I received this book as a Christmas present and it was a very well-judged gift as I managed to read three chapters on Christmas Day.
It looks at how we spend our time and how that has changed over 50 years. The data come from time use diaries, where individuals record what they are doing every 10 minutes in various categories. The most recent survey was carried out in 2014-15 when 16,000 diary days were collected from 8000 individuals in 4000 randomly-selected households. Pretty similar data were collected in pretty similar ways back in 1961 and at intervals in between.
So the data allow one to look at whether we are rushed off our feet compared with the past, whether we get more sleep than we used to, and whether there has been any change in the way that men and women spend their time.
The data from the latest survey are fascinating but the comparisons over time are even more so. Back in 1961 I was alive but not filling in diaries, as my days were filled with pre-school play. A striking change in our days is that in 1961 there were well-defined lunch and dinner times when high proportions of the population were sitting down to eat whereas those peaks of activity have now been much reduced as we spend less time and less synchronised time eating such meals. In my early days at primary school my father would come home for lunch every day, picking me up from school en route, and Mum would have a meal ready for us for a quick turnaround within the lunch hour. That would be a rare pattern these days.
Similarly this book reminded me that Dad worked every other Saturday (taking turns with his brother who jointly ran the small family business). A far higher proportion of workers now work a five-day week rather than having a six-day working week as standard.
But the book is full of findings which are well-described and interestingly explored – I won’t go into the findings, I’ll leave you to discover them for yourself. The book is not number-heavy but there are lots of graphs (I love graphs) and these are fascinating. Some of the graphs are not brilliantly well reproduced here which is a bit of a shame. But they are certainly servicable and very much do the heavy lifting of getting the message across.
This book explodes some much-repeated misconceptions about how our use of time has changed but it is also simply fascinating. It was a good present for me and might be one you could buy yourself as a New Year gift.
What We Really Do All Day: insights from the Centre for Time Use Research by Jonathan Gershuny and Oriel Sullivan is published by Pelican.
Remarkable Birds by Mark Avery is published by Thames and Hudson – for reviews see here.
Inglorious: conflict in the uplands by Mark Avery is published by Bloomsbury – for reviews see here.
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My guess is that commuting takes up a huge amount of people’s time now. For most of his working life my Dad lived within a short walk of his job. I had 20-30 minute journeys for most of mine (though the Friday afternoon meetings of the Friends of the A34 often extended them). Dad’s grand-daughter now lives about 2 hours away from her job but only goes to the office once a month.
I’m guessing that we collectively spend vastly more time in front of screens of one kind or another than used to be the case.
I have not read this book, but hopefully it does go into a very important change in all our lives that we all underestimate, that of our generation dietary changes, and the ever increasing demand for cleaner, varied, uniformed produce.
My parents/grandparents ate seasonal food, a large part of which we grew and stored. For the early part of my life, weekly meals never changed from season to season, that was until Tesco’s opened a shop, small by todays’ standards, it had the local effect of Martians landing, different foods and different fresh produce in packets and tins all under one roof, 52 weeks a year, a life changing event, we now take for granted.
Whenever I talk to a group of people about this farm, I usually start off with a puzzle by saying, what has Henry VIII, the battlecruiser HMS Tiger and Fanny Craddock to do with the rise and fall of farmland birds? Most at first don’t see, those that have historical knowledge actually catch on quite quickly. As I work through the explanation arriving at Fanny, I point out the most ambitious meal she prepared on TV was coq au vin, which I remember my mother had a go at. Compare that to today’s Master Chef on TV with multi ingredients from around the world.
What usually got a chuckle is when I remind whomever I’m talking too, that curries came in a freeze-dried packet, courtesy of the space programme. I thought them a revelation when they appeared, but it was like eating grit, compared to the recipes we get today.
Whether for good or bad humanity is a progressive species and all of us play a role in our success, and as mores the case now our failures. We might fondly look back with nostalgic reminisces, but none of us are prepared to change our lifestyle and that goes for whatever irks you, be it social injustice and welbeing, conservation or the environment.