The point I’ve reached in this ‘sociological autobiography’ was one of flux and change. I had managed to work my way around what had been presented to me by Stan Newman as an attempt to get me out of UCL – though all was later mired in confusion – and Graham Hart had welcomed me into the Research Department of Infection and Population Health in Mortimer Market. As reported, I had, concomitantly with this transition upped my productivity by churning out a few papers and going easy on books. Graham, bless him, left me alone (‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’). No, more than that, he was wholly supportive of my somewhat maverick endeavours.
This blog in the series is another brief disgression. Change – harsh, challenging and even traumatic (I had for a while to think about the possibility of compulsory redundancy) – throws the mundane into angular, sharp-edged relief.
It is as well recognised that one of life’s more magical tricks is to enjoy living the moment as it is uncommon to actually pull it off. So often we have to satisfy ourselves with looking back, with fuzzy memories. Less acknowledged is the salience for ongoing contentment of unidimensional, routine everyday experiences. Anthropologists and sociologists have written about it, and I have myself blogged relatedly on ‘familiarity bonds’, but a further pause to ponder is in order.
As I write this I am sitting in a café on Reading Station. I am likely to move it on in a café in Oxford, where I’m due to lecture. I love writing in cafes and bars, often to the point – I confess it – of unsociability. In the 1970s it was just me and a biro and exercise book, now it’s me and my laptop. I am also entirely at home in bookshops: I can brouse for hours. In retirement I am far less likely to visit old London haunts, most notably down Charing Cross Road (I once had a brief conversation with another addict, Michael Foot, in ‘Any Amount of Books’), but I regularly scour the Waterstones in Dorking, and latterly Epsom, and occasionally get to go to the likes of Heffers in Cambridge and Blackwells in Oxford. They are sources of ineffacble pleasure.
Later …
So here’s the thing. Lunch at Harris Manchester College with Crispin Jenkinson was good: academic gossip eased digestion. The 2-3pm Oxford lecture on health and illness behaviour a la Scambler seemed to go down well too, though Crispin has found this year’s intake less engaged than usual. Blackwells was a delight, even if I have in retirement discovered a strange reluctance to add to our constrained (bursting-at-the seams) home library in Mickleham. I bought but the one book, Dorling and Gietel-Basten’s Why Demography Matters, hot off the press, plus a crime novel for Annette. But, oh those shelves, those many shelves, and the scouring thereof! Seduction pure and simple. Scantily clad volumes winking, beckoning me. I suspect I share a ubiquitous academic ‘habitus’: that is, an insatiable curiosity that translates into a desire to relieve ignorance across-the-board. The rule re-bookly seduction? You can look, but don’t touch, in other words ‘don’t buy’. But the incipient excitement of browsing! I had a coffee on the first floor to calm and settle myself. Incidentally, two of the lessons yet to be fully learned from US coffee chains and outlets are: (a) the concept of ‘bottomless coffee’, and (b) sanguinity about taking as-yet-unpaid-for piles of books into café precincts.
Another café, with my laptop. This blog may not be especially endearing – as it happens – but I took a time-out to focus on the ‘process’ of nomadic or peripateic writing in and of itself; and I judged myself content. And that matters.
Meeting Ray Fitzpatrick at Nuffield College at 4.30pm led to a three-hour rambling conversation over two pints of Guiness. Here was sociability to complement the contentment of my opting out. Wittgenstein’s thesis: opting out is only possible if it is possible to opt in. So it’s a balance, a tension: the intimate pleasure of perusing bookshelves and liaising with my laptop is at the mercy of sociability just as sociability is at the mercy of my predeliction for books and keyboards. And I so enjoyed talking to Ray, my colleague at the Middlesex Hospital Medical School (long since ‘taken over’ by UCL) in the late 1970s and early 1980s. He remains an impressive person and valued friend.
Today I enjoyed, appreciated, appraised and reflected on the ‘now’, the ordinary and too often neglected mundanity of the present. The ‘ordinary’, familiarity bonds, matter. We know this even as we too readily neglect both it and its correlates. It pays us to ‘reflexively’ bear witness to and celebrate – even, and particularly – as we dip into mundanities that will (inevitably) one day be lost: perusing shelves, buying books, typing, snippets of conversation made possible by invitations to lecture, and the acuity and mobility to deliver on promises, will pass. The as here is weight-bearing.
One day the pure enjoyment of the taken-for-granted will be beyond reach. This is emphatically not a fatalistic or even pessimistic punctuation of life’s natural course.! It’s a reminder to – a cliché this – to appreciate simple pleasures as they cop up.
Even later …
I’d best finish the day’s narrative, not least because it too carries more than a hint of the routine. I have always liked trains and for all that I opposed the privatisation of the railways (any state can buy a chunk except the British state), I continue to enjoy this form of travel: commuting, as I’ve said before, was not a great hassle for me.
Well, I got back to Reading ok and stopped off to have a quick snack in the adjacent pub. At around 9.30pm I headed off for my normal Gatwick-bound train that stops at Dorking Deepdene. It was not running, possibly as a result of the timetable changes that had recently caused havoc nationally. So I caught another train to Guildford, thinking to change there. As the train approached Guildford, I thought a touch diffidently, an annoucement informed me that there were no trains to take me further, instead a bus service. The bus dwindled every which way before depositing me at Dorking. Luckily there was a taxi there, so I was home by 12.30am.
So there are familiars and familiars, welcome ones and less welcome ones! But, I hazard to suggest with tongue in cheek, even the latter can be a source of comfort. Really? Well, uncertainties as well as certainties play a role in constituting the social worlds we inhabit (take the weather for example). I remain a sociologist so am allowed an hypothesis now and again: familiarity bonds come in all shapes and sizes, in bold primary colours as well as in black and white, and all have the potential to comfort us and to contribute positively to health and wellbeing. Of course I prefer to rummage around bookshops and sit in cafes and bars with my laptop, but … Plus, familiarity bonds can fairly easily be put in their causal place by other mechanisms positive or negative for health. But don’t lets underestimate the salience for quality of life of the taken-for-granted, the mundane minutiae comprising day-to-day routines.
I appreciate wandering up Charing Cross Road the more so since acknowledeging that one day I will cease to do so, either through lack of opportunity or, in due course, mobility. I will ever cherish the memories of doing so, but in the meantime …