The Working Day 2

Of course the working day seems to have disappeared. Writing about life in the fifties (below) only serves to exacerbate the curious condition we find ourselves in today; where people either seem to work all the time, or hardly at all, or perhaps do both at the same time whilst desperate to get on Come Dine With Me. So much for 'labour saving devices' or the 'leisure society'. So much for 'soft' and 'hard' skills too. So much for high culture, so much for the public house, they've just mutated into Pret a Manger. So much for nature too. Of course this might not be such a bad thing, it's only easy to tell in hindsight, but it does feel rather post-human; all these people trooping around KFC with their laptops. And today I noticed the screen on the cash point suddenly offered just £5 as an option, just £5! That suddenly seems a harbinger of bad things in the offing. But on minimum wage working behind a bar, it would take four hours work just to make what you could spend in that same bar in a couple of minutes, and by the time you've paid the rent, what's left? So all that could make you reasonably nostalgic for the fifties, and especially for some notion of social housing, predicated on straight forward needs, not constructed for profit by the same corporations sucking you dry of everything else.