‘Another those cold winter mornings when he forced himself out to a job he didn’t like and for which he was temperamentally unsuited. Even though he’d never held a dollar in his hand and never would.
‘I’m awa’ the noo,’ my fatherin-law would recite cheerfully, as he set off for his nightly stint setting up machines in a factory. To him, it was infinitely better than hewing coal on his knees in Scotland, though not perhaps as satisfying as his first job planting pine trees to create a Caledonian forest or his second as a jacquard loom fitter.