Back from a luxurious break
You, me and the keyboard makes three.
When I wrote to you last, in early December, I thought my hitherto rigid Tuesday posting cycle could survive the slew of deadlines headed my way, with minor modifications. Instead, I was swept up by a furious rising tide of pupillage applications and final law school exams — plus, of course, my actual full-time job — and spent most of the last eight weeks at my laptop or, lilac highlighter in hand, hunched over a Trusts law textbook.
Something had to go, and it turned out to be everything I enjoy.
That’s not strictly true. While my husband has, particularly this last week, taken full charge of ensuring that I do not starve, I managed a few things I like. I made a Guyanese black cake inspired by the one at Kaieteur Kitchen. I briefly went to Edinburgh. I packed a backpack and spent 47 incredibly rainy hours in France (much of them working). I had friends round for dinner and watched New Year’s Eve fireworks from my flat. I went to the Lee Miller exhibition on New Year’s Day. I saw this play, and that one. I learned the best way to make boiled eggs that peel easily. I bought strange second-hand dresses on Vinted. I had some triumphs and, as usual, some regrets.
Mostly, though, I worked. I worked at airports, on planes and trains, even on the tube. I worked first thing in the morning and very late at night. I worked in bed, duvet pulled tight under my chin, and over the gourmet meals my husband made for me, which I also critiqued vigorously, on breaks. (Sometimes, after rudely proclaiming his luxurious, parmesan-inflected polenta a little dry — “this could use a jus,” quoth she — I’d gobble it down and simply leave the table to work.)
My daily step count plummeted from about 10,000 to a few hundred. I didn’t care. I was working.
Most horrifyingly of all, I didn’t really mind.
I mean, of course I did. In the abstract, I would far rather have been with the people I love, doing things I actually enjoy, instead of working through the effects of the Mazur judgment or distilling Sam Freedman’s multi-chapter argument about changes to the British legislative process into a single highly accurate sentence.
And yet, as is often the case when one is having a good time, the time simply flew by.
Compare my experience — the thrill of being hunched over a laptop at midnight — with that of the hunter-gatherer Ju/’hoansi people of southern Africa.
This community, the anthropologist James Suzman explains in this podcast episode, had a flat social structure and a longstanding commitment to egalitarianism, both of which were threatened by highly stimulating work that confers substantial status on those who do it.
In the wilds of Zone 1 London, that might be a certain kind of high-paid knowledge-economy work that eats up your evenings and weekends. In the Kalahari Desert, it is hunting.
“Hunting is extraordinarily fulfilling work,” Suzman says. “It is very satisfying. It engages your mind. It engages your intellect. It engages years of acquired and accumulated skill. It engages your intuition. It engages your physical strength. It engages your stamina. And it engages you emotionally because you have this huge empathetic connection with the animals that you’re pursuing. It is deeply and profoundly satisfying.”
Hunters, in turn, are strong, capable and the direct route to meat, the thing people in the community like most, Suzman says.
So, how do you stop these valuable individuals from accruing unhelpful quantities of social capital and asserting their dominance? You denigrate them and their spoils (”Ah, the meat smells like urine. Ah, it’s not enough to even feed my mother-in-law”). The kill, meanwhile, is attributed not to the individual who felled the giraffe, but to whoever made the arrow.
“In this way,” Suzman says, “successful hunters were, in effect, discouraged from hunting excessively.”
Two questions. Could we put rising inequality to bed by teasing everyone getting off at Bank tube station? And is it a little pathetic that my “rewriting the second paragraph, again” is their “out on the savannah with a bow and arrow”?
Anyway — it’s very nice to be back. See you next week, for a return to normal programming.
Natasha
P.S. I really liked Elle Hunt’s essay on overwork in 2020, and I did not learn anything from it.
STUFF YOU CAN EAT
Take the train to East Ham, then start your day with a vast and delicious dosa.
Someone made me this delicious lime and ginger posset, a surprising and lovely dessert. Someone else recommended this chicken dish. It’s on my to-do list. I’ll report back.
I rate this vegan mapo tofu recipe.
EVERYTHING ELSE
I saw two movies: Sentimental Value and The Girl. I liked both a lot, even as I found the heroine’s immaculate liquid eyeliner in a war zone, above, a little unlikely.
Did you already know about the six-foot-above-ground grave in Pinner?
I love the work of the Indian artist Jagdish Swaminathan, some of which is on show at the Royal Academy.
An excellent present: the silliest shower cap you can afford.