I am contemplating an experiment: go a week without looking at the news. Or even longer.
It’s not that I’m anti-news, it’s just… well, it’s quite a lot like Facebook. You don’t necessarily see the kind of thing you’re looking for, but there’s all this other stuff designed to get your attention, and before you know it another hour of your life is gone forever.
Time immemorial…. Has a lovely sound to it, doesn’t it? Like days of yore.
In fact, in British law, time immemorial is defined as everything before the sixth of July 1189. This was decided in 1275, presumably because by that point no one could remember anything before the sixth of July 1189 and it was therefore literally time immemorial – a time that no one living could remember.
It is interesting to consider what time immemorial would be these days. It’s so easy to forget how short a time, relatively speaking, things have been The Way Things Are. Mass transport, antibiotics, Queen Elizabeth II, the Internet… Fast fashion has only been around for a few decades, and yet how strange it now seems to have just a few carefully tended items of clothing, worn for years and infrequently replaced.
If there’s one thing I enjoy doing, it’s moving the furniture. Plotting future moves is almost as much fun.
Earlier this year I cooked up a delicious plan in which work desks (2) would be moved out of the living room into the kitchen, and the dining table would be moved into the living room, where it could enrich its life by doubling as a sewing table, writing table, games table, etc, etc, without being surrounded by cold air (the kitchen faces south-east) and the smells of cookery.