In between school and heading off to university,
I worked weekends at a nearby bakery. It was only part time work, and the long and short of my duties was simply to serve customers, keep the place clean at the beginning and end of my shift, and to occasionally assist in re-stocking/counting stock. Standard dogsbody work, but it gave me money to go out and get twatted with my friends of an evening, so it did me just fine.

Anyway, anyone who has ever worked in a 'proper' bakery before will know that baking bread is a 24/7 business; the actual bakehouse ran all night in order to have stock for the following day, and this is common practise for a busy bakery.

Ordinarily, the proprietor and head baker Nick managed to fulfil the daily quota of stock each evening; however, on this occasion he had (foolishly) agreed to supply bread for a friend's wedding the very next day, so I was called in to help, despite not having the foggiest notion of what I was doing.

The evening wore on and gradually (very gradually) I began to pick up the practice of mixing and kneading dough, and we were making exceptionally good time. Quite a few hours in, and with some bravado at the pace of our bread production, Nick stuck a twenty in my hand and ordered me to head down to the nearest all-night offie and get my hands on some beer to, ahem, 'lubricate' the production process. Thirsty from the night's work, we polished off a few too many refreshments and were decidedly merry.

It was at this point, unsurprisingly, that the hunger set in. After a night of hard graft, and with nothing but beer in our tummies, we suddenly realised we were utterly famished. Now exceedingly sleepy and hungry, and with our bread order finally baking away in the ovens, we realised that our only option was the scoff a couple of the spare barely-cooked, doughy loafs from one of the ovens. Scoff we did, and with the night's work done, I slinked off home, went to sleep and thought nothing more of the whole experience.

Until I woke up the next morning.

As I woke, I realised I could barely open my eyes. A thick crust had formed in the corner of my eyelids and I had to pick a fair bit of it off before I could even see clearly. On closer inspection, the eye-crust was actually bread dough that had somehow found it's way into my system after the previous night's drunken feed.

That's what I call a 'bread rheum' disaster.
(Coin Operated Boy is reading the new Bravissimo catalogue on, Wed 29 Jun 2011, 18:29, Reply)