A few days ago, working with a student, the subject of ‘gap years’ came up. My student pointed out that he hadn’t heard of anyone having a gap year for quite a long time. I’ll explain why in a moment but that reminded me of a conversation I’d had several years ago when we discussed that fact that at the time ever second advert on the TV seemed to be for sofas. Dad suggested that that was because at the time, based on the state of the British economy, a new sofa was the most generally affordable aspirational commodity.
Mindful of
the fact that in a recent blog I advanced the notion of The Last Teabag theory
of human survival, I wish to bold enough to propose the Gap Year and Sofa Guage
of Economic Health. Forget following the stock market or Bank of England
interest rate hikes to monitor the nation’s economic condition… just watch the
telly to see how often sofas are being hawked on the adverts and notice how
often you hear of someone going off on a gap year! Perhaps I should have a word
with the LSE!
Actually, I
notice that at the moment most adverts are for new kitchens and specialist
cruises. As well as indicating that I probably watch to much TV (guilty as
charged) maybe it means that most Britons now enjoy the luxury of a comfortable
sofa and got around sizing up their tired kitchens and beginning to feel the
need for a break that’s a break from the ordinary.
On a
completely different note, with some other students, we’ve been reading about
the research that was done at the wonderfully named Dream and Nightmare Lab in
Montreal, Canada, where they’ve finally proved that eating cheese does give us
nightmares. I couldn’t help wondering if the work in the lab is divided and so
some of the staff have a dream job and the others…
Also how
might the staff react when a colleague dashes late into the building and
declares, “It’s a nightmare out there!” Would they assume, as the rest of us
would that the traffic has been really bad this morning, or wonder if they
should dash out of the building tightly clasping a clipboard and a pen?
A similarly irrelevant
conundrum that occurred to me recently was when a group of us were sorting out
books for a charity and someone fished out a book about Feng Shui. I wondered
if it contained information about where you should keep the book itself. Also
tidying through my own books, aiming to downsize, I realised that I had several
‘How to get your book published’ type books that I’d accumulated at the
beginning of my ‘career’ (career! ha!). How many ‘How to get your book
published’ books have actually been rejected I thought? (Is that a writer’s
form of gallows humour?)
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