Some winters the water froze in the workshop, so the only way to wash our hands was to break the ice on the cow trough outside.
That's the kind of garage I did my apprenticeship in. Cold, basic, no frills. My boss had been a mechanic for decades by then, and it showed. Hands marked and stained with years of oil that never quite washed out. Slower getting up off the floor than he used to be, and never quiet about it either, there was always a groan when he pushed himself upright after a job underneath a car.
He was the one who taught me never to kneel straight onto cold concrete. Always get something under your knees first, a mat, a board, anything. He told me more than once that if I didn't look after myself now, I'd end up moving like him by fifty. He wasn't being dramatic. He was telling me what thirty years on a cold floor actually costs a person.
I've carried that with me ever since, not just as advice about knees, but as a bigger lesson. Look after yourself, because the work will take its toll if you let it. And once you're responsible for other people's work as well as your own, that lesson stops being personal. It becomes about looking after them too.
That's part of why health and safety at Berry & Escott isn't paperwork we do to tick a box, ISO 45001 included. It's shaped by watching what years of physically demanding work can do to a person if the risks aren’t managed early. These days that means proper occupational health checks built into how we work, not just a policy filed away, because the whole point is catching problems while there's still time to do something about them. We'd rather be conscientious about that now than sorry about it in twenty years.
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