A Thinking Man

Saturday mornings have become a time of ritual for me.  It hasn’t always been so.  At former times in my life Saturday mornings have been a time of chaos or industry.  There were children to amuse, household tasks to complete that could only get done during that brief time of freedom, essays to mark, lessons to plan, courses to write, sermons to prepare, essays to write.  Everything was crammed into that confined space pushing freedom and choice out.  It was a time completely of ‘oughts’ and ‘musts’ and ‘needs’ and usually ‘others’.  Now, it is a time of ritual.

We all have rituals, whether religious or not - little regularities that we perform without thinking, as ways of easing our existence; comforting routines that satisfy our desire for order or control, requiring minimal effort of planning on our part.  Once, when much younger and considerably more foolish, I challenged an Anglican clergyman friend of mine, gently mocking him about his love of ecclesiastical ritual.

“We all have rituals,” he said confidently.

“No we don’t,” I asserted equally confidently.  “I don’t!”

“When you shave in the morning, do you always start on the same side and shave in the same routine?” he asked.

I was silent, dumbstruck, convinced in a moment.  Since then, I have been more sympathetic to rituals, and more aware of my own.

Some religious rituals are an attempt to invoke power or prevent disaster.  “If I say these words enough times, or if I perform these acts enough times, I will somehow (in ways that I do not understand but accept because they have been passed down to me) be able to control the alleged forces for good or evil that exist beyond my knowledge and control.”

My Saturday rituals aren’t like that.  Just humble attempts to relax and slide into a well established routine that I enjoy.  Now that the children have gone, the career has changed, the study has ended, I have more time and space.  There is a blank page each Saturday morning, and for me, my rituals are a pleasant way of filling that space.  And that is not to say that the rituals have become ruts.  I do do different things occasionally when I choose to do so.  But now that Saturday mornings are more about ‘me’ and ‘wants’ the rituals are sometimes (often) a convenient, shorthand way to moderate, easy pleasure.

The day starts at a Café having a cooked breakfast.  It is the only one I have each week, and although it used to be the traditional fried English, it is now a more healthy and modest affair (toast without butter or margarine, scrambled eggs, mushrooms, tomatoes, beans, and a mug of tea - buying the same each week).  I go the the Café attached to the Supermarket where I do most of the shopping (usually parking in the same place).  I take my time over the food.  Occasionally I glance at a comic (a tabloid newspaper).  Usually I sit in silence (in the same place), enjoying my space and the food.  I need time to wake up and get going.  I don’t have to do too much thinking.

After unpacking the shopping there is usually an hour or two to kill before lunch.  This is the time when I do read most of the newspaper.  Although I always have books on the go, reading a book on a Saturday morning feels wrong to me.  Perhaps it is because I associate it with studying (something I have done a lot of, even since stopping being a full-time student), and studying is associated with work (even when I read books for pleasure).  So books are out of bounds on Saturday morning, and I luxuriate in being able to read a newspaper just for the fun of it.

There is a ritual to this too.  There is a large cafetière, of course.  The Saturday newspaper I buy is enormous - enough reading material for a week.  So many sections, so many articles within each section - so much to read or to leave out.  Choice can be stressful, but my ritual minimizes that.

I always start with the travel section, rushing through the photographs and cheap flights before I spend time at my final destination - the mystery guest’s review of a hotel visit.  I don’t fully understand why, but I find these compelling.  Perhaps it is because I have stayed in some fantastic, and some fantastically dreadful places that I can derive pleasure from being a voyeur of the experience of others.  Perhaps it is just because I enjoyed “Fawlty Towers” too much in my youth.  I certainly enjoy the reviews where the service and food and room is awful far more than when the visitor enjoyed the stay.  I soon throw travel aside, making a mental note to return to any article on destinations I have visited or might be interested in.

After a sip of coffee, I do “Books”.  This is the first of the guilt sections.  I always feel guilty when doing “Books”.  I mean, I consider myself to be a relatively well-educated and (in theory) a well-read man with wide-ranging interests and yet, the “Books” section always reminds me a) of how little I know, and b) how much more there is to read.  Occasionally I am momentarily able to assuage the guilt if I read something that I think I know a little about, or if I read something by, or about, a writer that I have some tenuous knowledge of.  Usually I end up reading the brief non-fiction reviews (men read more non-fiction than women) and then the fiction reviews to see if there is anything that looks unputdownable or anything that a self-respecting pseudo-intellectual ought to keep up with.  I make a mental note to add it to my enormous Amazon wish list for the next time the children say: “It’s your birthday next week.  What can we get you?”  The “Books” section, however, is also very satisfying in that it does help me feel that I am keeping abreast of things and that I actually know more than I do.

After more coffee, we move swiftly on - very swiftly in fact, because reading the “Body & Soul” section is so guilt-ridden and depressing that it has to be dealt with quickly. Every week I am reminded that I don’t eat the right things, that I am overweight, that I am about to catch some awful disease, and that I will probably die before I finish reading the page.  As I know what they are going to say, I only skim read this section.  I only bother at all because of the saving grace at the end - the sexual problems page.

Ok, let me say two things.  First, as a therapist, I read this section out of professional interest! Secondly, the column has been running for years, and I also read it to see whatever they are going to come up with next (pardon the unintentional pun).  It must be agonizing for the team of experts at the editorial meeting to find something new to write about each week - yet they do, and without seeming to repeat themselves.  It’s amazing.  I just cannot believe what they are finding to write about, and just have to read it.  I suppose that it is also another kind of voyeurism.

Moving quickly on, the “Money” section is thrown on the floor without being opened.  I don’t have the necessary disposable income to worry about the stock market and already know that I am not getting enough interest from my bank account and that my pension is underperforming. So, we ditch “Money” and finally hit the main news section.

I tend to linger here the longest, partly out of interest in people, politics, and the world, and partly out of a hope that I might find something that enrages or inspires me enough to want blog about.  Obviously today was a bad day, or I felt that the stories that seemed most significant to me required more knowledge than I had to do them justice, or the topics had been blogged about by me before.

With any luck, after I have finished reading the news, it will be lunch time.  If it isn’t, I always read the restaurant review in the Magazine section.  The reviews have very little to do with meals. The outrageous style of the columnist who is often accompanied by a ‘random flopsy’ makes me laugh, and the scant food information whets the appetite further.

And so the routine comes to an end.  The morning space - my space - has been satisfactorily filled, without too much pressure of decision or effort.  I end up feeling somewhat renewed and restored.  The ritual has served its purpose, until the next time.

After lunch I can get back to the really important things in life - like blogging.

Tags: blogging, books, Fawlty Towers, Health, magazine, news, newspaper, reading, ritual, routine