When I was a furniture delivery man

One of the best jobs I ever had in my whole life was delivering furniture for the big department store in town. Working on the loading dock was a deeply satisfying way to earn something just above minimum wage - we'd sort out all the inwards goods in the morning, and then spend the afternoon bombing around the neighbourhood, dropping off fridges and sofas.

Me and my mate Gary could have your new washing machine set up, and the old one out of sight, four minutes after we knocked on your door. Sometimes it was a strangely complex and mentally taxing job - you get really, really good at figuring out angles and what can fit around where, and it usually worked. We once got an ancient fridge down a spiral staircase in a house owned by the son of the mighty Arthur Lowe, and we only ever failed to deliver one sofa when we just couldn't make the angles work.

I also got so very good at backing that small delivery truck up some horrendous driveways, and using the wing mirrors to squeeze into impossible spaces - as long as there was a millimetre of space in there, you were sweet.

I fucking loved it, it was just what I needed in life at that time. It was my mid 20s, and I was still not just not sure where I was going in life, and keen to just kick back a bit and let life happen for a while.

Intellectually, I justified it by reading a lot of Bukowski novels, and getting into all those layabouts in the beat generation, all extolling the merits of decent honest labour, and declaring that a working class hero was someone to be.

It's all a con, designed to keep the scum in their place, but I was all right being a little scummy in my scuffed denims and torn workboots. I could still feel some truth in these claims of working class heroics. It was as simple as getting out there and working your arse off and helping people get their shit, and there was something noble in that.

All that hard work, and then going home and getting wasted as fuck on booze and pot every night, because you really did need something to wash away the weird aches of the day.

I never went to university - I was in my first factory at 17 - but I was constantly reading books from the library, draining it dry of all the good stuff, getting stuck into the philosophy sections, giving all the great classic novels a whirl.

It was a lifestyle I could have got trapped in forever, hooning around town in that truck. But of course the bosses fucked me, and I had to go, and went back to a shitty factory job which was fine because the manager there wasn't a dick, and that was genuinely worth giving up those trips in the countryside.

I've been a journalist since 2004, at the ripe old age of 29. and haven't really done much real physical labour since then. I really do feel my age some days, but I still feel I could still do it that job if I had to, even if the department store has long since outsourced that kind of labour. At the very least, I bet I could still set up your washing machine in four minutes.