Ten years ago, I spent a couple of weeks working at a warehouse on one of Basingstoke's industrial estates. Cardboard boxes full of glassware manufactured abroad would arrive in a shipping container on the back of a 25-tonne truck, to be unloaded onto pallets and stacked up in the warehouse, where they were stored until it was time for them to be separated out and distributed to shops around the country. It would take three of us an entire day to unload one container: monotonous work, though there was satisfaction to be gained from the way the different cartons tessellated, and from slotting the last of them into place on its pallet and watching it be driven out the length of the empty container, eight hours and forty feet after the doors had been opened to reveal a daunting eight-foot-square wall of cardboard waiting to be dismantled.

LRB 9 February 2006 | PDF Download