back to town where Mason, the driver, ran a pub. I didn’t catch his mate’s name through his thick Scouse accent.

We talked about the funeral.

“I thought the whole thing was disrespectful frankly,” the Scouser said, “Would I want my dead body dragged around the entire country for everyone to see? Would I fuck!”

It wasn’t a long journey and I couldn’t hear much of what was said in the front mainly because I was being crushed by my own chair so was relieved when we pulled into Mason’s pub on the south side of town. I hopped out, gasping at the evening air and when I’d recovered we went into the pub. I leant on the bar and Mason slapped me on the back, saying cooly to the barman, “Get this man a pint and stick it on the tab.” We shook hands and he left me to it.

I drank my pint and walked up into Oxford’s centre. On the way, I saw an old school teacher and stopped him for a chat. He was an eccentric man who walked with long slinky strides and whose wild hair clung to the sides of his bald head. He used to run a school trip where they’d walk from Sienna to Rome. Having done it so many times he knew the way by heart but he explained this past year had been awful. The kids, holed up for 2 years during lockdown, were the most immature and self-centred 18-year-olds he’d ever taken.

I had decided I would stay in a hostel so I made my way to the only one in town, intrigued to see what Oxford’s backpacking scene was like. Inside it felt strangely like every other hostel I’ve ever stayed in anywhere on earth. The usual friendly Europeans writing journals and the handful of middle-aged men fast asleep at weird times of the day.

I met a Hawaiian girl in the common area who was spending a few months in Europe. I told her I was about to head into town for a pint and she decided to join. She was an airy, easy-going girl, the daughter of US military parents and sister of two military sisters. She didn’t fancy the army though and worked behind a bar instead, but when she visited her younger sister who was having surgery she decided then and there to quit and go travelling.

“What’s your name?” I asked.

“Cascade,” She replied dreamily as we walked down the stairs.

We wove on through the streets, past the ancient colleges and came by Oriel. It took me back to a few months before, hitching out of Oxford when I was picked up by an Oriel maintenance man. It was a strange coincidence given I’d just put the phone down to a cousin who’d been in the college. He’d assured me I was certain to get a ride in no time and that he had a suspicion it would be in an expensive car. Sure enough, a Tesla pulled over and the driver had an Oriel shirt on.

His name was Luke and he had a fantastic mannerism of supremely confident seriousness. We found common ground in the blues and he told me he was in a band. “You should start a band, mate.” He said assertively, “Get yourself a drummer and he’ll know a bassist. Drummers always know bassists, you see.” He nodded, to confirm that that was indeed always the case. “You gotta personality-check them though. The last thing you want is a dodgy bandmate. You know, been on the road 14 hours, get into an hotel room and he goes and does a massive SHIT and stinks out the room! Don’t want that now do you?”

I’d agreed no one wanted that.

Cascade.

I thought of Luke as we passed. In the distance, the warm glow of the Bear Inn lit up the dark alley. Cascade and I ducked inside the cosy, wood-panelled pub, its walls and ceilings covered with old dusty college ties. They’d been serving beer there uninterrupted since Henry III was on the throne - except for the occasional pandemic like Covid, Spanish Flu, the Great Plague of 1666, or even the Black Death which I realised with a vertiginous sense of scale had caused it to miss its 106th birthday.

Unfortunately, Cascade didn’t seem very interested in this fact. Instead, she proudly showed me the sweets she’d bought from the Oxford sweet shop, which, she told me, was founded in 2016.

We had a few beers at the pub then headed back through Oxford’s ancient streets. Past its great halls, libraries and heavy stone doorways and its slightly less great sweet shop. We passed the twinkling lights of a kebab shop and after a long day, I decided I couldn’t resist its temptations. And anyway, all good stories end with a kebab.