In the Fair Food car park a delivery truck returns from a run with its back step dangling off in an alarming angle. Andrew, the driver, gives it a few tugs and the whole thing breaks off, hitting the concrete with a clang. The call goes over to the CERES Site Team and Vic Cardemone wanders over to take a look. Vic looks over the broken step and under the truck where it came off. The truck disappears over to the Site workshop and returns later, the step not just fixed but totally redone, held together with strong clean welds, reinforced with a piece of recycled box steel. The whole thing made better than before.
Vic Cardemone has been fixing things around CERES for the past 14 years, he started volunteering not long after he retired from his job in the workshop at Caterpillar, the heavy machinery company. Working through a never-ending list of things needing building or fixing, in his own way Vic has kept CERES going and perhaps CERES has kept him going too. Vic turned 80 the other day, (that’s him above watching on uncertainly as his 80 candles are ignited with a blow torch).
When it comes to recycling things CERES is a place of huge optimism but the gap between the dream and the reality of making some pile of old rusty steel into something useful is regularly summed up by Vic’s well-worn refrain, “What is this f#*!ing s#%t!?”. Invariably however, what emerges is quite the opposite. The results of Vic’s patience and skill can be found all over CERES in resurrected gates, bike racks, meter cages, fortress-like steel cupboards and endlessly repaired wheel barrows, trolleys and vehicles.
And like so many “no longer required” people and things that come to CERES, Vic’s story is another line in the universal CERES song – a mantra sung to our throw-away world. In an old unwanted rubbish tip, there is an old unwanted man, making old unwanted things, new again.
Happy Birthday Vic
