This week's flaneurial thoughts come from the relatively recently found dada (not capitalized) café in the town of Epping, which lays claim to have the highest High Road in the whole of Essex ( a dizzying 332 feet above sea level). The café is small but perfectly formed. Apart from a very exotic, if somewhat expensive, range of teas and some very strong coffee, they also serve a range of snacks and quiches, employing what seem to be former roof tiles instead of plates. If nothing else, it lends new meaning to the phrase 'put mine on the slate...'.
Reading the café’s copy of “The Times” I discover that the UK is apparently now a land of opportunity for the over 65s. Gone are the days when such folk found themselves 'forced' into retirement. Now more and more of them are 'benefiting' from the 'flexibility' of zero hours contracts. Most of these people are also employed at minimum wage level apparently, another wonderful plus for the UK economy.
In the world of spin, even the ugliest of facts can be made to sound pleasant. The reality, it seems, is that elderly people find themselves increasingly having to work whether they wish to or not. The already meagre allowances are being steadily chipped away by the powers that be whilst the state in the UK is increasingly unwilling to help even the most desperate of folk (unless, of course, the folk in question are the likes of Russian millionaires, Chinese property speculators or hugely wealthy non-doms who seem to somehow manage to maintain that status despite the fact that they have lived in the UK for up to 30 years).
It seems that it is not enough to have a society based on the wage slavery, but if at all possible, the desire from the upper echelons of government seems to be that the slavery continues until the moment the slave in question shuffles off their mortal coil.
The Chancellor, George Gideon Oliver Osborne, formerly known as the 'Oik of St. Paul's' and yet another member of the Bullingdon Club, has developed a fondness in recent times for preaching about the 'dignity of work'. Sometimes the dignity in question seems harder to witness in practice than to espouse in theory, the reality often involving, as it does, employees being forced to work long hours at the beck and call of fickle employers who currently enjoy the benefits of some very 'flexible' labour practices. These entail such things as the aforementioned zero hours contracts, compulsory and often unpaid overtime and a steady eroding away of even the most basic of decent working conditions. Mr. Osborne, it should perhaps be noted, has never had what used to be quaintly termed as a 'proper' job himself...
The American essayist, and very profound thinker, Henry David Thoreau pointed out the nature of the trap that we are all lured into. In his book 'Walden' he devotes the whole of the first chapter to 'Economy'. In it he shows how we are tempted and seduced by the desire to have so many 'things' we do not need and how being enslaved in such a way keeps us having to work long hours at jobs we often hate in order to acquire them. We are enticed, through the skilful machinations of the advertising industry, into greed, into the absurd belief that if we can only acquire enough things that this is somehow, almost magically, going to make us happy.
Thoreau demonstrates with incisive insight that excess possessions not only require excess labour in order to purchase them, but also often end up simply being a burden, something we need to concern ourselves with because they need cleaning, maintaining or even simply storing. People believe they need these things and this 'need' then forces them into devoting much of their waking time to working long hours in order to have these often completely useless items in their lives.
Advertising feeds into this 'need'. It persuades people that they are measured, or somehow validated, by their ownership of objects. It has them chasing after the acquisition of endless 'stuff'. On visiting people's homes, I am often struck by just how much 'stuff' they own. Things that are never used, that seemed a good idea at the time, that now lay neglected and unused in the 'spare' room or garage, or simply cluttering up every available space in the property. This seems to be the case as much with those of limited pecuniary means as for those fortunate enough to find themselves in better financial straits.
Happy, fruitful and fulfilled lives are not achieved by the endless acquisition of stuff, but by doing things that have meaning and value to the individual concerned. Whether that be through family, through relationship, through service, through the expression of talents and the doing of things that one loves, or simply by following the kind of life one wants to live.
Of course it is often necessary to have sources of income and the means to achieve these things, but often far, far less is needed than would be supposed to be the case.
Standing in the way of people's abilities to lead free and expressive lives is often the phenomenon of debt. The system is almost set up in such a way as to ensure that debt is taken on from a very early age (indeed, in the case of students, even before they are working) and piled on from that stage onwards through the acquisition of cars, houses, appliances, etc., so that most people, for the vast majority of their adult lives, are never out of debt.
It seems that very soon the average UK household debt level will top £10,000. This figure, quite amazingly, doesn't include mortgage debt. In excess of a quarter of all British adults of working age spend more than 40% of their income simply to service their debts. They are having to run faster and faster just to stay still.
Back in the Dada café, the lunchtime crowd have come and gone and the staff are busily washing the tiles, attempting to make a clean slate of things perhaps... My final thoughts are of Henry David Thoreau and his notion, when writing about economy, that the most precious thing we possess in life is time. For him, the idea of spending the days, weeks, months and years of our lives doing tasks we hate to obtain things we don't need seemed like an absurdity.
I, for one, would not disagree.
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