You know those books where, prior to reading them under the
weight of readerly guilt for having to this point completely neglected them, you
had avoided them as you expect, once the plunge has been taken and cover
opened, to be confronted by a whimsical piece of nonsense, written whilst
whiling away a few hours between gloating about how wonderful your life is to
your dwindling stock of friends and sleeping with your ridiculously
good-looking wife who also makes the world’s greatest vegan curry, and destined
to annoy the shit out of you because you had the vain hope that maybe just this
once it would be worthwhile and life-changing but are fully expecting to be
seriously disappointed? That.
Sorry, did I just utilise a Twitter device?
A condemnation of my life. |
Why else would someone like B&Q advertise with a slogan
that presupposes pride in a job done, not necessarily well, but at least by
oneself if not because effort for an end product, a tactile,
every-fucker-can-see-it product that illustrates just how fucking hard you’ve
had to work to get there? Information Management is just so much shit. Bertrand
Russell said the definition of “work” (and I think he meant this pejoratively) was
twofold: “first, altering the position of matter at
or near the earth's surface relative to other matter; second, telling other
people to do so.” Judging from this I would
say he is of a similar position to Crawford, in so far as if your job fulfils the natural role in your
life of producing something that makes you proud, that you can experience as a
product of your labours, or that other people can enjoy and relate that enjoyment
to you, then it does not count as work.
Oh fuck – if only I had been told
all of this when I was a stupid, ignorant little dipshit by someone other than
my mum, who, bless her, did tell me that a trade
would always be in demand and that I should take up plumbing. At that tender
age the spectre of rooting around in soil pipes was so abhorrent to me that the
door closed forever (or nearly forever). Where would my life be now? I suspect
that I would be living in a carved mahogany mansion overlooking the city I had
built from the ground up with my bare hands, with grateful citizenry depositing
offerings of fruit, bread and sexy young daughters at my doors daily.
All this distracting expostulating
with the way my life has turned out, at
least on the work front, should
not take away from the fact that this is a good book. Not brilliantly written,
not easy to read (at first), and probably not well footnoted enough to pass as someone’s
doctoral thesis, but very much an argument for a way of life that is so
appealing to me that I have already stopped working very hard in my role as an
administrator.
Anyone who raised an eyebrow just
then, can leave now.
*A pre-emptive apology for all the swearing would normally
appear here, but fuck you.
**In an aside worthy of getting myself a spousal kicking for
my habitual “blame the fuck out of everyone except myself” whinging, I blame it
on my parents’ obsession with L.A. Law.
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