Austwick Womens Institute, 10 January 2019
In the centre of Leeds, on Wednesday 12th May 2004, something very ordinary happened.
Student Stephen Abbot got up at 8:30 and made himself tea and toast. With one week to go on his undergraduate course he made his way to the library for half past nine, a lot earlier than his usual time, and collected a waist-high pile of books to read back home. Between 10:30 and six whilst allegedly ‘revising’, Stephen managed to nab (himself) five new albums of music from the internet, sculpt the greatest beans on toast bonanza (he had) ever seen, catch up with the storylines on Neighbours AND learn all about seventeenth century Japanese architecture with emphasis placed on the Nihombashi district of Tokyo.
I’m able to share this valuable information with you today because Stephen recorded it in a journal as part of a project called A Day in the Life of Leeds, where members of the public contributed their pictures and writings to a website and public exhibition at the Royal Armouries.
A Day in the Life of Leeds owes something to Mass-Observation, a project which began with a letter published in the New Statesman 70 years ago, on 30 January 1937. In a more recent NS, Joe Moran describes it thus:
The letter was jointly written by three diversely talented young men: Tom Harrisson (an anthropologist and ornithologist), Humphrey Jennings (a painter and film-maker) and Charles Madge (a poet and Daily Mirror journalist). It invited volunteers to co-operate in a new research project, which they called an “anthropology at home … a science of ourselves”. Their list of suggested topics for investigation read like a surrealist poem on the hidden strangeness of mundane life: “Behaviour of people at war memorials … Shouts and gestures of motorists … Anthropology of football pools … Beards, armpits, eyebrows … Female taboos about eating”.
The letter announced the founding of Mass-Observation, an organisation that aimed to investigate daily life in modern Britain in the same way as anthropologists were studying remote, tribal societies. It soon acquired an enthusiastic army of lowly paid or unpaid researchers. They interviewed people in the street, wrote down conversations overheard in pubs, factories and public toilets, and observed people carrying out ordinary activities such as smoking, drinking and dancing. Baffled journalists dismissed these quotidian researchers as “busybodies”, “snoopers” and “psycho-anthropologic nosy-parkers”. The NS’s critic joked that the typical mass-observer must have “elephant ears, a loping walk and a permanent sore eye from looking through keyholes”.
But there was a point to all this nosiness. Mass-Observation wanted to plot “weather-maps of public feeling”, to make ordinary citizens’ lives and thoughts better known to the people who governed them. It was less than a decade since every adult over 21 had won the vote, and there were few systematic attempts by either politicians or the press to find out the views of electors. Ordinary people were rarely seen or heard on film or radio: the newsreels did not bother with vox pops, and Lord Reith’s BBC was staunchly upper-middle-class and dinner-suited. Mass-Observation was annoyed by the lazy assumptions about “the man in the street” which were made by this media/political elite, who they criticised as being “a tiny group, with different habits of mind, ways of life, from those millions they are catering for”.
In the post-war boom years the Mass-Observation project was overtaken by the growth industry of market research, which was also interested in recording the views of ordinary people, but at far less depth and for explicitly commercial purposes. Today the opinions of ordinary people are co-opted by the entertainment industry as votes on reality TV shows and as contributions to political ‘focus groups’.
Mass-Observation challenged the notion that history consists solely of the lives of great men. In its relatively brief heyday Mass-Observation opened the minds of the masses to their own potential, and to the value of their previously hidden, neglected or deprecated ordinary everyday lives. And it continues today in projects like A Day in the Life of Leeds which tend to be well-received and much talked about in the communities they affirm, because they affirm them and engage with the usually hidden depths and complexities of their ordinary life.
I deeply hold to the instinct that we need to value the ordinary and the everyday. After all, who we are and what we do most of the time, is ‘ordinary’. Ordinariness enfolds us and defines us. The ordinary is the arena in which we practice our faith, live out our lives, most of the time.
There is a tendency in our society, to be abstracted by the extraordinary things in life (the exotic, the erotic and the sublime) and there is a sense in which the ordinary is regarded as a bad thing, something to neglect, escape from or deny. The French writer Georges Perec critiques this:
Trains begin to exist only when they are derailed, the more passengers are dead, the more trains exist; planes have access to existence only when they are hijacked; the only meaningful destiny for cars is crashing into a sycamore: fifty-two weekends per year, fifty-two totals; so many dead and all the better for the news if the figures keep increasing! […] In our haste to measure the historic, the meaningful, the revealing, we leave aside the essential. What really happens, what we live, all the rest, where is it?
I share Perec’s instinct that if we devalue the ordinary we devalue ourselves. I would say that if we value the ordinary then we may be strengthened, empowered, enabled to become reconnected to the source of our true selves. And to others. How can we connect with each other meaningfully in the midst of the mundane?
In his essay Approaches to What?, written in 1973, Georges Perec suggests exercises which we can use to attune ourselves to the infra-ordinary. He urges “describe what remains: what we generally don’t notice, which doesn’t call attention to itself, which is of no importance, what happens when nothing happens, what passes when nothing passes except time, people, cars, and clouds.”
If you’ll allow me to throw just a little theology into the mix here: The dictionary tells us that the antonym (opposite) of ‘spiritual’ is ‘mundane’. But the gospels disagree. The gospels bear out the spiritual relevance of unremarkable things, telling the story of a saviour who grew up in a workman’s house in a nondescript town, who started his ministry at a wedding party (when he took the very routine decision of doing what his mother told him to), whose closest followers were jobbing fishermen, and whose descriptions of the Kingdom were unfailingly drawn from everyday life.
Somerset Maugham once wrote,
For men and women are not only themselves. They are the region in which they were born, the city apartment in which they learned to walk, the games they played as children, the old wives tale they overheard, the food they ate, the schools they attended, the sports they followed, the poems they read, and the God they believed in.
That’s the great writer; and there are so many others, comedians, journalists, poets and all sorts of others who are excellent at celebrating the ordinary.
Keeping my references northern, I’m a big fan of Martin Parr who was enthused about photography as a teenager by his grandfather in Yorkshire, a keen amateur photographer who lent Parr his first camera. Parr’s subject-matter is determinedly ordinary. His early monochrome shots of life in Hebden Bridge, Jubilee street parties in Leeds in downpours of rain, his constant turning to dowdy seaside resorts and rural summer fetes (again usually held in inclement weather) have helped him build up a tremendous collection of everyday English life, in all its eccentric complexity.
His projects have included The Last Resort: Photographs of New Brighton, Think of England, Bad Weather and Bored Couples, mainly consisting of couples in cafes and restaurants staring into space. He’s also published his own personal collection of Boring Postcards featuring 1970s shopping precincts and motorway service stations, a classic which raises the thoroughly unremarkable to an art form. Parr is a photographer with a passion for the ordinary, who lovingly captures the dullest scenes and somehow offers hints of heaven in them.
Not unlike the Manchester painter L.S. Lowry, who despite being derided by the metropolitan arts world became undoubtedly one of Britain’s best-loved artists, his subject matter the impossibly mundane streets of the industrial North.
In his early years Lowry lived in the leafy Manchester suburb of Victoria Park. Then lack of money obliged his family to move to Station Road, Pendlebury, where factory chimneys were a more familiar sight then trees. Lowry would recall “At first I detested it, and then, after years I got pretty interested in it, then obsessed by it”. The subjects for his paintings were on his doorsteps. In later life he recalled this as a sort of vision. “One day I missed a train from Pendlebury – (a place) I had ignored for seven years – and as I left the station I saw the Acme Spinning Company’s mill … The huge black framework of rows of yellow-lit windows standing up against the sad, damp charged afternoon sky. The mill was turning out… I watched this scene – which I’d looked at many times without seeing – with rapture…”
Lowry and Martin Parr learned their trade in Manchester, while Simon Armitage, for some people our Poet Laureate in waiting, hails from Huddersfield. He too, with Northern grit, makes the mundane seem profound, as in this poem remembering a Northern man and his everyday ways:
And if it snowed and snow covered the drive
he took a spade and tossed it to one side.
And always tucked his daughter up at night
And slippered her the one time that she lied.
And every week he tipped up half his wage.
And what he didn’t spend each week he saved.
And praised his wife for every meal she made.
And once, for laughing, punched her in the face.
And for his mum he hired a private nurse.
And every Sunday taxied her to church.
And he blubbed when she went from bad to worse.
And twice he lifted ten quid from her purse.
Here’s how they rated him when they looked back:
sometimes he did this, sometimes he did that.
… and perhaps that conclusion might lead us to consider how illiterate we are at discussing ordinary lives, because we don’t try it often enough. I don’t really know what heaven is – but I suspect it is somewhere where we have a comprehensive language to speak of unremarkable things.
Comedians are particularly adept as celebrants of that language.
We are blessed in this region by the presence of Peter Kay, who hails from Bolton, where the Mass-Observation project spent three fruitful years in the 1930s and whose own questions about everyday life help us appreciate it all the more at the same time as we split our sides laughing at them:
Why does your gynaecologist leave the room when you get undressed?
Why is there a light in the fridge and not in the freezer?
Why can’t women put on mascara with their mouth closed?
Is it possible to brush your teeth without wiggling your bum?
Why is it called Alcoholics Anonymous when the first thing you do is stand up and say, ‘My name is Bob, and I am an alcoholic’?
Why does mineral water that ‘has trickled through mountains for centuries’ have a ‘use by’ date?
If you’ll permit me a moment of spirituality; I’ve studied the everyday prayers of the old Celts of these islands who seemed to instinctively believe that heaven was very close indeed to earth, that there was no distance at all between let’s say the spirit of God and the muck in the soil.
Some of their old prayers have become interestingly popular again in recent times, maybe speaking of our generation’s unexpressed need to find meaning and depth in the ordinary stuff of life. Prayers which seem to embrace every ordinary thing to make it blessed: prayers they’d say on getting up in the morning, prayers they’d say while milking the cows or out at sea, prayers like this one said while making the bed:
I make this bed
In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost,
In the name of the night we were conceived,
In the name of the night that we were born,
In the name of the day we were baptized,
In the name of each night, each day,
Each angel that is in the heavens.
In our contemporary world I love Michael Leunig, an Australian cartoonist whose daily offerings in a national newspaper the Age, are like prayer-poems about things like hair, handles, sad dogs, sinking boats, and the onset of winter. He has a slight surrealist bent – which is helpful I think if you’re looking to find ways of celebrating the ordinary. Here’s a couple of them:
1.
We give thanks for the mystery of hair:
Too little here and too much there,
Censored and shaved, controlled and suppressed,
Unwelcome guest in soups and sandwiches,
Difficult growth always needing attention,
Gentle and comforting, complex and wild,
Reminding us softly that we might be animals,
Growing and growing ’til the day that we die
And the day after as well, so they say.
In all of its places, in all of its ways,
We give thanks for the blessing of hair.
2.
God bless those who suffer from the common cold.
Nature has entered into them;
Has led them aside and gently lain them low
To contemplate life from the wayside;
To consider human frailty;
To receive the deep and dreamy messages of fever.
We give thanks for the insights of this humble perspective.
We give thanks for blessings in disguise.
Amen
If you’re celebrating the ordinary it helps if you can look sideways, from just where you are, to see it.
Some time back I wrote a series of what I called Common Prayers, which I broadcast on Radio Merseyside’s Thought for the Day each breakfast-time. They were inspired by the long time which I spent walking the streets of the place where I then lived and worked – a massive 1930s housing estate on the edge of Liverpool – and deliberately recording in quite some detail what I saw on these journeys. Sometimes I’ll walk alone, at other times I’ll walk with someone else so I get the benefit of their particular perspective on the ordinary things which we encountering as we go.
I always made sure that I didn’t just go the obvious ways, or stick to the attractive places, but encountered all sorts of things I’d otherwise never see – the back way into the leisure park via a hole in the cemetery fence, the shallow old river which connects a gentle country park to a smelly water treatment centre, crossing beneath a six-lane highway en-route. The bookies and the Sure Start centre, back-alley drinking clubs behind Boots the Chemists.
The idea was to build up a rich picture of life in that area; ordinary life, mundane life, brought to life in this process of discovery and exchange. If you contemplate the many meanings even in the smallest detail of life – like, say, a wheelie bin (which in Liverpool is purple) then you start to head towards a celebration….
We give thanks for the purple wheelie bin
Receptacle of all our rubbish,
Carrier-away of our cast-offs, unused goods, undigested foodstuffs, nappies, wrappers, broken electrical items and all the discarded clutter of our cupboards and our lives.
A blessing on those who make it their work to collect these bins together and pour their contents into a waiting lorry,
labouring through soaking rain and stinking heat on behalf of the rest of us wasteful citizens;
A blessing on those who wheel out the bins for their forgetful or frail neighbours, and wheel them in again afterwards;
A blessing on those who brighten up their wheelie bins by painting on them pictures of flowers, favourite TV characters or cartoonish self-portraits.
We give thanks for the purple wheelie bin
Receptacle of all our rubbish.
Give us patience with those who use our wheelie bins as playthings: climbing on them, racing down the road in them like plastic chariots, setting them on fire;
Give us strength to push our full and heavy bins to the roadside, when we are feeling feeble on bin collection morning;
Keep us calm if in a moment of panic we should think our bin has gone, wheeled away up the road or into oblivion.
Help us to forgive those who, years ago now, decided without asking us, that our bins should be purple.
Help us to recycle, and bless those who want to help us to recycle more.
Help us to use less packaging, and bless those who want to sell us things with less packaging on them.
Give us grace to care about our waste and the way it affects our city’s space.
We give thanks for the purple wheelie bin
Receptacle of all our rubbish.
Now here in the Yorkshire Dales we may think we’re living somewhere extraordinary – somewhere where people who live in those sorts of ordinary places I’ve described come to to escape, refresh and refuel. Which is true … to an extent … but we live ordinary lives too, we have our little daily routines and rituals, we know that life can get dull even here!
If you feel that way sometime I hope in this talk I’ve given you something to play with; resources to illuminate the mundane and appreciate the ordinary.
Notes
This talk was sourced from my previous material:
Heaven in Ordinary. Greenbelt Regional Angels Day, All Hallows Church, Leeds, 10 March 2007.
Reading the Everyday (Uncovering the language of the Ordinary). Greenbelt on Iona week – May 2006.
Common Prayers #1: The purple wheelie bin. BBC Radio Merseyside Thought for the Day 7 August 2006.
