Month: February 2025

Slowness and labour-saving devices

There is an argument that commitment to going about things slowly means should shouldn’t surround yourself with timesaving kit. I mostly don’t agree. As well as the standard stuff that everyone has had for years, we’ve also introduced a breadmaker and then a robot vaccuum cleaner to our managerie.

They mean you can choose your slowness. Making bread with a breadmaker is huge fun, a world away from the chore of having to make it like my grandparents knew.

I was thinking the other day about pre-dishwasher days. They mostly coincided with my not-being-married days, and quite often with being invited for Sunday lunch. As a young guy and recent Christian I ate a lot of other people’s Sunday lunches, usually a roast, and typically followed up by a walk or a chat and then a tea. Along with others, I have gratefully tackled piles of washing-up, enjoying the conversation and the shared work. I found various species of washers-up over the years, all now sadly ghosts of history.

  • The perfectionist. This was someone who basically took charge of the sink and made sure every dish came out spotless and gleaming. They were not quick, and their fellows on the cleanup crew had to stand and wait.
  • The drier-up who gleefully, even maliciously, returned washing up to the sink, requiring it to be redone.
  • The drier-up who assumed if you pick it off with tea-towel, that’s just fine.
  • The enthusiast who splashed around like a toddler in a bath, soaking everything, washing up with speed but not always with the highest quality.
  • The mono-tasker who, if you asked him a question, would stop even drying up a plate while he thought about the answer.
  • The contrarian, who washed the dirtiest things first, using prodigious amounts of water and time.

On that spectrum I was definitely, as a washer-up, the enthusiast, and as a drier, the picker-off-with-the-teatowel, unless I really didn’t like the person washing up, in which case I returned every plate I could find.

So much is lost with the demise of the Sunday wash up. Psychological assessment. Control. Submission. Dominance. Mentoring. Shared endeavour. Friendship.

Still, though.

Community can heal

I was gob-smacked and jaw-dropped, if you can be both, when I watched this this week:

As well as a few side-benefits – a second revolution, saving the NHS, that sort of thing – it was a glimpse into what the future could be like for all of us. And what a happy, healing place it looked like.

At root it what’s being described is, I think, an NHS GP practice in one of the most deprived areas of London, that has realized doctors only get to a fraction of illness. The rest is caused, or cured, by things like employment, education, environment and creativity.

With that realization taken seriously, what has evolved is a thriving community with an NHS medical practice (and, as it happens, a church) at its heart.

I do recommend you put this on next time you are cooking or driving or working out or something. (You don’t need to see the video and the pictures anyway add little to the story.) Instead of a clinical setting, think cafe, community, art, creativity, fun … it’s just really something.