I am pretty much the only fisherman in my harbour who still works in darkness. Back in the heyday, all of them would have done, and I hear lots of stories of the camaraderie they shared when they were all going out together, but they’re over 60 now mostly – I am the youngest – and they prefer to hang out in cafes, and skip starting in the dark.
Our harbour is unusual in that it’s a river mouth so it’s tidal; you have to work from high tide to high tide, because there’s not enough water to get back in once you’ve left the harbour. That’s 10 to 12 hours at a time, at any time, so I often end up going out at one or two in the morning. The tides shift by around 40 minutes each day, though so I do eventually have more comfortable days, starting around 9am.
Being the only one down there when it’s dark means I haven’t got anyone to bounce off as to whether it’s safe to head out. If anything goes drastically wrong once I’m out, I can head into Lyme Regis harbour nearby, which isn’t tidal – but so far I’ve managed to avoid that. As well as my sleeping patterns, the tides affect what I’m fishing: on bigger tides I tend to use rod and line for bass. On the small, neap tides , I use nets, for dover sole or occasionally plaice. The netting is very selective; the mesh is big, and they aren’t in for long, so anything that I don’t want to catch goes back, or becomes bait for my pots. I do a lot of fishing in Lyme Regis marine reserve , a conservation area in which fishing is allowed, so long as it’s not damaging to the seabed or biodiversity.
One of the things I like most about working these hours is getting out to see the sunsets and sunrises and being the only one out there to experience it. Every day is different; you are going out to this wilderness and anything could happen. The other day I was surrounded by a huge pod of dolphins, one of which was absolutely enormous. If I was going to an office, I would struggle like hell to get up at 2am but whatever I am doing there is some excitement to it, so normally I’m out of bed like a shot.
The downside more than anything is the weather; we’ve had such a rubbish winter I’ve been tied up in the harbour for weeks on end. Sleeping isn’t so bad because it’s such a physically exhausting experience. It doesn’t matter what time I get home, or whether it’s bright sunshine. As soon as I hit the pillow I’m out like a light.
I bounced around doing a few jobs before fishing, but I found all I was doing was earning money to spend on getting out on the water. It got to the point where I had to try and make it my living. There’s a close-knit community in my harbour, and I was quickly accepted into it. After years of seeing the boats packing up, they were happy to see someone new coming up through the ranks. It’s been five years of fishing now, and it can be difficult: you have to make hay when the sun shines, which often means cancelling plans – I’m a pain in the arse to my friends and family.
People ask how I wake up at 3am, and I say: “It’s fear.” I am terrified I’m going to oversleep and wake up to messages saying: “Where are you? The bread is overproved.” The only way I can get to sleep is by letting go; accepting the fact I’ll only have four hours sleep, and that the world won’t end.
At Poplar Bakehouse, you only have to do the early shift twice a week. The rest of the week you work 9am-5pm, which is lovely. At previous bakeries I’ve started work at 6pm, and finished at 2am, but we don’t do that here because the bread has a slower ferment in the cold room. We mix the dough at 9am and by 1pm it’s in the fridge. It ferments overnight, so by 4am, when I arrive, it’s at the right stage to go in the oven. Bakeries that don’t have enough space in the cold rooms can’t work like this. The cold rooms are a gamechanger: the bread is fresher when it goes out, and it means we can sleep. It’s easier to look after yourself when you have the afternoon and evening to come down from a shift and unwind. It’s a lot harder to finish at 2am, and go to sleep; you’re too wired.
I’m up at 3am – I get showered and lay my clothes out the night before – and I get to the bakery at 3.50am. I like being the first one in. People have an idea of baking as romantic, and often I think it’s not. But at that hour, seeing the sun rise through the windows, playing my favourite tunes and putting bread in the oven, I see some of the romance.
The summer is easier: seeing the sun rise on my cycle in, when it’s warm. In winter it’s easier to get to sleep at 7pm, when it’s dark and people aren’t outside having street parties. I like to do my two early shifts back to back, because I find it easier to get a good night’s sleep on the second day, but our bakers can choose what works for them. I think this is easier than week or fortnight shift patterns because, while your body clock shifts, life around you doesn’t. Going to bed before your partner even gets home from work is difficult two weeks in a row.
It’s a lifestyle, being a baker. I’m on my feet nine hours a day, cutting and shaping dough, taking bread in and out of the oven and lifting 25kg bags of flour – but then you get the afternoon to do what you want. I don’t go to the gym. Sometimes I give the flour bags an extra couple of reps. But it’s great to visit other bakeries for coffee late afternoon and be that person who people see and think, “Does she have a job?”, knowing I’ve done my job already.
I have always operated on very little sleep. I don’t mind getting up very early, and I don’t even necessarily go to bed early either. It’s probably not very healthy, but I’ve always worked in the small hours (my brother and I ran a bar before Covid) and at least early starts allow for a healthier lifestyle than late-night finishes.
When I’m making cheese, I am at the caseificio [cheese factory] by 3am. We won’t finish until that afternoon, which is lovely in summer and harder in winter. In summer, we start as the sun rises; in winter, we start and finish in the dark. We’re based in Chew Valley, and the milk for our cheese comes specifically from Widcombe Farm, about three miles away, via Chew Valley Dairy , where our caseificio is based. This means we start making cheese within a few hours of milking – and that makes a difference in pasta filata cheeses [when the curds are cooked and stretched]. There’s a lot of obscurity around fresh mozzarella. Ideally, the milk should come in no more than nine hours before making the cheese, but for many producers in Europe, even in Italy, using milk from other European countries is their only option. Germany is one of the largest exporters of curd in the world, because milk prices there are so low. The frozen curd is transported to Italy or elsewhere to be defrosted and made into mozzarella. I am not badmouthing it, it’s a good product, but there’s no traceability and the air miles are high.
That was the point of our business: to be transparent, get the freshest milk possible, and ensure our wholesalers get the product the same day or, worst case, early the following morning. It’s amazing how different it tastes on day one as opposed to day six; it’s beautiful. I’m Italian, my cousins are mozzarella makers in Naples and my brother owns a pizzeria in London. We wanted to offer a product that good restaurants in Naples get to have. Somerset is the home of British dairy farming. It has the best milk in the country – partly because it’s so wet, which is bleak but does mean plenty of rich pasture.
Prior to setting up, I spent three months going around caseificio in Naples, Andria, and Trentino, to learn from cheesemakers there, then found Nicolò Calogero, whose family have made cheese since the 1960s. The Italians do cheese factories more beautifully than the British; ours is more purpose built, but it’s new and clean and we have a nice team. I’m based there three days a week, and with my girlfriend in London the rest of the time. I don’t mind; I’m at an age where no one really socialises Monday to Thursday, so I’m happy being in Somerset for that period, making cheese. We don’t produce over the weekends. I really want to try and operate such that we all have a life and spend time with our friends and family. It’s tough, manual labour, and everything is sharp, heavy and hot. You need to recuperate. We’ve invested in good machinery, so there’s a balance of artisanal and mechanical power, and my dream is to achieve a four-day week.
We’ve just sent some of the cows on holiday, which means they won’t be milked for eight weeks before they have their calves. It’s a rest for them and a slightly quieter time for us too. We’re still milking, so I am still up at 4am, but only 340 cows instead of 370. This gives us a chance to catch up on all the other stuff around the farm before calving begins, like refencing, reseeding paddocks with clover, chicory and other herbs and grasses, and making silage, which is feed for the winter. We’re organic, and supply Arla Cooperative, so our milk goes to McDonald’s, Yeo Valley and Tesco Organic. We also have some arable crops, which supply the flour company Wildfarmed .
During calving periods we can be up all night. The cows are bred to be able to calve on their own – it’s one of the traits we select for, when choosing bulls – but we still need to check on them. If a cow is calving at night, we will check at around 10pm, then if all’s going well, check in again at 3.30am. Our rule is that if something goes wrong and we haven’t managed to right it in 30 minutes, we ring the vet. The other day I thought my husband had got up very early, but he hadn’t; he’d just not been to bed, because a cow was having twins and they were breach so he’d had to get the vet in.
It’s impossible to turn off when you live on a farm; we are on call 24/7. The advantages are that, apart from milking, I can be quite flexible; doing the morning milking means I can do the school run for my three kids, and I am doing a Nuffield farming scholarship at the moment: studying the future of organic, where it sits on the shelf with the rise of plant-based dairy alternatives and regenerative farming and whether the policy is there to incentivise people to buy organic produce. The thing I love most is school visits, which I do with Clover, one of our cows. We go into schools to communicate about farming and food, and careers in agriculture because it’s an industry that struggles with labour.
I don’t need the full eight hours every night. Even if I don’t have to be up, I wake early. I meditate between 9am and 10am, and I drink lots of tea. I don’t drink coffee, and I’ve cut back on cola; I used to have one a day – full fat, always. Social media helps too. I know some people don’t like it, but when I’m getting up I like knowing my friends who are farmers are getting up with me. Winter is tough – this winter was awful. I take lots of vitamins, plan things to look forward to, and cut myself some slack. But in good weather, it’s lovely.
Oliver By 8am, I’ve been saying “morning” to people for 10 hours. I come in at 9pm and say “morning!” to the night team, because it’s our morning. Then the day shift come in and I say “morning” because it is morning. I go to the gym on my way home, I’m in bed about midday and then up at 8pm to have a coffee and a catchup with my partner. She’ll make my porridge while she makes her dinner. It takes a certain sort of lady to understand night work. She sleeps in the spare room on Friday night so I can get a good night’s sleep, then we have Saturday and Sunday morning together.
Robert Oliver is my little brother. I don’t dothe early shifts any more, unless he’s away. Before he took over, I had worked through the night since leaving school. When I started the business, 19 years ago, I used to start at 10pm or 11pm, and finish at 3am. The market had a pub back then, but times have changed and it doesn’t exist any more. Business is more 24/7 now – certainly ours is, as we supply hotels, restaurants, law firms, events – so we have people working around the clock, not just picking and packing during the night. And men are more involved in family life now which is a good thing. They can’t just head to the pub at three in the morning.
The warehouse has to be full 24/7. Oliver – or myself, when he’s away – comes in, speaks to the order team and the packers to see how it’s going, then speaks to the office to get a shopping list of everything needed for tomorrow’s orders. For some things, like dairy, he’ll speak to suppliers over the phone, but there’s stuff you want to taste, smell and feel before buying: lemons, grapes, berries, melons and so on, which you have to check are good enough quality for our customers. For that he heads to the market, gets a cup of tea and sees what everyone has to sell. Some things might not be available because of port issues or shortages, so he needs to think through substitutes. There aren’t as many suppliers as there were years ago, but we don’t try and take customers off each other. There is enough work out there for us not to undercut each other.
Oliver It’s still a community. The market will be 50 years old this year, which is a big thing. With the redevelopment it has lost its heart a bit, as everyone is in a temporary building, but I think it will come back once the builders have finished. It’s like an extended family. There is always someone to talk to, no matter how happy or sad you are. They can tell by how you walk up to them, and they’ll take you for a cup of tea, no problem. They’ll say to their colleague: ‘“I’ll be back in 15 minutes, I’m just going for a tea with Oliver.” Some days you don’t get along; when your produce isn’t there and you ordered it four hours ago, you’re telling them to sod off. But they know the stress we’re under, and it’s just words. The next day you just pick up and carry on again.
Robert I remember doing the night shift when the business wasn’t so intense, doing the deliveries around 4am or 5am and seeing London wake up. That’s lovely, when the sun is rising and you’re ahead of the day.
Oliver Now I don’t do shifts, I just do nights. I think shifts would throw me more, because I’d have to recover from them. It takes a day or two, when I go on holiday. Sometimes we go to places where the time difference means there’s no jet lag. I arrive and I’m fine. The day is my night-time.
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