Making Work For Idle Hands
More tips for wasting time
At the turn of the seventies I was working in Templeborough, one of the worlds largest melting shops, owned by the nationalised British Steel Corporation. Four huge arc furnaces worked around the clock five days a week producing high grade steel. It held the world record for most steel produced in twenty-four hours. I was part of the engineering team that maintained and repaired anything that went wrong, the maxim being production must not stop. The Tories had come to power and decided to break the unions, an old enemy, and break up the steel industry, shutting the uneconomical bits and selling the rest off. Thatcher, the prime minister, appointed Ian MacGregor as head of the business. He toured each site, that is how I came to see him walking through the engineers workshop while we were having our tea break. Pointing to all these loafers sipping tea and chatting, he asked the melting shop manager why all these men were idle and if they hadn’t anything to do, why keep them. The manager calmly said, if these men were busy this place would be losing £250 a minute and no steel would be produced. Be thankful.
Of course we didn’t know at the time what lay ahead, the decimation of the steel industry, from almost two hundred thousand employed to less than seventy thousand a few years later. There was a strike to fight the cuts, MacGregor and Thatcher's practice run to take on the miners a year or so later. By the time the eighties were finished steel would be a rust bucket and coal was in the ground.
Money seeped out of steel and coal communities. Hope and any future along with it. Today, those communities still struggle, particularly coal, drugs, alcoholism, poverty and deprivation stepped in where work used to be. It is, to my mind, one of the greatest crimes a government has inflicted on its own people.
Why do I mention this? British Steel has been in the news lately, the debacle over the Scunthorpe Queens and China playing its hand far too soon. Now the whole of Britain is scrambling to rip out anything attached to Chinese money. And it had me thinking about the day I met Ian MacGregor while I sipped a mug of tea with my mates and the sound of the furnaces swilling hundreds of tons of steel reverberated through the concrete floor.
I filled my time with a host of different jobs in the days since my time in the melting shop. None gave me the satisfaction of those days until I began writing, and though it is a solitary occupation that I find conducive and fulfills all my needs, I do miss the camaraderie of that long gone age.
In recent times illness shifted the definition of work. No longer able to get out on to the hills to write about walking, I found myself with time on my hands. Initially, it was filled with The Search and a few smaller projects, but the empty hours slowly captured a larger portion of my day. Nature abhors a vacuum as they say. And my mental well-being does not like long periods of idleness. This is different to putting aside time to do nothing (what I call, the useful wastage of time) slowing the day down to let me breathe and think.
The illness also squeezed my world smaller: first to a few square miles, then a square mile, now four walls and a window out onto a garden. It was sitting at the window watching the Sparrows swoop in and out of the feeders that I knew I had to create another world where I was useful, had some goal however nebulous, and most importantly gave me pleasure.
Enter books. First it was reading, anything, the books that I had always wanted to read, knew I should have read, but never did: Homer, Joyce, Virgil, Nabokov, Amis, etc started to appear on the bookshelf. New bookshelves were added to hold the growing collection of TBR (To Be Read) books, Woolf, Foster Wallace, Delillo, Montaigne, Bellow, Hemingway etc.
It was enjoyable, especially the buying and receiving, but haphazard and had a sense that I was missing something, sentences in novels that had a reference to some classical text, essays referring to titles and authors I had never heard of; hello Flannery O’Connor.
The horizon for my own setting sun is not that far ahead, so I need to use my time wisely and fill that vacuum carefully, empirically, each step building on the last.
For example, when Montaigne mentioned in his essay; That we should not be deemed happy till after our death: ‘Scilicet ultima semper. Expectanda dies homini est, dicique beatus. Ante obitum nemo, supremaque funera debet. [You must always wait a man’s last day before his death and last funeral rites, no one should be called happy.].’
I can think back to Ovid’s book III of Metamorphoses, Actaeon, ‘But never forget the ancient saying: “ Wait for the final day. Call no man happy until he is dead and his body is laid to rest in the grave.”
And there, I have connected a line that runs across a thousand years and more to the present day, by reading methodically and with purpose. School never taught me that, it taught me how to file a round steel bar square.
It helps to have a guide for classical study, the Western Canon is one, the more literary universities have reading guides, as do many writers. I was fortunate to come across @tedgioia on Substack who offered a humanities reading course from the Epic of Gilgamesh (never heard of it) to The Things They Carried (never heard of that either), and have come across more since. It really helps to read the classics to gain an understanding of the literature that came, the ‘aha’ moments begin to land like frozen snowballs.
The other day on Substack I saw mention of the dreaded AI as a tool for writers. Not asking it to write but using it for research etc. One thing that I know I would benefit from is a guide, someone to point out a place to begin, Ted Gioia certainly does that but his Humanities course is now finished, though I have not finished the reading. I wondered if AI might help so I typed a query about T. S. Eliot’s The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. I never knew that the epigraph at the beginning of Eliot's poem was from Dante’s Inferno - Divine Comedy. That was a small journey for me, I didn’t have to look hard and was grateful for the gate it opened to new paths to follow.
Note taking is also part of the enjoyment in reading more deeply and closer, building into a cross index of words and ideas. It has caused me to look at my handwriting. I never did cursive writing at school, and though I would love to write like that now I just do not have the time. As a consequence, I am developing my own style of writing, call it a cross between Arial and Helvetica. Doing that gave me the idea of handwriting my next book, one copy for Alison, so now I have to learn about fonts and typography, getting the letters, spacing, line breaks etc to look even, to look like a printed text so that it is easy to read.
And also how I retain knowledge, something that is harder as my brain stops working as it should. What does a note mean, why write it down. At times for the pleasure of writing and knowing, at others to remember and refer back to, again as a note to take me somewhere else.
I’m enjoying myself hugely. Lost for hours in a world that is constantly new and evolving. Knowledge and artistic skill combining to provide something that I find beautiful to look at and satisfying (note the margins I added to the notebook to give the look of a printed book). It is also fine to make a mistake, not be so precious about something; just like living a good life that is not dependent on other people's approval.
The vacuum has/is being filled. To what end I have no idea. Monetary? I doubt it. Aesthetics? I hope so. Enjoyable and fulfilling? definitely yes. All from wanting to read and learn empirically, to appreciate literature from many worlds and many ages. I think that is time well spent.
Take care and good luck.
Paul
Some newsletters that I have enjoyed this last week and think they are worth reading.
Paul, your wonderful anecdote about Ian McGregor’s visit to Sheffield Steel Works in the 1970s and your manager’s reply to his question is one that tens of thousands of managers could still give today: that systems need people on standby to work efficiently.
You talk of how your world has been ‘getting smaller’ - it is something I can empathise with, but I have come to the conclusion that my diminishing circle of ‘friends’ is a plus: there are fewer people I have to explain my growing unreliability to and I find that a welcome release. The linings of my lungs are, in the words of my consultant ‘brittle’ and ‘could go anytime.’ It has been that way since 2015. Every time I get a chest infection I take to my bed or my favourite £9 IKEA easy chair, which I bought in 1996 when I set up an office in Nottingham for the charity I was working for (my leaving present when I retired in 2006 was two of the six chairs I bought). So far so good. The nearest I have yet come to a miracle - hence my lucky bunny emoji.
Well Paul, thanks for inspiring in me another anecdote of my own to write about soon. I struggle with the philosophers and classical writers, but I do know of Montaigne, which must mean something! Finally, have you been following the re-run of ‘Artists and Models’ on BBC4 TV? Full of references to the classics and Greeks. There is an episode tomorrow (Monday) at 11pm. You can find them on Freeview as well. Keep on thinking. I am sure, to quote, Poirot, it is exercising our ‘little grey cells’ that help keep us going! Regards Robert🐰
Serendipitously, the next thing I read after this gem of a post was this one by Elin Shafak. I think you’d enjoy it: https://open.substack.com/pub/elifshafak/p/we-are-what-we-read?r=e2wpk&utm_medium=ios