The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work

i: A logistics hub

1.

Two centuries ago, our forebears would have known the precise history and origin of nearly every one of the limited number of things they ate and owned, as well as of the people and tools involved in their production. They were acquainted with the pig, the carpenter, the weaver, the loom and the dairymaid. The range of items available for purchase may have grown exponentially since then, but our understanding of their genesis has diminished almost to the point of obscurity. We are now as imaginatively disconnected from the manufacture and distribution of our goods as we are practically in reach of them, a process of alienation which has stripped us of myriad opportunities for wonder, gratitude and guilt.

Critical to both our imaginative impoverishment and our practical enrichment is the field of endeavour known as logistics, a name rooted in the Ancient Greek military figure of the logistikos or quartermaster, who was once responsible for supplying an army with food and weaponry. Today the term is used to refer collectively to the arts of warehousing, inventory, packaging and transport, an industry which counts among its greatest achievements the ‘cool corridor’ between Africa and Europe down which cut-flowers and vegetables travel, the FedEx hub in Memphis, Tennessee, and the development of the corrugated fibreboard box.

2.

In the centre of England, a few miles southwest of the River Avon, near King James I’s palace at Holdenby House, stands a group of twenty-five imposing grey warehouses – of a sort common to the landscapes of all industrialised nations, the kind which line ring-roads and airports, yet rarely explain their purpose to on lookers, mutely repelling the curiosity or outrage they can generate. The warehouses together make up one of the largest and most technologically advanced logistics parks in Europe. Positioned beside three central arteries, the M1, M6 and A5, they are within a four-hour drive of 80 percent of the United Kingdom’s population, and every week, largely at night, they handle a significant share of its supply of building materials, stationery, food, furniture and computers.

Despite their importance, the warehouses have no desire to advertise themselves to the public. They are spread out across a site of determined blandness marked by gentle gradients, ornamental trees and expanses of preternaturally green grass. They have no interest in the problems and possibilities of architecture. They care only for size. One looks up at their cathedral-like ceilings and finds, instead of angels, workaday, economical spans of steel punctuated by fluorescent strips, which guide the onlooker’s eyes back to rows of symmetrical shelving and the hurried motions of forklift trucks. That the logistics hub has been allowed to assume this stark and monolithic appearance signals our confusion about how much it matters what is in front of our eyes. We accept that museums can devote fortunes to acquiring tender Early Netherlandish devotional paintings no larger than hardback books, but we see nothing foolhardy in casually surrendering large strips of the planet to the impatient interests of men from Jones Lange Lasalle, out of a curious reluctance to concede that we may in the end be as inwardly affected by the sight of five square kilometres of warehouse space incised into the fields of Northamptonshire as by the benevolent gaze of a twenty-centimetre Madonna from the workshop of Rogier van der Weyden.

Yet it would be foolish to describe the logistics hub as merely ugly, for it has the horrifying, soulless, immaculate beauty characteristic of many of the workplaces of the modern world.

At the top of a slope on the perimeter of the site, overlooking six lanes of motorway, is a diner frequented by lorry drivers who have either just unloaded or are waiting to pick up their cargo. Anyone nursing a disappointment with domestic life would find relief in this tiled, brightly lit cafeteria with its smells of fries and petrol, for it has the reassuring feel of a place where everyone is just passing through – and which therefore has none of the close-knit or convivial atmosphere which could cast a humiliating light on one’s own alienation. It suggests itself as an ideal location for Christmas lunch for those let down by their families. Patrons can tour the aisles of a generous self-service buffet, combine fish pie with deep-pan pizza or hamburger with curry, without needing to apologise for the size or eccentricity of their selections, and silently take a seat at one of the yellow plastic tables which look out onto the stream of ruby-red tail lamps outside.

Roadworks are common on these stretches of motorway and serve to slow the traffic almost to a standstill, allowing one to follow the incremental progress of Skania and Iveco lorries packed with industrial quantities of items which one normally contemplates only on a domestic scale: chocolate bars, cereal, bottled water, mattresses and margarine all inching their way northwards in the darkness. The view has some of the consoling qualities of a river, whose constant play of shadow and current may lift an observer out of a mood of stagnation. It is life itself rolling past, in its most heedless, savage, selfish manifestations, endowed with the same impassive will which impels the spread of bacteria and jungle flora.

3.

The single-mindedness of the goings-on in the logistics park are most transparent at night, when the appearance of the moon questions the significance of efficient courier services from an interplanetary viewpoint, as does – from the perspective of eternity – a slender church spire built in the late fourteenth century, visible as a pitch-black arrow on the far side of the motorway.

Nightfall used to be the time when members of our species would acknowledge their physical limitations and huddle together to mitigate their fear of ghosts and witches. The logistics hub, however, makes few concessions to human frailty, the spirit world or the primacy of natural rhythms. Floodlights come on to compensate for the sun’s retreat, bathing the area in the nocturnal orange glow familiar from airports and military installations. Workers are dropped off by bus at a central reception area and clock in before seven. On a site which was once fields of barley and wheat, warehouses now await shipments of lawn mowers, work-out benches and barbecue sets. Passing motorists, seeing the glare from the forecourts through the fog, might be forgiven for wondering what ungodly preparations could be in train at this hour.

The work that unfolds here casts most of us who unknowingly benefit from it in a passive role. We will lie in bed, now and then shifting from one side to the other, our mouths defencelessly agape, while a fleet of lorries is loaded up with the lion’s share of the morning’s semi-skimmed milk for northern England. To witness the park’s activities in the darkness is to recall those moments in childhood when we woke up after midnight and heard footsteps and other noises outside our bedroom door, the parental unloading of crockery, perhaps, or the rearrangement of furniture, and thereby derived a sense of the labours which underpinned the daytime order of our household.

4.

The largest warehouse in the logistics park belongs to a supermarket chain, which throughout the night receives dispatches from food suppliers and recombines them for onward delivery to stores across the country. The aisles of an average supermarket contain twenty thousand items, four thousand of which are chilled and need to be replaced every three days, while the other sixteen thousand require restocking within two weeks. There are fifty lorry bays running along the length of the building and vehicles arriving and departing at a rate of one every three minutes.

Inside, staff circulate between shelves, placing goods onto automated runways, which rush them to rows of steel cages lined up behind the loading bays, where they wait to be driven to a range of obscurely numbered destinations. For example, 02093-30 refers to a cathedral town boasting a theatre and a brewery, a place which hosted a Parliamentarian army during the Civil War and retains several fine Georgian squares and which every morning, unnoticed by most of its residents, is visited by an articulated lorry from across the Pennine Hills, carrying in its hold Parmesan cheese, red jelly, fishcakes and lamb cutlets.

Components of the national diet race around the building on conveyor belts high above the ground: thirty cartons of crisps for Northfleet, 1,200 chicken drumsticks for Hams Hall, sixty crates of lemonade for Elstree. Human beings, once segregated into dietary categories almost as strongly as by religious ones, into the peoples of rice or of wheat, of potatoes or of maize, now fill their stomachs with unthinking promiscuity.

Time is of the essence. At any given moment, half the contents of the warehouse are seventy-two hours away from being inedible, a prospect which prompts continuous struggles against the challenges of mould and geography. Clusters of tomatoes still attached to their vine, having ripened to maturity in fields near Palermo at the weekend, are exchanging the destiny seemingly assigned to them by nature to try to find buyers for themselves on the northern fringes of Scotland before Thursday.

Blind impatience is equally evident in the fruit section. Our ancestors might have delighted in the occasional handful of berries found on the underside of a bush in late summer, viewing it as a sign of the unexpected munificence of a divine creator, but we became modern when we gave up on awaiting sporadic gifts from above and sought to render any pleasing sensation immediately and repeatedly available.

It is early December and in a central aisle, twelve thousand blood-red strawberries wait in the semi-darkness. They flew in from California yesterday, crossing over the Arctic Circle by moonlight, writing a trail of nitrogen oxide across a black and gold sky. The supermarket will never again let the shifting axis of the earth delay its audience’s dietary satisfactions: strawberries journey in from Israel in midwinter, from Morocco in February, from Spain in spring, from Holland in early summer, from England in August and from the groves behind San Diego between September and Christmas. There is only ninety-six hours’ leeway between the moment the strawberries are picked and the moment they start to cave in to attacks of grey mould. An improbable number of grown-ups have been forced to subordinate their sloth, to move pallets across sheds and wait in rumbling diesel lorries in traffic to bow to the exacting demands of soft plump fruit.

If only security concerns were not so paramount in the imagination of its owners, the warehouse would make a perfect tourist destination, for observing the movement of lorries and products in the middle of the night induces a mood of distinctive tranquillity, it magically stills the demands of the ego and corrects any danger of looming too large in one’s own imagination. That we are each surrounded by millions of other human beings remains a piece of inert and unevocative data, failing to dislodge us from a self-centered day-to-day perspective, until we take a look at a stack of ten thousand ham-and-mustard sandwiches, all wrapped in identical plastic casings, assembled in a factory in Hull, made out of the same flawless cottony-white bread, and due to be eaten over the coming two days by an extraordinary range of our fellow citizens which these sandwiches promptly urge us to make space for in our inwardly focused imaginations.

This gargantuan granary is evidence that we have become, after several thousand years of effort, in the industrialised world at least, the only animals to have wrested ourselves from an anxious search for the source of the next meal and therefore to have opened up new stretches of time – in which we can learn Swedish, master calculus and worry about the authenticity of our relationships, avoiding the compulsive and all-consuming dietary priorities under which still labour the emperor penguin and Arabian oryx.

Yet our world of abundance, with seas of wine and alps of bread, has hardly turned out to be the ebullient place dreamt of by our ancestors in the famine-stricken years of the Middle Ages. The brightest minds spend their working lives simplifying or accelerating functions of unreasonable banality. Engineers write theses on the velocities of scanning machines and consultants devote their careers to implementing minor economies in the movements of shelf-stackers and forklift operators. The alcohol-inspired fights that break out in market towns on Saturday evenings are predictable symptoms of fury at our incarceration. They are a reminder of the price we pay for our daily submission at the altars of prudence and order – and of the rage that silently accumulates beneath a uniquely law-abiding and compliant surface.

5.

Dominating the eastern end of the warehouse is an encyclopedic selection of the inhabitants of the world’s oceans. Stacked on shelves in the middle of the English countryside are mackerel icefish from Australia, red rock lobster from Mexico, hoki from New Zealand, mahimahi from Ecuador and monkfish from Costa Rica.

To consider the expressions of these creatures, with their faces by turns noble, gauche, ugly, wise and terrifying, is to be pulled from our ordinary agenda and made to acknowledge man’s co-proprietorship of the planet with some distinctive beings whom we have condemned to end their existence under rings of lemon because of no greater error on their part than the possession of a fleshy texture and a lack of small bones.

How did the fish find their way here? How did they die? Who made the packaging? And, more imaginatively, what might a painter discover in rendering a mackerel’s skin or an engineer in examining a red rock lobster’s claws? Implicit in these questions is a broader failure to appreciate the interest and incidental beauty of the working world.

I notice a shelf stacked deep with fresh tuna steaks. ‘Caught by line in the Maldives’ says the wrapper, a claim as concise and tantalising as an epitaph on a gravestone. That fish taken out of the water several continents away could in a matter of hours be here in a warehouse in Northamptonshire is evidence of nothing short of logistical genius, based on a complex interplay of technology, managerial discipline and legal and economic standardisation.

It is the almost conspiratorial silence regarding this achievement that intrigues and provokes me – and with time gives birth to a desire to seize hold of a fish and follow it, at a somewhat more leisurely pace, backwards into the sea. It might of course have been some other commodity: I might have traced a roll of sheet steel from a Bavarian car factory to the scrub of the Australian desert or a skein of cotton from a loom in Mexico to the irrigated fields of the lower Nile. The tuna’s lessons, while played out in particularities, are nonetheless general ones about the value of swimming upstream in order to observe the forgotten odysseys of crates, to witness the secret life of warehouses and hence to mitigate the deadening, uniquely modern sense of dislocation between the things we so heedlessly consume in the run of our daily lives and their unknown origins and creators.

I decide that I will anchor my journey around images, for it is tangible details in which the logistical field seems to be most sorely lacking. Herewith follows, therefore, a photo essay whose sole ambition is to alter, if only for a second or two, some of the thought processes that might occur the next time one is confronted by an object that has been transported mysteriously and at an implausible speed halfway around the planet in the darkness.

ii. A Logistical Journey

It is impossible to follow fish without an appetite for humiliation. No one wants to open up to writers, who bring in no money and are liable to cause trouble. Even in an era of increased political transparency, businesses remain uninterested in acquiring observers. Attempts to trace – let alone to witness or photograph – how warm-water fish reach our tables are liable to provoke within the industry some of the same suspicion which must have greeted enquiries into the slave trade in the 1780s. I contact fifteen seafood importing businesses. Three of them have the same sculpture of a marlin in the lobby. All refuse to discuss the details of their logistical networks.

There seems no alternative but to head to the Indian Ocean, hoping to pick up leads on the ground. In Male, the capital of the Maldives, the photographer and I check in to the Relax Inn, whose titular command we find ourselves unable to obey. For the first five days, we encounter nothing but dead ends. To kill time between fruitless appointments, we wander the city, visiting patriotic monuments and mosques. Behind the Seagull Café, we discover a small cemetery dedicated to dead holidaymakers, most of them from Norway, Germany and England. They are commemorated here not because they were unwanted back home, but because their relatives wished for them to spend their afterlives in soil more congenial than that found in their frozen, fog-bound homelands. The park honours not only those who managed to die here but also an equally large contingent who sorely wished to do so but in the end succumbed elsewhere, perhaps claimed by one of the many viruses which haunt the rain-sodden European plains in midwinter.

Our fortunes change when, after a discussion with a well-connected hairdresser, we secure an appointment with no less a figure than Abdulla Naseer, the Minister for Fish, newly returned from an official visit to the United Nations. Wearing a pair of crocodile shoes, the minister greets us with gravitas, having a lucid awareness of his power, not just over the lives of fish, but of their captors too. After patiently listening to our story, he shouts a few orders to his subordinates in the next room, then offers to introduce us both to a tuna exporter and a group of fishermen in the northern islands. On our way out, he hands us a set of his business cards, allowing us to flash them at anyone who might cause us trouble on our peregrinations around his heavily policed island fiefdom. Unsure of how to pitch my gratitude, I suggest we have tea the next time he is in London.

We travel to an almost perfectly round kilometre-long coral island, in the second most northerly atoll of the Maldivian chain. From the air, it is easy to mistake the place for a tourist resort, though from close up, it is lacking the requisite water villas, spas and couples from Baden-Württemberg renewing their marriage vows. There are only basic breeze-block huts, emergency water tanks donated by UNICEF, flies, a two-room school funded by a Saudi Arabian mosque and a single shop. We are informed on arrival that our fishermen have been stranded at sea by a broken engine. So we spend three inconceivably long days waiting in a boiling tin hut fitted out with two camp beds and an en suite tap, and reflect on the life of beetles and the sadness of small islands. In temperatures which reach 35 degrees centigrade in the shade, we often squat under a tree on the main patch of waste ground, watched over by President Maumoon Abdul Gayoom of the Maldives, the dictator, poet and Islamist whose portrait stands sentinel, by law, on every one of the country’s two hundred inhabited islands – and who bears an uncanny physical resemblance to my late father.

At mealtimes, the locals disappear into their homes to fry up a medley of fish, coconut and onions, but as we lack the requisite culinary equipment, we come to rely extensively on the stock of the local shop – whose owner also becomes our only friend, it being hard to find kindred spirits in small communities. We have chocolate biscuits for breakfast, tinned tomatoes and mayonnaise for lunch and ketchup and sweet corn for supper.

At last, the engine is fixed and we head out to sea. The fishing boat is under the command of captain Ibrahim Rasheed, a thirty-three-year-old father of five whose livelihood depends on his ability to track down and club to death at least fifteen mature tuna in the coming twenty-four hours. Tooth-brushing came late to the Maldives, but the practice has taken hold as firmly as the executives of Colgate-Palmolive could have hoped, thanks in part to a television campaign featuring a shark with vividly gleaming dentition. The tube lives on a shelf in the fishing boat’s combined kitchenette-toilet. At breakfast time, we join the crew in the main cabin for a freshly cooked meal, our first in many days: miruhulee boava (octopus tentacles) followed by an invitation to chew a bunch of areca palm leaves.

After breakfast comes a succession of card games. The tuna below us have a few more hours in which to partake of life on the planet. It should not be presumed from this image that the author is in any way lacking in empathy or bonhomie, or that he would be unable (as is sometimes suspected of intellectuals) to take his place, man to man, amongst a group of illiterate Indian Ocean sailors exchanging anecdotes in an unfathomable Indo-Sanskrit tongue. He is merely in that preoccupied state, of necessity involving a distant gaze and extreme concentration, which often accompanies attempts to control runaway intestinal inflammation.

For hours we wander the sea without hope. Then shortly after eleven in the morning – dawn in the warehouse in the middle of England – a school of yellowfin tuna approach from the east, swimming in a V-shape, the older, more confident fish on the outside, the younger ones inside. They are moving at fifty kilometres an hour, on their way to Somalia from the coasts of Indonesia. Because they lack a swim-bladder, the cursed creatures have no option but to advance relentlessly; they cannot pause and rest on the current, like the sedate grouper, or they would fall to the bottom of the ocean and die, only growing more attractive to man by their continual exertions, for it is through the life-long flexing of their tails that their flesh grows muscular and hence uniquely flavoursome. A cry goes up on deck. One of the school, by all indications a heavier, older specimen, a veteran of five years of unmolested navigation, has taken a bite at a bait of mackerel. Fifteen minutes later, he announces himself on the starboard side, panicked and enraged, his tail hammering against the boat. Fifty kilos in weight, he is attempting to prise himself free of the cable tearing apart his palate, but he does not count on two men, above him at either end, reaching into the water with steel hooks and flipping him onto the deck with a victorious cry. Pandemonium follows.

The tuna has never been this far out of the water, has never seen light this bright, but he knows instinctively that he will drown in so much air. The fishermen need him to stop flooding his arteries with blood in panic, or he will darken, and therefore ruin, the appearance of his flesh against a dinner plate. So the captain’s brother swiftly wrestles him between his rubber boots and raises aloft a large, blunt mallet, resembling the archetypal club of a prehistoric man, carved from the trunk of a coconut tree. He brings it down heavily. The tuna’s eyes jerk out of their sockets. His tail convulses. His jaw opens and closes, as ours might do, but no scream emerges. The mallet strikes again. There is a dull sound, that of densely packed brain and experience, shattering inside a tight bony cage, triggering the thought that we too are never more than one hard slam away from a definitive end to our carefully arranged ideas and copious involvement with ourselves. The fisherman is himself enraged now, striking the beast vengefully, cursing the dying creature in Dhivehi: ‘Nagoobalha, nagoobalha, hey aruvaalaanan’ (‘Bitch, bitch, you’ve had it now’). This is the first tuna he has caught in eight days, and there are six children waiting at home.

Rich red blood explodes from the creature’s brain and sprays across the boat. Two of the younger crewmen rush forward and slit open his mouth, pulling out his gills and ventilation system. Next they turn their knives to his stomach, releasing the undigested bodies of smaller fish – fusiliers, cardinal fish, sprats – on which he breakfasted at the start of this infernal day. The deck becomes slippery with organs. As the killing spree goes on, I find myself thinking obsessively of my elder son, four years old and about the same length as some of the larger fish. It is no longer implausible that, as many religions maintain, we are all, in the end, from moth to president, members of the same large, irrevocably fratricidal family. Unburdened of his guts and his reproductive tract, the tuna is hoisted into the air and plunged into the first of four refrigerated compartments, which will, by nightfall, be filled by the bodies of a further twenty of his companions. One wonders what the atmosphere will be like in the school, 60 metres below, as the survivors pursue their way to Somalia; whether there will be a memory of the absent members and, in the pitch-black waters, a terrible fear.

We arrive at the fish processing plant – which keeps in close touch with British importers and supermarkets. The true nature of bureaucracy may be nowhere more obvious to the observer than in a developing country, for only there will it still be made manifest by the full complement of documents, files, veneered desks and cabinets – which convey the strict and inverse relationship between productivity and paperwork. Despite cautionary tales from a range of antecedents from Gauguin to Edward Said, I am unable wholly to suppress fleeting images of a joint future with Salma Mahir, the secretary of the owner of the plant, who harbours as many misconceptions about my country as I do about hers. My Maldivian father looks on.

The boss of the tuna plant, when he finally arrives, is an unexpected phenomenon. In temperament, Yasir Waheed combines the phlegmatic romanticism of a late-nineteenth-century French poet with the carnivorous aggression of a contemporary Anglo-American capitalist. His favourite book, by Bill Zanker and Donald Trump, is Think Big and Kick Ass in Business and Life. He is just back from an electronics conference in Dubai, where he picked up a Bluetooth wireless mouse for his Apple Cinema.

The plant’s fish handlers know how to fillet a tuna with machetes in three minutes. All were once fishermen. The sound of one of their knives cutting flesh away from a spine recalls that of a fingernail strumming the teeth of a comb. All are now widowers. Yasir took pity on them after seeing them weeping on the news after the tsunami rolled round the eastern shores of Sri Lanka and swept away their families when they were out at sea. While there are clear medical and hygienic reasons, in the preparation of fish for export, for requiring that plant workers’ facial hair be covered by surgical masks, that the temperature be kept constantly below zero degrees centigrade and that all aprons and other work garments be incinerated after a single wearing, it may nevertheless be a reflection of something more deeply embedded in the Western soul that it is we who have ended up as the unparalleled masters of artificial chilling techniques, of continual hand-washing and of rampant hygienic imaginations.

Like someone running into an old friend in a strange land, I am surprised and a little moved when I stumble across a reel of bright-orange labels long familiar to me from my local supermarket. With the picture of the fishermen clubbing tuna to death burnt into my memory, I recognise that I am now a veteran of the blood-soaked processes lurking behind the labels’ serene photograph of a fishing jetty and an azure sea.

There being only so many efficient ways to cut through air or water, the architecture of the plane evokes aspects of the tuna. The Airbus has gill-like air-inlet flaps near its wheels and fins along its fuselage. Even the lower bodies of the two creatures are a comparable piscine grey. One crate is locked in place below rows 3 and 9 in business class, the other below rows 43 and 48 in economy. On the apron beside the London-bound Sri Lankan jet is a Qatar Airways cargo plane, its windows painted out, on its way around the world, bearing post, vegetables, documents and blood samples. The plane was in Tokyo last night and is due in Milan Malpensa tomorrow, one of thousands of freighters which, without any acknowledgement on our arrival and departure screens, pursue their lonely routes around the earth.

We take off at 8:30 a.m. and head northwest across the Indian Ocean. Outside, to the untrained and unaided eye, the plane appears to be adrift above an unsubstantial, vaporous blue mass, as featureless and disorienting as the sea but, reconfigured through the antennae of the flight-deck instruments (comparable in their abilities to the organic mechanisms embedded in the tuna’s cranium at the spot where the fisherman’s mallet fell), the sky is revealed as a lattice of well-marked lanes, intersections, laybys, junctions and beacon signals. The plane races along airway A418, which runs from the Gulf into southern Iran. Over the town of Shiraz, in a space known to pilots as intersection SYZ117.8, the captain moves across to airway R659, which leads to UMH113.5, a point thirty-five thousand feet above Uromiyeh, the capital of western Azerbaijan, where the Three Wise Men are said to have rested on their way to Bethlehem.

The cabin crew serve red chicken curry in Economy and a choice of asparagus vol-au-vent or cheese omelette in Business. The skies darken. Occasionally, one catches sight of the very moment when a light is extinguished in a house below. Someone has finished watching television in a living room in Craivoa, Romania, someone in Kalocsa, Hungary, has reached the end of an article in the fashion magazine Nok Lapja, neither of them suspecting the existence of an aluminium missile roaring through the firmament above them. I look at others’ faces and feel sympathy towards them. People stir under their synthetic blankets. If we lived still in the days of ocean liners, we might all be friends by the time we docked at Southampton.

The plane lands at Heathrow at nightfall. The tuna makes it to the warehouse by two in the morning, revealing nothing to a succession of men in high-visibility jackets about its tumultuous history of aquatic and airborne wandering. The drivers in the warehouse never know at the start of a shift where they may find themselves by dawn. At four in the morning, Ian Cook receives a command from the control room to drive one of the largest of the articulated lorries over to Bristol. The driver has been doing supermarket runs for the last fifteen years. He carries his belongings in a small red bag and has a complicated life, for he has a wife in Lancashire and a friend in Derby. He talks continually on the journey, covering murderers, religious zealots, tax evaders and child molesters, in a monologue whose unarticulated yet nonetheless powerful guiding theme is the decline and eventual collapse of contemporary civilisation. By early morning, the lorry comes to a stop at the back of an aluminium shed in suburban Bristol, on whose aisles the tuna is placed, fifty-two hours after it was first levered out of the aphotic brine of the Indian Ocean.

The photographer and I crouch in wait behind a refrigerated cabinet, which feels vengefully cold after the torridity of the Maldives. Shoppers amble by, occasionally casting a distracted look at the cuts of the tuna’s flesh. To pass the time, I think back to people we have met along the way. I remember Aisha Azdah, whose job it is to source the tuna’s packaging material. She ordered the plastic trays from a manufacturer in Thailand. One afternoon, we photographed her in her one-room company flat next to the processing plant. On the wall is her wedding picture, featuring Mohamed Amir, a mechanic in charge of the tuna slicing machines made by the Scanvaegt corporation of Denmark. The interest of the photograph seems to hinge on the iron. This is an essay about people who depend on one another and yet have no thought of each other’s laundry. It may be one of the tasks of art in the age of advanced logistics to make sure that Aisha is introduced to Linda Drummond, for in the end, it is she who stops at the fish counter and picks up some tuna steaks for her family’s supper. The photographer and I stand up and explain our story. We tell her about our journey and about Karl Marx’s theory of alienation as defined his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. We ask if we might follow her home. She calls her husband for a second opinion.

Later that day, Linda’s son, eight-year-old Sam, is unfazed to find two strangers in his kitchen. He hates tuna, but not as much as he hates salmon. He hasn’t forgotten about the wonder of logistics. He knows a lot about lorries and planes. He is also an expert on the world’s oceans, and lectures us as to how the Indian Ocean is not an ideal habitat for fish, on account of its unusual warmth and stillness. He notes that the freezing North Sea supports infinitely more forms of life, as storms there constantly stir up the nutrient-laden aphotic layer which lies a thousand metres below the waves, and in which the gulper eel, the anglerfish and the vampire squid live. He also makes the ancillary suggestion, less often remarked upon by marine biologists, that our perpetual killing of fish has left the seas choked with an array of pallid oceanic ghosts who will one day gather together to exact terrible revenge on humanity for shortening their lives and transporting their corpses around the earth for supper in Bristol.