Opening Lines

WE all use it. “Are you busy?” or the shorter form, “Busy?”.

The sliced pan of small talk, bland but very handy, a golden key that opens up a treasure trove of anecdotes when talking to a taxi driver. It can be a prelude to conversations about ‘The Regulator’ and whether it’s worth their while going up to the airport or not.

One reply to “Busy?” is “Ah, can’t complain”. This does not mean that the respondent is living in a despotic regime. It just means that work is relatively stress-free when compared to the many people who are worse off in the world. (Some of whom, no doubt, live in countries where you can’t complain)

You may also be “up the walls” — a condition that is not just confined to window cleaners.

I reply with ‘tipping away’ — a practice that is at odds with my vehement opposal of illegal dumping. Tipping away implies a steady enough supply of work without any wall-upping being required. Tipping away should be enough to pay the bills. Be careful though. Revenue are always on the look out for people who pay a ‘tipping away’ amount of tax when they clearly ‘haven’t time to scratch’.

In farming, 15 year olds who are cutting silage for 48 hours straight with a PJ Carrolls clamped permanently in the mouth, knocking over every gatepost in the country and ‘getting FORTY out of her on the way back with an empty trailer’ would not be described as being up the walls, unless they lose control of the tractor around the yard. They are said to be ‘mad tearing around the place’

But when the harvest is in, the cheques from the co-ops are cashed and the ploughing has been gone to, things slow down a bit for the winter and it’s sufficient to be ‘doing a bit here and there’ — or fencing.

With the proliferation of foreign multinationals here, the reputation of the Irish as indolent dreamers leaning against a wall chewing on a blade of grass is gone forever. The Americans want their workers fully occupied.

But we shouldn’t replace it entirely with the tyranny of busy.

Even children now have schedules full of ‘activities’. What happened to bored? If I did the sums on my childhood, I’d say in total I spent about five years being bored. Admittedly I didn’t use the time to invent the Internet, or come up with a cure for mouth ulcers, but there was a kind of otherness about the time. It felt like unbeknownst to me, powers of concentration and relaxation were being honed during the vast emptiness of those summer afternoons. Those days that stretched for ages where so little happened you were looking forward to Sons and Daughters. (the Australian series about vets, not planning a family)

Even if you’ve nothing to do, you can be sure whoever you owe money to is definitely not letting the grass grow under their feet — or yours. But maybe as the Season of Busy and Being Rushed Off Our Feet starts to kick off, we could prioritise what’s important.

So come down from that wall, cease your tipping, and take some time to scratch.