I rode to work each day on my 50cc moped, through the centre of Sheffield. This needed pedaling up the hills, but could do 30 mph on the flat. Sometimes as I rode - I can remember this clearly - I daydreamed about the day I would bring a future girlfriend to see where I used to work. I wish I could remember why I daydreamed this, because it seems a bizarre thing to desire. Perhaps I wanted to be able to say, "See my roots. Understand machine knives and you'll understand me." Or maybe it was a deeper-seated Yorkshire respect for dirt ("Where there's muck there's brass"). But my favourite theory is that my view of life put loyalty - to my work, to my past, to my friends - central to fulfilment, and I believed that, with love, it would become a shared loyalty - to our work, our pasts, our friends, and to each other. This is my favourite theory not because it seems most reasonable now, but because I think it captures something about how I was then.

As for my job, I was helping to put together documents for the Health and Safety Inspectorate, so I had to catalogue all the power presses, lifting gear, and other dangerous tackle. I don't think we had to do anything about the safety of the file cutting machines, which were all organised in two big shops, one above the other, and made a continuous din as their operators fed through file blanks, and the knives cut dozens of equally-spaced ruts in the steel. But the power presses were fierce things, in which large chunks of metal were shaped under hydraulic force. All of Makins' were properly guarded, but I once met a man who'd had his arm pressed. That  contextualized my job.