Beware of the wild corned beef!

The problem with the summer months is light. There’s so much of it. From around 0400hrs the light burns through the curtains and when I awake, I’m awake, and there’s no getting back to sleep. I remember being in Alaska in the late 90s during the summer months when there’s hardly any darkness and it’s light all day long. After a long flight from London via Minneapolis I remember sitting somewhere in the Anchorage Hilton, it might have been my room or a rooftop bar, or both, but it was gone 11pm and it was broad daylight. The hotel had black-out blinds and once they’re pulled down it might as well be December, that’s how dark it gets. They had black-out blinds when we reached Seattle too and I’m thinking back to that trip and how amazing it was. I remember whale watching and flying in a light aircraft to reach a more remote part of Alaska, the state the Alaskans call the 49th as they’re always referring to the ‘lower 48’. Because parts of Alaska are land-locked, light aircraft is the only way of getting around. It was a great trip and one I will never forget. Hold on a second while I switch off the alarm on my mobile phone. Right, where were we? Alaska. I’ve written about it somewhere; the article is probably in my garage in a big plastic box and I really ought to dig it out and read it and see how my writing style has changed.

I used to have a plastic holdall, blue and white, with the name of a company, HP Foods, printed on each end. The company had nothing to do with the trip, it was just a bag I decided to bring along. I think I’ve still got it somewhere, it’s probably lying around in the depths of the downstairs cloakroom, which is really a large, dark cupboard full of coats and hats, scarves and God knows what else.

Sometimes I wish I lived in Alaska, I could do with the desolation and let’s face it, Alaska is a desolate place, full of bears and moose. Black bears are as commonplace in Alaska as foxes are here in the UK. They rummage around at night in the bins in people’s back gardens. Moose, apparently, are even more dangerous than bears and I can believe that, they’re huge beasts that might look ‘cute’, but are far from it. Mind you, bears look cute too, but you would be mad to try and stroke one. I don’t know for sure, but they probably don’t have snakes in Alaska, it’s too cold, but I might be wrong.

I was in Alaska because of the salmon industry. Did you know, for example, that Alaska is the only place where the salmon is caught wild and not farmed? Even today, many years later - it’s amazing how time flies - whenever I pick up a tin of salmon I check the base for the word ‘Alaska’ or ‘Alaskan’ embossed on the tin. Then I’ll say something like, “Get this, it was caught in the wild.”

American students work on the ‘slime lines’, as they’re known, at the salmon canneries; it’s a summer job and probably great fun, although it doesn’t really look that appealing. I’m guessing it pays well, because the job is basically slicing up salmon on some kind of production line and taking out all the guts and bits people won't eat. It’s the sort of job I wish I’d known about when I was a student. All I could come up with was working as a lift attendant in a department store. Some job! Boring if I was doing it all day, but quite fun if I was filling in over the lunch period. There were two lifts, one was very old-fashioned with pull-across gates; the other a push-button affair. The former was great because there was a huge lever that moved back and forth to go up or down and it was possible to stop the lift an inch from the floor and then watch the customers ‘fall’ into the lift. They never really fell, I wasn’t that evil, but let’s say some of them stumbled in. The other lift was more closed in, with solid walls and automatically closing doors that, once shut, enclosed all inside into a dimly lit space with no outside views of the shaft or the floors as they passed. In that sense it was scary, but also more irritating. When somebody pressed the ‘call lift’ button located on every floor, a small disc on the lift’s control panel would light up and buzz and if a customer kept their finger on the button it would buzz angrily. It was possible, however, to bypass floors simply by not pressing the buzzing button on the wall and that way I could irritate the customers simply by avoiding them, but the buzzing would get angrier and angrier until I felt there was little left to do other than pick them up. If they complained, I blamed the lift, or, as Americans call it, the elevator. The other good thing about the modern lift was it could be ‘stuck’ between floors. This was achieved by taking my finger off the ‘close door’ button just as the two doors came together. The lift doors would then open between floors and I’d have to call the electrician. Actually I don’t recall phoning anybody, I think they simply showed up when queues started to mount on each floor. While the lift was stuck I’d sit there reading magazines until I was ‘rescued’. They used to winch the lift up to the nearest floor and I would make some excuse, anything that cleared me of any blame, although it happened too often and eventually they took me off lift duty.

There were, of course, many better jobs in the store, like working in ‘small electrical’. This was with a guy called Martin, a drifter - if such people can exist in the UK as there’s not a great deal of land on which to drift. Martin worked the holiday camps on the coast during the summer months and found a job inland for the winter. He and I would sit in the store room most of the day behind some huge cardboard boxes that were used to carry fridges and freezers and we would play cards. I remember a girl called Judith and how we invented a store room monster we christened ‘the wild corned beef’. It was a piece of foam packaging material that resembled a chunk of corned beef and we rigged it up on some kind of spring and then erected a notice reading “Beware! Wild Corned Beef”. Judith was apprehensive and inquisitive. Could it be that there was a wild corned beef on the loose in the store room? It kept her out of the store room and made our lives easier, but one day we thought we’d let the corned beef loose and when we saw her we pulled back the spring and let it go. “Comin’ atcha!” The wild corned beef chased her out and we resumed our card game.