Down in Cardiff last week, I went to visit my uncle who lives on the coast a few miles west of the city.We were talking about how people find information today and, inevitably, the topic of Google came up.My uncle, now long retired, was a journalist working for a Cardiff news agency and, for many years, on The South Wales Echo where he was News Editor.
He was describing how he did most of his work by phone or in interviews and suddenly launched into a story about how on 21 October 1966 (a Friday morning) he was sitting at home and starting to write a short piece about waterspouts.There had been a rumour that a waterspout was imminent in the Bristol Channel and that this might pose some danger to shipping.“What did I know about waterspouts?” he said to me.The story continued.A phone call to the museum in Cardiff got him connected to the Keeper of Geology who referred him to an academic colleague in the Geography Department at the University.My uncle’s call to the University was answered and a very helpful and detailed account of waterspouts (origins, frequency in the channel, impact etc.) was forthcoming.My uncle took down the details in his notebook and, after two final calls to the harbour master at Barry and the coastguard station, he rang the newsroom to dictate his copy.
No one picked up the phone.No one answered his second or third calls.Newsrooms functioned on phone calls so, after a fourth call remained unanswered, my uncle got in his car and drove to the office.The few people there were in shock.News had come in that a tip of coal waste had slid onto the village of Aberfan and had buried the village school.My uncle got back in his car and drove north.He spent a week living in his car in Aberfan, filing copy by phone wherever he could find a phone box, and came back to the newsroom on the following Saturday.An old colleague found him staring at his desk, muttering incoherently, and took him home.
The Aberfan Disaster and the enquiry which followed made a huge impact in Wales and across the country.The National Coal Board was clearly to blame for ignoring warnings and evidence about the danger of the tip.No individual was prosecuted.Nor did the waterspout materialise (for that’s where I started) and no shipping was endangered.Weeks later, my uncle looked for his shorthand notes about the waterspout but never found them.
A neighbour, who must be nudging 90, stopped me in the street yesterday to show me a collection of photos he apparently retrieved from a skip. Obviously once part of a family album from the 1930s, there were some great pictures of airplanes at Croydon Airfield and lots of scenes from around Italy featuring a man and a woman on what seemed to be their honeymoon. Having shown me these, he produced a final set with a flourish that showed the same man and woman cavorting naked in their hotel! My neighbour went off chuckling to himself.
Were they found in a skip? Were the man and the women members of his family?
The brooding presence of Son Number One gazing balefully at his chemistry book and, supposedly, revising makes home feel like work. If most corporate work is futile, what does this say about education?
Shall I let him go off rockclimbing with his mates this afternoon or insist on more hours of drudgery?
Theorising about work is so much easier than sorting out life outside.
Saturday means the weekend Guardian and Oliver Burkeman's This column will change your life. Discussing habits and habituation, Burkeman describes "burst working", a "smaller-scale kind of routinised disuption" intended to help habitual procrastinators (getting close to home, now).
Intrigued, I followed the topic up and found this overview piece from acidlabs based on Anne Zelenka's article in web worker daily. This reframes burst working in a different but no less interesting context from the habits Burkeman discusses. So, to a busy worker operating in a scientific management paradigm, burst working definitely seems like not-working and so misses the point that burst workers are engaging with the positive opportunities and advantages offered by the whole range of Web 2.0 tools. No more email slavery, choose and use your tools!
Walking down the river path in Weybridge, you can look over to Shepperton where Ballard lived for many years. Lovely old church and square by the river and then a more modern high street leading up to the station. It's a long way from literary London but perilously close to the landscape around Heathrow that Ballard made his own in novels from Crash onwards: abandoned farmland; lorry parks; the A30; business parks and cars everywhere you look; the M25 a never ending rumble in the background.
We've let the hedge down one side of the garden grow for the last couple of years. It's a tangle of shrubs and small trees. The reward for this gardening amnesty is that we have sparrows and blackbirds nesting. Recently, I heard a radio piece examining the disappearance of the sparrow from many urban parks and gardens. The experts were far from unanimous about the cause but the removal of habitats through excessive clearing and tidying was clearly part of the picture.
So in gardens, so at work, we over tidy at our peril. Clean desk, clear desk, paperless, digital; where's the space for some healthy mess?
Pens fell to the floor this morning when I wore a suit to work. It felt different and I spent much of the day waiting for the old corporate habits to creep in. A bit more bluster; a little more assertion; back straighter. I saw some clients this afternoon and not one commented. I hung up the suit tonight and it may stay in the wardrobe for a while. Until next time.
I first read Auden's The fall of Rome nearly four decades ago. The image of the clerk stuck in my mind as representing the office worker thinking and dreaming while trying to find meaning in the daily flow of tasks.
