Georgian jobs • Page 5
Needed: women and children who like walking and marching. The boom in the brick industry has created several openings for puggers.
You will spend your days stamping up and down in troughs in your bare feet, mixing tons of slippery clay for brick manufacture. Unlike your French grape-treading cousins, your toes will benefit from wonderfully smooth skin and you will get a few pence for your efforts. Marvel as your footywork is transformed into a brick by forcing the clay into moulds and then stacked for air drying.
The firing kilns will provide some warmth in the winter months, and the odd batch of decorative terracotta work should add some variety to the normal vista of thousands of standard bricks surrounding you as you toil. Wellies are not allowed and strong thigh muscles are essential.
'And in the red corner ...' Tough, buxom and hard women wanted for the main event at every backstreet brawling house on Friday and Saturday nights.
No slapping or pinching allowed. We need real women who can heft a serious right hook, kick like a mule, scratch out eyes and bite off ears. Yes, women fighters are the top of the heap when it comes to entertaining the poor masses. Each bout can last up to 100 rounds of three minutes each. Punters will bet their pitiful wages on the fighters, and if you can endure the onslaught, you could become queen of the slums.
Get yourself a manager (who will, of course, be a weedy man) and hit the big time. Violent kneeing, elbowing and head-butting and joint-wrenching wrestling all get big cheers from the baying crowd. Clothes ripping will gain extra points. Bare knuckles only.
Children needed who are not scared of the dark. Now that the night-time city is rife with muggers, murderers and pick pockets, several vacancies exist for link boys.
Using a flaming torch, you must skedaddle through the back streets, lighting the way for decent folk who need to get home to their posh houses. With no street lamps, your beacon will be their guiding light past the evil temptations and dangers of the slums.
A penny will be your reward for your expert navigation, but go wrong and you'll just get a clip round the ear. All city locations must be mentally mapped so you know exactly where you're going, and you cannot refuse any offer of work. That means there will be no 'Oh, not going south of the river at this time of night, mate.' Only shrewd and streetwise types need apply.
If you don't mind trailing a rancid smell or getting your hands dirty, the fur processor's job could be for you.
Animal pelts – that is, skins with the fur still on – are washed and scraped to remove all the nasty bits of fat and gristle that can quickly decay, smell terrible and damage the fur. Then copious amounts of grease are rubbed into the skin to make it supple, and salt added to aid in its preservation.
Disease is rife among fur processors, and the clinging stench of the dead animals can be incredibly difficult to get out of your clothes and off your own skin. If you haven't got many friends, or you want to hang about with other people who don't have many friends, this job would be ideal.
If you're scared of heights, this really is a worst job. But if you're not, it can actually be quite pleasant, provided you don't mind working in all weather conditions and under the constant threat of falling to your death.
You'll need to be quite a handy person as steeplejacks need to carry out all sorts of work in lofty places. It's not all weather vanes and loose tiles. You'll need to be a competent mason for repairing decorative stonework, a roofer for fixing those leaky church spires, a bricklayer for repairing factory chimneys and a demolition expert for when they need to be taken down.
Crucial to securing the post is proven experience in working with ladders and ropes, as you'll need to secure all of the scaffolding yourself up to several hundred feet. Those who suffer bouts of dizziness need not apply.
