Tag: lunch

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.

One lunch at a time

Don’t mobilize, metabolize.

Breakfast in Catalonia (author pic)

Regular readers will know that I am weary and wary of approaches to the Christian faith that come out of a business-speak textbook:

Strategy!

Outreach!

Mobilisation!

I wonder instead how much real work for the Kingdom, and better work, is done in coffee shops or over lunches.

It’s an approach with form. Remember Acts 2, ‘They broke bread in their homes and ate together with glad and sincere hearts‘ (v 46).  No sooner was the Holy Spirit poured out than the church lunch became a thing.

Less well known is how good this is for our well-being. Newspaper reports recently cited an Oxford University study that found ‘the more people eat with others, the more likely they are to feel happy and satisfied about their lives’, and that the only two factors that really mattered in long-term survival after a heart attack were (a) giving up smoking and (b) having friends. 1

So let us march to the New Jerusalem, stopping frequently for lunch.