Back in the M.A.F.F. - Part One of Two

It was the first time I’d ever been asked the question ‘Are you allergic to silage?’ at a job interview. I couldn’t give a definitive answer because I wasn’t sure if I’d ever even met any silage.

I had told the woman behind the desk at Seacroft Job Centre that it was a complete and utter waste of time going after a job that I wasn’t the slightest bit qualified to do and that I didn’t really want it anyway, but she said that it would affect my benefits if I didn’t pursue every opportunity that raised its head in the job market. I was sure that there were vacancies for brain surgeons and ballet dancers but she wasn’t sending me away for interviews for those, so why did she want me to go and work as a scientist? I vaguely remember her being called Janine. For every Jimmy in Glasgow and every Dimitar in Bulgaria, there’s a Janine in Seacroft; a not entirely salubrious district on the sunny eastern side of Leeds.

I had GCE ‘O’ Levels in ten different subjects plus a couple of ‘A’ Levels, an Efficient Deck Hand certificate, a document stating that I was proficient at lifeboatmanship and a note from my mum saying that if they didn’t get me back in work a bit sharpish she’d be jolly cross with them, and me.

The problem was that I didn’t have an ‘O’ Level in biology which the people at the Ministry of Agriculture Fisheries and Food (M.A.F.F.) were insisting upon. While I was pouring out my personal details so that the Job Centre staff could set up a file on me I had mentioned that I had kept tropical fish for a while and that I was very fond of food, so it was probably this that made them think I might be suitable for the job. All my knowledge of biology was self-taught.

I wasn’t particularly worried about these benefits that they spoke of and I told Janine so, much to her annoyance. She had wanted to torment and blackmail me for being one of those awful people that was out of work. When I sat down in front of her desk I’d only been unemployed for just over an hour. Until a little more than a day before that I had been away, working on a ship in some of the hottest bits of the world for nine months which meant that I was entitled to nine weeks of paid leave. I’d phoned the shipping company’s office in Glasgow to tell the personnel officer (you may remember the poor, bewildered Jimmy from an earlier episode of my life story) to tell him that it was probably for the best for all concerned if my life on the ocean wave was to come to an end. It was my idea for this working relationship to cease but he made no attempt to talk me out of it so you might say that I had left the company by mutual consent, in true football manager style. He said he’d arrange for my final month’s salary to be paid immediately together with the nine weeks’ holiday pay that was due to me. This sudden influx of funds meant that I couldn’t give a bosun's whistle about the two pounds sixty-three and a half pence per day or something like that that was on the table to keep me alive until I found a new job. Even with no job I was going to be financially fine for around three months, especially considering that at the back end of a Leeds winter there was very little to spend money on anyway other than Guinness, records and the occasional night out with a Janine.

However, I went for the job interview anyway because I knew I’d have to find some sort of gainful employment eventually so it would have been a mistake to go upsetting Job Centre Janine. I also had to remember to tread carefully as she was a friend of my sister who also worked there but who wasn’t allowed to deal with my case because, as a close relative, there existed the risk of her letting me have the two pounds sixty-three and a half pence per day or something like that without my meeting all of the requirements set out in Department of Health and Social Security (D.H.S.S.) regulations.

Not feeling the slightest bit nervous, I turned up at the M.A.F.F. regional headquarters at the other side of Leeds later that day to face a group of middle management people dressed in almost white laboratory coats with breast pockets stuffed full of Bic biros and last year’s poppy still attached to the lapel. Although they worked in a scientific environment they never left their office desks so there was absolutely no need for them to wear the white lab coats other than for the fact that the blizzard of dandruff from their almost entirely bald heads was less likely to be noticed on their shoulders. Upon meeting them, and to give me something to do during the interview, I started to think of a suitable collective noun for them and quickly settled upon a scabbiness of civil servants.

The only smart clothes that I had at the time were those that made up my merchant navy trainee officer’s uniform and I was sure that I would have looked a bit of a prat wearing that on the bus riding round Leeds ring road to the Government Buildings in Lawnswood. I had even looked a bit of a prat wearing it on ships and consequently didn’t. So I arrived for the interview in my best tee-shirt and the only pair of jeans that I had that weren’t held together with Rolling Stones and Leeds United patches, a leather bomber jacket, a tropical tan and hair down to my shoulders. I must have looked like a Bee Gee or a member of that other popular beat combo that everyone loved at the time, Olivia, Newt and John. But still they offered me the job. What were they doing wasting taxpayers’ money in this way? They were obviously more desperate to fill the post than I was to be used as the filler.

Could I start tomorrow? No I bloody well couldn’t! It was just over twenty-four hours since I had arrived home by plane from Tampa in Florida. I probably still smelt of the phosphates (fossilised bird shit used as fertiliser) that I had been involved in supervising the loading of until the point when I left the ship. I still had a mild case of jetlag and because I’d been so busy during my first day at home ending one career and trying to start another, I hadn’t had even a suggestion of a good long sleep in my own bed. Technically, due to the expedience of Janine, the begrudged cooperation of me and the desperation of the desperate men at the M.A.F.F., I was only unemployed for six hours but managed to hold out until the following Monday before starting work and actually earning any money.

I was taken on by these people to carry out the work of simulating (not stimulating) a cow’s stomach, a field in which I suppose I already had quite a bit of experience, even though I had gained it in more of a pub and curry house situation than in a field. Nobody was thinking about Brexit back then because the European Union hadn’t even started. Everybody in and out of politics seemed to be quite happy that we were members of the Common Market, except for a few people in places like Harrogate who found it a bit common. But it was quite important that the stuffed shirts in Brussels were kept absolutely up to date with what our farmers were feeding to their bovine stock.

I shouldn’t be telling you this because before they would give me my own supply of white lab coats and Bic biros from the stores department I was forced to sign the Official Secrets Act. Some of the things I tell you in my writing might be a bit tongue in cheek but this bit is absolutely true. If the Russians were ever to find out that some cows in North Yorkshire were having trouble going for a poo, then fingers would be pointed and I would be in big big trouble.

So if you promise never to repeat a word of this I can tell you that each day I had the responsibility of accurately weighing out twenty-five grams of each of twenty-four different samples of cattle food that had been sent to us by north east England’s finest cattle food manufacturers for testing. I had to individually wash/squirt each sample with acetone (which smelt rather nice, by the way) before boiling them for one hour in an alkaline solution, filtering them, washing them again with acetone (mmhh, it certainly had a bit of a kick to it), boiling them for an hour in an acid solution, filtering again, and then another acetone squirt (by now I was feeling rather squiffy). Every day I processed twelve samples each morning and another twelve in the afternoon before toasting them in a laboratory furnace overnight. Apparently this is exactly what goes on in the stomach of a cow. Poor cow!

The following morning, I would be left with only a bit of ash in the samples’ individual glass dishes. This was the fibre remaining at the end of the digestive process. I had to weigh these and calculate what percentage they were of the original twenty-five gram samples. The figure needed to be exactly three percent for the sample to pass the test and the manufacturer to be able to sell that particular batch of feed. If it was less than three percent, there existed the risk that any cow that it was fed to might be constipated and if it was above three percent there was the risk of it having a dose of the skitters.

Now this might sound like a load of cow shit to you but to me it was bread and butter. It was nowhere near as monotonous as you may think and for anyone with a bit of imagination it was a wonderful job. While the laboratory beakers and jars of stuff that ironically looked like Bovril bubbled away above Bunsen burners I couldn’t leave my place at the bench because there was a risk that the samples in their solutions might boil over. If they had done I would have had to start from scratch and the scabby heads in the office would have stopped scratching and come down on me like a ton of bricks for not meeting targets. So I kept one eye on my apparatus and one eye on whatever book I was reading at the time.

The daily journeys on Leeds buses to and from work each day might be described as the mother of all monotony, even when Leeds City Transport put some shiny new buses into operation on the route. I always had a paperback book in my pocket so that I had something to read to keep me awake and reduce the risk of me missing my stop. If I had missed it, the answer to my problem would have been to sit tight as it was the number nine Ring Road service, so within two or three hours I would have got back to where I wanted to be without getting off and standing at another bus stop on the opposite side of the road in the West Yorkshire rain and wind that made the empty cigarette packets swirl so beautifully around inside the confines of the bus shelter.

I could say that in this period of my life I was reading significantly more than in any that had gone before. I was reading to escape and there seemed to be so many things that I needed to escape from; home, work, the climate that I was struggling to readjust to after having been floating around close to the equator for so long in my previous job, the bus, the other passengers on the bus who would become a bit malodorous if they got wet and my lack of any friends who might be up for a bit of a night out on any night of the week other than Friday. On a couple of occasions on the bus to work I had missed my stop because I had become so engrossed in my book; the permanently steamed-up windows that I couldn’t see out of having added to the problem of being in the right place at the right time. Thank goodness for flexi-time and flexible right times! The fact that I could continue reading when I arrived at work was a huge bonus, though being a true professional Assistant Scientific Officer (Casual), as my branch of the Civil Service had branded me, I never got so engrossed that I let my beakers of silage broth boil over. A claim to fame that I have remained proud of to this day.

The afternoons in the lab were much more interesting than the mornings as some of my fellow cow cake processors would go off to the nearby pub, the Lawnswood Arms, at lunchtime (sometimes I would join them for a fruit juice or a small sherry) returning in a state far more interesting than the one in which they had left and in the ideal mood for doing a bit of entertaining.

Link to part two...

https://www.abctales.com/story/turlough/back-maff-part-two-two

Image:

Every image I use is from a photograph I have taken myself. 

On this occasion - A Leeds bus, but regrettably not the number nine.