Days pass in 24-hour cycles. Of which 8 hr are spent in bed. A further 2½ hr are devoted to meals and associated tasks like washing up (more if you’re the cook). Passive quasi-intellectual tasks (reading the newspaper and instructive books; scanning a PC, TV or smart-phone specifically for news and/or information) absorb 2 hr. Shopping, averaged over the week, 1 hr. Inescapable drudgery (Getting up, dressing, taking pills, ablutions and the loo, house cleaning, tidying the garden, dealing with refuse, laundry matters) 1½ hr. DIY, again averaged over a longer period, 1 hr. Dog walking or amusing the cat, 1 hr.
But let’s not haggle over minutiae. Give or take, most of us are occupied for 17 hr out of 24.
Which leaves an astonishing 7 hr for what is vaguely termed leisure. The stuff we choose to do.
Now here’s an oddity. Many appear to think the best blogposts are based on leisure pursuits. No reason why not, of course, except this policy dismisses the routine parts of our life. But must routine be dull? Is it healthy to accept boredom?
We clean our teeth and are reminded of our bank balance. Why?
Arthritic fingers find conventional taps hard to turn. There are alternatives.
Daringly, we choose a striped carpet. It works. Might stripes work elsewhere?
Can we afford to pay a gardener? Do the arithmetic.
What would happen if we entered by the side door for a day?
Could we eat all our meals with a spoon?
What does music sound like in the dark?
Dull? Only if you insist.
There you go! I'll be interested to see what you make of stripes, or of entering the side door for a day...
ReplyDeleteMarly: At heart this was a plea for bloggers to use their imagination rather than merely respond to and/or record factual phenomena. The striped stair carpet represented a decision daringly taken some years ago; it worked. A few weeks ago, when it came to replacing the carpet in our bedroom and our bathroom (ie, the latter is the room which accommodates our bath) we went for solid colours. What could be duller than that? Had I been inclined to use stripes more imaginatively I might have speculated on their use in clothing - they're supposed to make the wearer look thinner and taller. Or like a penal member of a Southern States road-gang in the thirties.
ReplyDeleteIt's even more boring with the side door. Just recently in the UK it's rained heavily and there's been extensive flooding. The side door is approached via an alley-way occupied by our various trash bins; thus the net result would have been wet trousers from brushing past the bins. Wow-ee! What I had in mind was whether entering regularly by the side door would change one's relationship with the house. Still pretty boring. But possibly our attitude towards the new fridge - huge, and much appreciated - would have undergone a sea-change. That we might have turned it into a domestic deity.