Last weekend I was back in the Cotswold village I’ve recently given up calling home (I’m now resigned to being a Londoner – it’s bringing little Londoners into the world that does it). I was impressed once again with how much booze the residents manage to put away. I asked around a bit and the local consensus is that all the villages of the area are the same. It’s probably safe to assume it’s also true of villages around the country. It seems we urbanites live on islands washed by a sea of bucolic booze.
What can account for the discrepancy? It has to be a combination of leisure and income. We city folk often have income but just as often lack the leisure.
Anyhow it seemed an interesting insight to me. Thinkers from at least Maynard Keynes onwards have speculated on the arrival and nature of what they called the ‘leisure society’. Head to the country and you’ll see what it’s all about. Most people, if given a sufficiency of money and left to their own devices, choose to live a life of pleasantly befuddled dissipation.
I can’t say I’m surprised. I’ve always credited the writer of this song with an acute insight into human aspirations:
In the Big Rock Candy Mountains
You never change your socks
And the little streams of alcohol
Come trickling down the rocks
The brakemen have to tip their hats
And the railway bulls are blind
There’s a lake of stew
And of whiskey too
You can paddle all around it
In a big canoe
In the Big Rock Candy Mountains
***
Last time we were down there, a couple of weeks ago, it was supposed to be shearing time. Already much later than usual because of the wet, it was rained off again. Prepare for disappointing third quarter GDP figures.
Instead we drenched and sprayed the new lambs to ward off infestations of worms and maggots, respectively (the picturesque elements of farming are comfortably offset by occasions like this). The organization of this activity gave my eldest son (primary year one/two) some material for his weekly ‘My Wonderful Weekend’ essay. This particular recollection caught my wife’s eye when dropping him off: “My Taid said to me Tom you silly bugger get out of the bloody way”. I trust the school will exhibit its characteristic multicultural sensitivity: ‘bloody’ and ‘bugger’ are, of course, no more than pieces of emphatic punctuation to decent Welsh countryfolk.
***
Of course, we’re now in the grip of Olympics fever, the recent bout of cycling fever having burnt itself out. We’ve got tickets for the hockey, at the bizarre time for a sporting event of 8.30 on a Monday morning. I have no idea how we’re going to get there – it’s supposed to take a couple of hours just to get on to the Tube – but I’m determined to enjoy it. Or at least really try to enjoy it.
***
The ups and downs of the last few years – the various crashes we’ve experienced: financial, economic, political, journalistic – have at least reminded us that no-one really knows what’s going on. Politicians, central bankers, financiers, journalists, economists, media moguls, social scientists, expert compilers of reports featured on the Today programme – chancers all. The world isn’t rational, and it’s not fair. The ancients had it right, more so than the chimerical Peston-Robinsons:
Philosophers say that Fortuna is insane and blind and stupid, and they teach that she stands on a rolling, spherical rock: they affirm that, wherever chance pushes that rock, Fortuna falls in that direction. They repeat that she is blind for this reason: that she does not see where she’s heading; they say she’s insane, because she is cruel, flaky and unstable; stupid, because she can’t distinguish between the worthy and the unworthy.
I’m pretty sure we’re going to be rolled around by Fortuna’s capricious rock for a while yet. It will, though, be fun trying to spot the thinkers who will be seen to have made sense of our early twenty-first century. Can you pick out from the melee of opinion a budding John Maynard Keynes? Or perhaps a Friedrich Hayek, if that’s more to your taste? No, me neither.
ooh two dabbler diaries in one week! You are spoiling us oh dabbler gods!
I imagine I am not alone in my utter bafflement at Peston’s voice, do you think he actually taught himself to talk like that?
I met him once and he talks absolutely normally when he’s not on the box.
I like it when he’s doing a piece on location, and walks out of shot before he’s finished his last sentence. Presumably the comedy persona is to distract from the fact that he has no idea what he’s talking about?
Yer ancient Romans, cushy number or what, no M25, no Milliband although it was rumoured that Harrietus Harmanius can trace her ancestry all the way back to Caligula.
Cotswold sheep must be a bunch of shandy drinkers Gaw, our lot are shorn and at market, ready for the mint sauce. ‘Taters are a different proposition, big business up here, this years yield is rumoured to be 80% down, look out for inflated prices.
Peston, it is said had special elocution lessons at the BBCs insistence, after the obligatory lobotomy.
I think the delay wasn’t all weather-related: the shearers were double-booked at least once, the tarts.
Re your boy’s accurate reporting of earthy speech, reminds me of a little lad I overhead describing to his mother, as they walked home from school, that some miscreant had got into trouble for telling a teacher that he “couldn’t give a flying monkey’s butt-f***.”