You can also see female plasterers trowelling pink gypsum skim coats onto walls or stunning bricklayers that gave up modelling careers to take up the trade on building sites up and down the country.
When Bob Dylan sang 'The times they are a-changi
ng' I don't think he had women joiners in mind. Or maybe he just nicked it off Janis Joplin when she was drunk.
Compo-flecked radios, hard hats and cement bag bait seats with copies of the Daily Sport that double up as toilet roll for an empty Santex bucket loo used to be one of the last preserves of testosterone-fuelled manhood.
Ill-fitting jeans that slipped down as you bent to pick up a length of timber, dusty steel toe-capped boots, dirty jokes, swearing and smoking were all features of the building trade.
Somewhere you could not bother shaving or worry too much about spraying on deodorant in the morning.
Somewhere you could wear a checky shirt without fear that people might think you were on your way to a Western line dance.
A place where you could pass wind to admiring laughter. Be a bloke without fear of retribution or scorn.
The only women you saw on a building site were wolf-whistled at from a scaffold as they passed on the street below or with the architect and 30-odd men would try to hit on her, with no success, egged on and then derided by their workmates.
Workingmen's clubs, bookies and football stadiums now hold as many women as men.
The secretive inner sanctums of manhood have been laid bare. Exposed.
Hen parties are wilder than stag nights and many women now earn more than their fellas.
I'm not a sexist. I believe in equality.
The times definitely are changing, but where does it leave us men?
Anyway, I'd better be off. I've got to make the dinner and wash the dishes!
The full article contains 391 words and appears in Northumberland Gazette newspaper.
