The Hour Nobody Ordered

On the last Thursday in September they took the scaffolding off the old drapery on Halliwell Street, and for about an hour nobody on that pavement did a single thing they had gone out to do. The building had been wrapped for two years. Long enough for the sheeting to go from white to the colour of an old ceiling, long enough for the bus stop to be moved and then moved back, long enough that most of us had stopped believing there was a building under there at all and had come to think of it as a kind of weather.

They took it down from the top, which is not what you expect. You assume a scaffold comes apart the way a wall comes down, and instead it is undone in the exact reverse of the order it went up, tube by tube, and nothing is ever let fall. The man above frees a tube and brings it down through his hands, and the man below has both hands on it before the man above lets go, and the man above says a word first, one syllable, and that word is the entire warning system. The tubes go onto a stack, and the stack goes down the outside in bundles on a rope, hand over hand. In an hour I heard four words that were not that one syllable. Steel makes a particular noise when a gloved hand stops it. It is the noise of a struck string with the ring taken out of it, and Halliwell Street got several hundred of them that afternoon, and by about the fifth the woman from the launderette had come out with a basket on her hip and had not gone back in.

I want to defend that hour. Not the whole afternoon, which I frittered in the ordinary ways; one hour, spent standing on a pavement with my head back, watching four men take a metal frame off a brick face for reasons that were entirely theirs and none of mine. And I want to defend it to you in particular, because you have a calendar and I have seen the state of it, and because the defence I am about to make is not the one you are braced for.

The one you are braced for is that rest makes you better at working. You have heard it from every direction. Sleep scientists say it kindly, productivity writers say it hungrily, and your employer says it in a message about wellbeing that arrives at nine on a Sunday night. It is not a stupid argument. It is a surrender, and it concedes the only point actually in dispute: that the hour must earn its keep by what it does for the other hours. Grant that and idleness has not been defended. It has been annexed and put to work.

So I am not going to tell you that the hour under the scaffold made me sharper on the Friday. I am going to make a harder claim, and then I am going to pay for it in public.

Here it is. To be useful is to be useful for something, and somebody has to be able to say what the something is, in advance, in words, or it cannot be scheduled, paid for, or checked. That saying is a specification, and a specification is one of the great human inventions: it is how a bridge gets built, how a wound gets stitched, how anything at all gets done by more than one person in more than one room. Not all good work is like that; a cook improvises. But what can be checked against a prior statement is what gets counted, and what gets counted gets called the work. Look at what it does at the moment it is issued. Everything it does not mention becomes surplus. And a life in which every hour carries a specification is a life in which none of you is surplus, which sounds like efficiency and is in fact a definition of an instrument.

I am not insulting instruments. An instrument is a marvel. It is also the sort of thing we treat as written down, even where it is not: no manual holds everything a good turner knows about a lathe, and the lathe can still be handed to somebody else, or to something else, and it will perform. The trouble starts when the part we can hand over is taken for the whole. If everything you do is what was asked, then what was asked is the whole of you at work, and the whole of you at work is a document, and we have all watched what happens to documents.

The unproductive hour is simply the hour with no specification in it. That is the whole definition. Not rest, not reward, not fuel, not a treat you have earned by suffering adequately on the other days. An hour in which nobody, including you, has said in advance what would count as its having gone well.

Which is why it matters more than the rest argument could ever make it matter. Inside a specification you can satisfy a want. What you cannot do inside it is acquire one, since a specification is the list of what is already wanted, and nothing on a list is news. Wants arrive when attention lands somewhere nobody sent it, which happens inside assigned work too, as anybody knows who has found the real problem while solving the stated one. But it happens on the surplus, in the part of the mind the task has not spent, and a life arranged so that no part of the mind is ever unspent is a life arranged against it.

I have to be exact about what I am praising, because there are things it is not, and most of them are miseries.

Exhaustion is not idleness. The man asleep in the doorway of the shut bookmaker’s at the top of Halliwell Street was not being idle at two o’clock; he was doing the one thing his body had left him, and the difference between his hour and mine is not a difference of degree. Unemployment is not idleness. A friend of mine lost her contract in March and now has more unstructured time than she can bear, and not one hour of it is hers, because every hour is being watched by the next one. Care is not idleness either. The second shift, the tea and the tablets and the school run and the eight o’clock phone call to the surgery, is unspecified only in the sense that nobody has ever bothered to write it down, which is the exact opposite of the thing I am praising.

What I mean is chosen, and it is bounded, and it has an edge on both sides. It is nearer to truancy than to holiday: a small, deliberate, faintly illicit removal of yourself from the accounting, with the accounting still running, and with every intention of going back.

Now the hour itself. I am going to take you through it three times, because it will not tell you what it is worth in one pass.

The first pass is the money, since that is the objection everyone makes silently while making a politer one aloud. The hour had a price and I can tell you what it was. I do work that is billed by the day, and a day is seven hours if you are honest about it, and that Thursday I had a piece of one half finished on a laptop in the bag hanging off the railing beside me. One seventh of a day, forgone. I could give you the figure. I gave myself the figure, on the pavement, unbidden, somewhere around the fourth tube, and the speed at which it arrived is the only interesting thing about it.

Because that is what has been done to the hour: it has been made fungible, so that an hour of mine now exchanges against an hour of anybody’s, and against a sum, and against a slice of a mortgage, at a rate that is available to me at all times whether or not I have asked for it. I did not work it out. It presented itself. It presents itself to you as well, in the queue, in the bath, at your mother’s, and the machinery that does it was installed so quietly that none of us can remember agreeing to it.

The second economic fact about the hour is uglier and I would rather leave it out. I stood still on a pavement for an hour and nobody once asked me what I was doing there. The traffic warden went past twice and did not look at me twice. Standing still in a city is not a neutral act and it is not equally permitted; there are three armrests in the bench at that bus stop, put there on purpose, and every one of us knows which people get asked whether they are waiting for something. My hour was discretionary in the strict sense of the word, at my own disposal, and it was at my disposal partly because of my coat and my accent and the fact that I visibly had somewhere else to be.

The second pass is the body, and the body has a complaint to lodge. My neck hurt. It hurt that evening and it still hurt in the morning, a precise ache high on the left side, and I am putting it in because it is evidence and because it is undignified. I had not looked up in months. Not at anything. You can walk a city for a year at head height, reading the doors and the shopfronts and the backs of people’s heads, and never once take in the storey above the first, which is where a city keeps whatever it was feeling when it was built.

An hour of looking up is not restful, and I want that on the record, because the rest argument needs the hour to be restorative and it was not. Attention is not rest. Nothing about my heart rate was soothing. Twice I flinched. There is a moment when the man at the top leans out past the last standard with his lanyard clipped behind him and six feet of steel coming across in one hand, and your own stomach performs the movement on his behalf, and there is nothing recuperative in it whatsoever.

What the body was doing has a better word than rest, and the word is available. Not resting. Not waiting, because waiting takes an object. Available: attention with nothing booked into it, pointed at whatever the street did next, which was mostly nothing, and then twice something I could not have asked for, since asking would have required knowing it was there.

It was sociable too, which I had not expected. Fifteen or so of us at the height of it, none of us acquainted, nobody saying much, spaced along the far kerb at intervals that no one negotiated. The launderette woman kept the basket on her hip for the whole hour and never once set it down, which I have thought about since rather more than is reasonable. A boy of about seven asked his father why they could not simply push it over. And a man in a red thermal jacket stood with his bike against the railing and his foot on the pedal, spinning it backwards, again and again, so that the freewheel ticked. I had him down as impatient. I had a whole small story going about how impatient he was.

The third pass is what appeared, and it is here that I will lose some of you.

What appeared was the building, obviously; that is what taking a scaffold down is for. But what appeared on the building was a band of glazed tile above the third floor, buff and green and filthy, and set into it at intervals along the whole front, three times, a swift with its wings swept back.

Swifts. On a drapery. There is no reason for them. The place went up in 1908 to sell curtain fabric and mourning crepe to people who had walked there, and somebody in the drawing of it decided to spend money on three birds that would sit sixty feet above the head of every customer the shop ever had. Nobody at street level was ever going to see them properly. Nobody was meant to. They are gratuitous in the exact and unfashionable sense of the word: uncalled for, unreturned, free.

I went out into the road to get a better look, which was stupid, and a van driver gave me his opinion of it. And the thought I had, standing where I had no business standing, was not a useful thought, and I am handing it to you anyway: that somebody had to want those birds before anybody could write them down. I do not know how they got into the building. Perhaps the draper asked for birds and got exactly what he ordered, and there is a sheet somewhere giving their glaze, their height above the pavement, and a signature accepting the cost. None of that would touch it. A specification is the machine that gets a want built. It is not the place a want comes from. Somewhere behind that tile, attention outran whatever had already been asked. It may have happened at work; the surplus is the point. Somebody looked at an empty band above a third floor and thought: birds.

Then, because I cannot help myself, I did the thing I have spent this essay telling you not to do. Nine days later the hour turned up inside a piece of work, altered, useful, load-bearing, and I was extremely pleased with myself, and when I sat down to write this I thought: there is my proof, I shall finish on that.

I am not going to use it, and I want you to watch me put it down, because putting it down is the argument. The moment I amortise the hour across the nine days that followed it, I have agreed that an hour is a cost to be recovered, and I have handed the case back to the other side. An hour that has to be vindicated by its yield is not an unproductive hour. It is a productive hour with a longer settlement period. The defence has to hold in the version where nothing whatever comes of it, and that is most of them; I have spent hundreds of hours on things that went precisely nowhere, and either the defence covers those too or it is not a defence at all, it is an investment strategy with a warm voice.

It is also why I will not call the hour fallow, though the word is lying right there and everybody reaches for it. A fallow field is not resting. It is being managed for the sake of next year’s wheat.

So. The objection. I am going to put it at full strength, which means putting it in a form I cannot get out of cheaply, and I would rather you had it from me than assembled it yourself in the margin while pretending to be persuaded.

It runs like this. Everything you have described is a purchase. You stood on a pavement for an hour because you are paid by the day and not by the drop, because nobody was tracking your location, because you had eaten at one, because there is a door you can go home through, and because the city does not presently treat your standing still as a problem requiring management. What you are calling a nutrient of the mind is a good distributed by money, and describing it beautifully does not redistribute it by so much as a minute. Worse: a defence of idleness written by a man who has some is, whatever he intends by it, a compliment paid to the arrangement that gave it to him. A reader living in the precarity you are gesturing at will finish your essay knowing exactly what they knew at the start, which is that people with afternoons like yours believe their afternoons are meaningful.

That is correct. All of it. I am not interested in the version of this essay in which it is not correct, and I want to say out loud what accepting it costs.

The first cost is innocence. I do not get the hour back afterwards as a private pleasure. If the unassigned hour is a good rather than a taste, then having one is not a charming personal habit; it is a portion of something other people are being kept from, and I cannot stand in it the way I was standing in it on the last Thursday in September, which was happily, with my head back, like a man at a fair.

The second cost is proof. I have none to give you. I am not going to send you a study, and not because there are none on rest and attention; there are, and they measure recovery and performance, which is the case I have already refused to argue. What I am claiming is a change in what a person becomes capable of wanting, and I do not know how you would instrument that, and I am therefore asking you to take a claim about minds on the strength of a description of a Thursday. You are entitled to refuse.

My answer is smaller than the objection, and it turns entirely on which word we agree to use.

If the unproductive hour is a luxury, then its distribution is a matter of money and taste, the proper response of a person without one is envy, and envy has never yet produced an hour. If it is a nutrient, then its absence is a harm, and harms can be claimed. That is the whole of the difference and it is not small. Nobody discovered the weekend. It was taken, over a long argument, by people who were told at the time that what they were asking for was idleness, and who did not much bother to deny it.

So the objection is not wrong and I am not answering it. It describes a distribution; I am describing a need; and the distribution is the reason the need is urgent rather than a reason to keep quiet about it. If the unassigned hour is what keeps a mind from being completely specified, then a person whose every hour is specified for them is not merely tired at the end of it. Something is being taken that was never in the pay.

The scaffold was down to first floor level by four, and after that it stopped being worth watching, which is how these afternoons end. The sun had come round the end of the street and was lying flat along the top of the brick. People went. The launderette woman went in with her basket. The boy and his father went. I got my bag off the railing and discovered that my shoulder had stiffened as well, and that I was going to be late for the thing I was already late for, and I did not mind, which is the cheapest available evidence of a good hour and you should ignore it.

The man in the red thermal jacket was still there. His phone had sounded and there was a job on it, because he was clipping the bag shut and swinging his leg across. I do not know his route, contract, or pay, and will not invent them. I know the insulated bag, the name across the back of the jacket, and that Halliwell Street is shut to vans in the afternoon, so a bike can stand there without being moved on, which is not true of the ring road. He had not been idle. Waiting for work is not chosen idleness, and the word I had praised an hour earlier has a second use. Mine was availability with nothing booked into it. His was readiness that ended when the phone gave him somewhere to go.

And before he went he put his foot on the pedal and spun it backwards the way he had all afternoon, and the freewheel ticked, and then he put his head back and looked up at the third floor for as long as it takes to say a short sentence. I had that gesture down as impatience for an hour, on no evidence beyond my need to name it. I now have a second story ready, in which he is taking something back, and I notice how badly I want to hand it to you, and it is not mine to hand. I do not know what he was looking at or what it was worth to him. Here is all I have. There is nothing on that stretch of wall but tile and three birds, and nobody in our small crowd had been sent there to look at them. He looked. Then he rode off up Halliwell Street standing on the pedals with the bag swinging behind him, and the last of the sheeting came off the railings in the wind with a crack like something getting to its feet.