French sou. So it was that I began my working week with a day spent with my hands all over breasts: small breasts, big breasts, funny-shaped breasts, slippery breasts and even curry-flavoured. And when it wasn't breast, it was thighs, and drumsticks, and the odd-frozen chook, too, and some of them are VERY odd. Such is life in the chicken factory...That was how I began my first ever blog in August last year, but since then things have moved on.
I am not now, nor have I ever been, a chicken plucker - wouldn't know where to start, frankly. So the blog title is 100% correct.
That said, I have, since living in France, worked with chickens, albeit not in their adult stage, and with the industries that process them. At a hatchery, where the eggs were sorted in various sizes and occasionally hatched on the conveyor belt in front of us; at the abattoir, where they arrived alive in plastic crateloads, to then go to their doom in an automated killing and plucking machine (sorry to the squeamish amongst you), following which I would have to hang their plucked and lifeless bodies on hooks so they could be steamed, strung and sorted into sizes; at the factory where the flesh came in chilled or frozen and was then cooked or smoked or otherwise processed into edible delights, as described above.
And I've also worked with fish, spending three months at the end of 2005 as a fish-filleter in a salmon factory. There was even a short period as a roofer, but after 6 weeks we came to a job that was complicated even for the professional artisans I was working with, so that was the end of that, as it would have been too difficult to educate me about the ins-and-outs of that while they were getting on with it at the same time.
Now it's biscuits, or gateaux as they are known collectively; we anglophones tend to think of gateaux as just cakes, but according to my tattered and coverless French-English dictionary (Robert Collins, if you're interested, only 2½ years old but looks ancient now) : gateaux secs - biscuits (Brit), cookies(US). NOT gateux, (euse), which I just discovered, meaning senile, ga-ga, doddering, as in vieux gateux, silly old duffer (or for the ladies, vielle gateuse, silly old bag) - don't you just love dictionaries?
Working in the agro-alimentary industry was not what I would have seen myself doing had I been asked three years ago. That's when we arrived in France, with plans to go a-travelling the length and breadth of the continent in an old, large but very stately German motorhome, keeping the kids out of school for 6 months to enable them (and us) to discover the European delights that had thitherto been a closed book to us all. Ha! Life, panic and a dodgy alternator put paid to that idea, and we never got out of Brittany.
Subsequent thoughts of running gîtes and a micro-brewery came and went, until realisation came that a 'proper' job would be necessary, and so I went out to work, mainly through agencies, but for the roofing and what I do now through direct applications.
All a bit different from what we had expected, but better, I think, than plucking chickens.
