I am beginning to love Sundays. I have worked for myself for twenty five years and there is no need for us ownworkers to conform to the nine-to-fivers’ weekly mode of living and partly living (to quote T.S.Eliot). It got particularly silly in the nineties when Connie and I were motor-sailing the 30-foot gaff-cutter Vemara the 32 miles stretch from Rye to Boulogne every few weeks. We were both ownworkers but try as we might we could never lose the habit of leaving on Friday and coming back on the Sunday afternoon tide. The marina was empty in the week and choc-a-bloc at weekends. Weekday shopping times were more convenient. And the Saturday market finished at midday. But there is something else.
A few years ago I became intrigued when I read that different species had different heart rates. I had long taken the view that the only scarce resource 21st century economists needed to theorise about was the number of heart beats in an individual life. My thought was that normal life is measured in heart beats and we only fall short of a normal life because we feed ourselves with bad water and get diseased. Birds live shorter year-lives than us because their hearts beat faster. Think of ‘clock-times’ on computers...the megahertz or gigahertz that Dell quotes at you...and philosophically things start to get interesting. Slow computers do the same as fast computers but take longer to do it. This might explain why birds flash through a holly bush in the twinkling of a human eye without getting themselves impaled. They are sauntering in their own bird heart-rate time.
Anyway start thinking of the number of hours in a week and you have a sound basis for measuring the quality of society. There are 168 hours in a week with 7 hours of bedtime each day...and many people get by with less. So the 35-hour official EuroJobWeek represents less than a third of your weekly disposable heartbeat quota. Working hours can then get fitted into the other 84 hours...24x7 less 7x7 less 35 equals 84. This life grammar bears no resemblance to the work-life balance implied by European directives. There’s a surprise.
When I am in residence on Vemara...the Swedish king flies a flag over his palace to show he’s in residence so why don’t we all adopt the practice...I am just a 10-minute walk from the centre of Rye, a 15-minute run away from Heidi at Rye Harbour and 5-minutes stroll away from Hilden Gym with its work-out rooms, sauna and jacussi. For me it makes sense to hang out in town between 10 and 4 from Mondays to Saturdays. People are around. Shops are open. Phones get answered...I work from a mobile phone. So this is what I do. But remember ‘Hell is other people!”
Men my age are supposed to go to a place of work in the morning and come home into the bosom of a loving family in the evening. If you don’t you are looked upon as an idler and a scrounger. This opinion is confirmed if you are seen around town in the middle of the working day sitting in cafes. In fact my cafe hours are some of my most productive. I purchase two desk-hours for the price of a cup of coffee to read, scribble or talk.
My standard weekday routine takes me into town for my free library computer session at 11am with mail collected from my postbox on the way...access is denied between 1215 and 1500 hours. Errands and everything else that needs outside suppliers and services...lane swimming at the local pool, installing broadband for friends etc...gets tucked in around this daily schedule. An awful lot of work can get done between 0400 and 1100 and between 1600 and 0200...0200 and 0400 are the only hours when you are guaranteed to find me asleep.
Yet breaking away from the seven-day week is still not easy. There is a reason for this. You will not find it in the Judaic and Neo-Judaic (ie. Christian) sabbath traditions because it goes back further and deeper than this. Biorhythms come closer to the truth. But the individual who has come closest in recent times to finding the pearl among the swine is the Cambridge archaeologist Tom Lethbridge.
A couple of years ago I put ‘Tom Lethbridge’ and ‘T.C.Lethbridge’ into Google. It came back with no matches. Today there were 300. And to my delight (‘Vanity! Vanity! all is vanity!’) my article is up there on the top page. Careful experimentation with his long pendulum convinced Tom Lethbridge that megalithic energy follows the seven-day pulsating moon-cycle. That is why it has been so difficult to change the habit, not of a lifetime, but of millenia. We cultural creatives must learn to follow our natural cosmic rhythms if we want to reconnect with reality. Loving Sundays is not a bad place to start.
I started this weblog posting with the intention of writing about my Sunday with this as an introductory paragragh. Meini Gwyr was due to come up. I was there and touched the two (still) standing stones...there were seventeen a couple of centuries ago. But my self-inflicted word-quota may not be breached. So for my Sunday you must wait until tomorrow. Your only problem is that tomorrow never comes if you think about it. Philosophically this is almost as interesting as the tortoise and the hare. Douglas Hofstadter got very excited about them in Gödel Escher Bach. Put this book on your coffee table for your next dinner party. A Short History of Time has become a little passé.