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The Virtual Rambler
Number eleven: 22nd November 2010
Dawdling
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Having sampled brief bouts of full-time work during summer holidays , I
concluded that a leisurely student life was in order for as long as
humanly possible. Just reading through a Situations Vacant column brought me
out in a cold sweat. Who were all these people who “will
be highly focussed , adaptable to change and able to thrive in a
deadline-driven environment” ? From penalty-takers to chess masters , focus
always earns a ripple of applause denied to those with scattered attention
spans. For the single-minded , the pilgrim , the obstreperous and
the drunk , there's no discouragement shall make them once relent. The man
without a goal , on the other hand , is destined to a random sequence
of totally whatever situations. For those adrift on a sea of
skrimshanking(1) , no flow of admonitory faxes from head office
can
galvanise them into increased productivity. In search of an unpressured
existence , the last thing we want is to be awakening the giant within.
When I survey my elderly contemporaries I hear a chorus of grouchiness and
bafflement about the way that things seem to go from bad to worse.
Tempting though that response is , we dawdlers have come to prefer a
graceful retreat before the tide of the times. Rather like old King Canute.
There are those who tarry and there are others who become exasperated with a
dawdling companion. Everything hurries them onwards.
The foot-draggers have discovered that in the realm of the fleeting , a
dawdler is king of all he surveys. During my afternnon snooze I close
my eyes and essay an imaginative depiction of the unhurried pace of life in
the Precambrian(2)oceans. Consortia of minute cells
and filaments slowly coming together under protective coatings of slime to
the accompaniment of nothing more than gentle waves breaking upon
otherwise uninhabited shores. This sort of loitering went on for billenia ,
before the frenzied evolutionary tempo of the Cambrian epoch brought
locomotion to organic life in the form of go-getting predators. Ahhh , the
soothing perspectives of geological durations with their imperceptible
shuffles of structural change. What a contrast to the febrile and frenetic
tempo of modern life , exemplified in the figure of a fell-runner
coming down a mountain at full speed , who would fall over if he tried to
stop and stays on his feet only by accelerating ever onwards.
The ticking time during which we accomplish tasks and meet appointments may
be described as well-spent or otherwise but contrary to the maxim of
entrepeneurs , time is NOT money and is entirely indifferent to exchange
values. We experience time in itself , as opposed to clock time ,
only when it isn’t calibrated to our will. Consider those who must
linger in duration : the sick and the old , the purposeless , who wait
upon time rather than disposing of it. The transience of all things becomes
accessible to those for whom the current of time has slowed down to a
sloth’s pace. All is subject to change and lives by perishing. Better
to spend as much of your allotted span in as leisurely a fashion as you
can , unperturbed by the frenzied babble of the mass media or the chuntering
rumble of political debate. As uninvolved in any sort of social media as
you are inattentive to all marketing claims on your attention. Captains of
industry will castigate this as a childish , economically inactive and
unrealistic program. Yes indeed. To the committed dawdler their
“real world” is a chimera , like the patterns you see
floating before you when you rub your eyes on waking from a nap. We who
spend our time aimlessly strolling or recumbent in idle reveries prefer the
ambience of a play-group to that of the production line. We treasure any
opportunity to step off the fast-food chain of instant messaging and instant
gratification , thereby to loiter in time rather than be hurried on by
spurious deadlines. When we say that time passes , it's we who are passing.
Wig.
(1) a word of unknown origin , it was British military slang for
shirking work or one’s obligations. It was one of several words favoured by
my mother which are unknown to a modern dictionary. Folk were
spragged when thwarted. Small-time entities (like corner shops) were
described as
penking. Food without substance had no bant in it. To be
powfagged was to sulk after being spragged.
(2) The fossil record from before about 580 million years ago
suggests that organisms were comparatively simple , being composed of
individual cells occasionally organized into colonies. The rate of evolution
in the
Precambrian was very slow, with many species persisting unchanged
for billions of years.
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Archive
Virtual rambler #1 – Posturing,
9th March 2010
Virtual rambler #2 –
Managerialism, 17th March 2010
Virtual rambler #3 – Nostalgia,
27th March 2010
Virtual rambler #4 – The Alpha
Male, 13th April 2010
Virtual rambler #5 – General
Elections, 3rd May 2010
Virtual rambler #6 – The Leisure
Industry, 15th May 2010
Virtual rambler #7 – Guide to
The World Cup, 15th June 2010
Virtual rambler #8 – Human
Nature, 12th July 2010
Virtual rambler #9 –
Communities, 13th August 2010
Virtual rambler #10 – Worlds
Apart, 6th October 2010
Virtual rambler #11 – Dawdling,
22nd November 2010
Virtual rambler #12 – ELVIS,
24th December 2010
Virtual rambler #13 –
Transience, 4th February 2011
Virtual rambler #14 – Regional
Accents, 15th April 2011
Virtual rambler #15 – The
Afterlife, 21st July 2011
Virtual rambler #16 – Bizspeak,
27th August 2011
Virtual rambler #17 – Night
Walks, 3rd October 2011
Virtual rambler #18 – Bob Dylan
and Charles Dickens, 8th November 2011
Virtual rambler #19 – Another
Nutty Professor, 16th December 2011
Virtual rambler #20 – Customer
Choice, 16th January 2012
Virtual rambler #21 – Wearing
Shorts, 18th February 2012
Virtual rambler #22 – A Brief
History of Progress, 17th March 2012
Virtual rambler #23 – The Myth
of Sisyphus, 16th April 2012
Virtual rambler #24 – Natural
History, 20th May 2012
Virtual rambler #25 – European
Self Importance, 26th June 2012
Virtual rambler #26 – Sweet
Dreams, 25th July 2012
Virtual rambler #27 – Excess,
17th August 2012
Virtual rambler #28 – In Denial,
20th September 2012
Virtual rambler #29 – The Way,
21st October 2012
Virtual rambler #30 – On
Rambling, 14th November 2012
Virtual rambler #31 – Gazing
Into The Abyss, 18th December 2012
Virtual rambler #32 –
Intellectual Gloom, 25th January 2013
Virtual rambler #33 – Great
Human Achievements, 20th February 2013
Virtual rambler #34 –
Autobiography, 20th March 2013
Virtual rambler #35 – Your Good
Health, 21st April 2013
Virtual rambler #36 –
Deconstruction, 20th May 2013
Virtual rambler #37 – My Home
Town, 19th June 2013
Virtual rambler #38 – Ancient
History, 21st July 2013
Virtual rambler #39 –
Possessions, 20th August 2013
Virtual rambler #40 – Sporting
Stoics, 20th September 2013
Virtual rambler #41 – Free Time,
20th October 2013
Virtual rambler #42 – Ewan Don't
Allow, 20th November 2013
Virtual rambler #43 – A Literary
Nexus, 20th December 2013
Virtual rambler #44 – Taking
Liberties, 16th January 2014
Virtual rambler #45 – More or
Less, 20th February 2014
Virtual rambler #46 – Under
Control, 20th March 2014
Virtual rambler #47 – Waiting,
20th April 2014
Virtual rambler #48 – They Rose
Without Trace, 20th May 2014
Virtual rambler #49 – Bigger
Impression , Smaller Footprint, 20th June 2014
Virtual rambler #50 –
Terpsichorean Instrumentations, 18th July 2014
Virtual rambler #51 – Socially
Mediated, 19th August 2014
Virtual rambler #52 – Rambling Into The Sunset, 20th September 2014
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