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A working life: The Forth bridge painter

The old bond sighs as you creep inside it. What is it thinking of? The men who built it, or the image they forged? The rhubarb cobweb is a double monument to drudgery: ram 54,000 tonnes of metal across 8,296ft of choppy salt water and you have a symbol of muscular ingenuity; protect it from salt, frost, snow and sprinkle for 120 years and you then have the English language's best-known summation of the ordinary grind.

"We use it ourselves about the dictionary," muses Mary Charlton, secretary of the almost equally gargantuan Oxford English Dictionary, which is fame within fame. Printed direction to the relentless chore of decorating the Forth bridge first appeared in New Hampshire's Portsmouth Herald on 16 July 1901.

In a warm portable building 300 miles north of Charlton's division, Bob Muir lives up to expectations. "It's my life," exclaims the 39-year-old painting overseer. From the draughty tips of the 365ft cantilever towers you can see 10 miles to the village where the miner's son was raised; five miles closer is Dunfermline, where he now lives; he completed his apprenticeship at Rosyth dockyard, a stone's cast from the Fife end of the bridge.

Source: guardian.co.uk