Right now we are grounded. The French railways are on strike, and refineries around the country have been blockaded by trade unionists. The port of Marseilles is closed and no tankers can unload. Fuel is running out all over France. So we are stuck for the moment in our small village, which is no great hardship for a few days, but could get very annoying if it goes on for longer.

France has a great tradition of strikes, and a strong socialist party. Oddly enough, in spite of this, only ten per cent of French workers belong to a union, the lowest figure in the west. But those who do have a union, mainly public sector workers, make the most of it. The whole point of being a public employee, in their view, is that you can go on strike and you should go on strike at every possible opportunity, just to show the government who’s boss. After all, in the public sector, what difference can it possibly make?

It made a difference to us. It was disconcerting to walk to the post office and find the doors closed, or to drive to the train station and find no trains running. But it happens all the time. That’s why we always study the local paper before setting foot outside the house, to learn about the strike of the day.

We have had airline strikes, bus strikes, tram strikes, and ferry strikes. Various supermarkets and big stores closed for days or weeks, along with the post office, and some banks. Social security workers and then the entire local civil service went on strike. One day we opened the newspaper and found a blank space where the weather forecast should have been – the forecasters were on strike. Hospital workers, gynecologists, schoolteachers, head teachers, the local police, student nurses, and tobacconists all went on strike during the same few short months. There have been and are massive strikes in public and private industries in support of early retirement. The University of Montpellier, staff and students stayed on strike for a whole semester. Circus workers went on strike in the middle of winter, and those clowns blocked several main roads with their trucks. In the past two years the number of days lost to strikes has risen by sixty per cent.

My favorite strike story appeared just before Christmas a few years ago. The unemployed threatened to go on strike to support their demand for larger Christmas bonuses. We speculated about how the unemployed could go on strike. Would they refuse to hang out in cafés? Would they refuse to play pétanque all day? We were quite disappointed when this particular strike failed to happen.

The legal system was not immune. We have been amazed to see strikes by both judges and defense attorneys. This must seem very strange to lawyers in America. Why voluntarily cut down on your own billable hours, just when the boating season is coming up? The answer is that a great many French attorneys are employed by the state, and very badly paid. The nearest they ever get to boating is a rented rowing boat on the lake in the park. A group of Kurds, asking for political asylum, went on hunger strike for two weeks, attracting massive publicity. When people land on French shores, the first word they learn is “strike.”

Personally I’m very much in favor of the right to strike. It’s one of those fundamental human rights. But sometimes, when I find the post office closed yet again or nobody answers the phone at the airport, I do wish there was a French version of that notorious Californian law: three strikes, and you’re out.

Copyright: David Bouchier

The most enthusiastic walkers in Europe are the English and the Germans. They love to hike for miles through the countryside on rough tracks, or no tracks at all, preferably in the middle of a thunderstorm. I blame Martin Luther for this.

The Italians and the French, by contrast, never embraced Luther’s bleak view of the human condition. If they can drive, they never walk. In fact, they love their wheels even more passionately than Americans do.

So walking in France is something of a challenge. There is no network of protected footpaths as there is in England. Virtually all property is private and, when the French say PRIVATE they mean it. So unless you enjoy confrontations with landowners, who are always angry and often armed, the walking choices are limited.

We like to walk, in moderation. At least once a day we climbed the hill behind Saint Quentin to get a bit of exercise, and to enjoy superb views of the village and the mountains. But the same walk every day got monotonous. We invested in a guide book that promised to show us walks through all the most beautiful scenery in the region, on “safe and well-marked trails.”

The walks in the book were divided into four classes: very easy, easy, medium, and difficult. On a good day, we could just about manage the “very easy” category, as long as we rested in bed for the next couple of days. This is mountain country: the scenery is certainly beautiful, as advertised, but it is also very vertical. You don’t walk in as much as you climb over it.

This was not the only hazard of hiking. A linguistic purist might want to argue with the word “safe,” when applied to these walks, especially in autumn and winter. The hunting season runs from September through February, and the hills were alive with the sound of gunshots.

The French, or rather French men, do love to shoot things: it scarcely matters what. They kill thirteen million tiny thrushes every year, in a massacre that dismays soft-hearted English bird lovers. But the most coveted prey is the sanglier, or wild pig, an ancestor of the wild boars once hunted by French kings. The biggest danger, out there in the countryside, was to be mistaken for a sanglier.

Our guide book offered an ominous warning in very small print: “During the hunting season, certain trails were not advised. Consult your local town hall.” So we went to our local town hall to ask where it would be safe to walk. The woman at the information desk said: “There are hunters everywhere. They are all looking for wild pigs.” She paused and gave me an appraising look. “If I were you,” she added, “I would stay at home.”

Now I admit that I may look like a wild pig from certain angles. But I do think that hunters, however well-primed with the local wine, should know that that French wild pigs do not speak English, or wear bright check shirts from a Long Island discount store. They should pay some attention to what they are shooting.

In spite of the hunters, we were determined to enjoy our country walks, and perhaps even move up from the very easy to the easy category, if we survive through the winter. We have studied photographs of these wild pigs, and noticed that they always go bareheaded, with just little tufts of bristly fur sticking up between their rather large ears. So, just to be on the safe side, Diane has bought me a hat.

Copyright: David Bouchier

The task of preparing and packing for a trip of several months is enough to persuade a person to give up foreign travel forever. Our whole lives must be narrowed down to the dimensions of one suitcase and one carry-on each, – summer clothes, winter clothes, in-between clothes, medications, files, laptop, and all the other things a modern couple cannot live without. Arrangements must be made for paying utility bills, caring for cats, caring for the lawn or clearing snow according to season, and sometimes both. Time always runs out before all this is done, but we have to go anyway. Napoleon’s army setting out on its catastrophic march to Moscow in 1812 was better prepared than we usually are as we begin one of these extended trips.

It wouldn’t be so bad if we didn’t have to begin with air travel. Everyone now seems to agree that the airlines are engaged in a vast conspiracy to persuade us all to stay at home, or at least on the ground. This is good from the point of view of global warming, and no doubt we will all have to stay at home soon. But right now there aren’t many alternatives if you want to get from one continent to another. We could drive to Alaska and take a dog sled across the Bering Strait, then a train down through Russia, and come into Europe through the back door, so to speak. But it would take weeks, and it’s not very practical because we are cat people, and we don’t have any experience with huskies.

So we must start with the airlines and their increasingly ludicrous and humiliating “security” procedures. Once disentangled from the airline and the airport, often a major struggle in itself, there is always the question of hotels. In general, we love hotels as a relaxing home away from home. But unless we stay within the safe capsule of the big international chains, which are hideously expensive, every hotel is a lottery. Stars mean next to nothing, guide books are always out of date, and another curious conspiracy operates in the hotel industry. They have agreed amongst themselves that no hotel room should ever be quite perfect, so clients don’t get spoiled. The requirements for a good hotel room are simple: anyone could make the list. But in real life the list is always incomplete. One hotel gives you a coffee machine, but no hairdryer; another has a perfectly comfortable bed, but the pillows are stuffed with dried corn husks; one freezes you with air conditioning you can’t adjust; another tries to bake you alive. All hotel rooms without exception are missing at least one light bulb, and one essential bathroom item. Frills like wake-up calls, newspapers, Internet connections and room service are provided on the basis of a secret lottery run by the hotel management. You may get them, or you may not, but you will never get them all.

I miss the lost age of elegant travel, even though I never experienced it. I like to read about the writer Edith Wharton’s travels in Europe in the 1920s. She crossed the Atlantic on one of the great luxury ocean liners and, once in Europe, she was considered adventurous to travel by car. But the car had a chauffeur and a mechanic on board, and another car full of servants followed right behind. Another group of servants traveled ahead to set up her rooms at each grand hotel. No security checks, no lost baggage, and never any missing light bulbs. That’s the way to see the world.

Time travel, anyone?

Copyright: David Bouchier

I hate subways. Traveling in tunnels under the earth is a mode of transportation more appropriate for moles or hamsters. Human beings need light and air. Much of my misspent youth was spent on the London subway, called the Underground, and I have no fond memories of it.

But last time I was in London I took the Underground again, and found myself sandwiched between an exotically scented street person and a tight Teutonic knot of German tourists. Claustrophobia kicked in. The advertisements along the top of the carriage were the only entertainment, so I looked fixedly at them until my eyes collided with a poem. It was a shock, like finding a diamond in a garbage dump.

In the middle of the journey of our life
I found myself astray in a dark wood
Where the right road had been lost sight of.

That poem spoke directly to me. Substitute “tunnel” for “wood” and it described my situation exactly. It turned out to be a fragment from Dante’s Divine Comedy, “The Inferno,” which seems particularly appropriate for that or any other subway. In fact Dante is in every way the perfect poet of the Underground. His famous line: “All hope abandon ye who enter here” should be posted at the entrance to every station.

After so many years of avoiding subterranean travel I had forgotten about “Poems on the Underground.” This valuable service, which posts a constantly changing selection of poems all over London’s huge transport system, began in 1986 as an initiative of the Poetry Society. Now the idea has spread all over the world from Adelaide, Australia to St. Petersburg in Russia. The Chinese are thinking about it. Here the MTA started its own program, called “Poetry in motion,” back in 1992. You can be surprised by cool poems even in the steaming inferno of the New York subway.

This is one of those small things that almost restores one’s faith in the sanity of the human race. It was a stroke of genius to put poetry where no one would ever expect to find it, and so make it available to millions of people who would never open a book of poems, or perhaps a book of any kind. Poetry can have an impact like nothing else. A few lines between station stops might change your life. It’s a pity that, like Dante, we have to descend into the bowels of the earth to find it.

Personally I would like to see more poetry in more places where it might do good – places where the human condition is at its most desperate, like the Long Island Expressway and the Department of Motor Vehicles. Above all these days we need to see poetry in airports, and in the aircraft themselves – a form of transportation that Dante in his worst nightmares could never have imagined. A few uplifting verses here might make the difference between hope and despair. But where is the poet who can rise to such a challenge? How about our own local Long Island genius, Walt Whitman?

O to realize space!
The plenteousness of all, that there are no bounds,
To emerge and be of the sky, of the sun and moon and flying
clouds, as one with them.
Or, just to remind us of the fragility of our in-flight situation:
O human race, born to fly upward,
Wherefore at a little wind dost thou so fall.

Copyright: David Bouchier (and Walt Whitman)

Marooned in a waiting room, I picked up a magazine and started reading a sensational article about reincarnation. The article speculated on the past lives of some enormously famous celebrities I’d never heard of. The author appeared to believe that every media celebrity must be the reincarnation of a past media celebrity, a theory that runs into problems as soon as you get back a couple of generations to the time before media celebrities were invented.

The idea of reincarnation is one of the most appealing and at the same time one of the silliest of all human fancies. But, if we set aside the logical and metaphysical problems, there’s no denying that it has an awful fascination. The belief in reincarnation emerged way back in the mists of antiquity, and it may be one of the oldest human beliefs. Life was pretty rough a million years ago, and it was only natural for our ancestors to imagine another and better life. They probably got the idea by looking at their cats, sleeping by the fire at the back of the cave. Reincarnation was absorbed into various eastern religions, especially Hinduism and Buddhism and, in our addled age, it has reappeared as a significant part of quasi-religions like Spiritualism, Scientology, and various so-called “New Age” therapies such as past life regression. According to the Gallup Poll, twenty-five per cent of all Americans believe in reincarnation.

It’s easy to understand why. We don’t want to just disappear when we die, and we don’t want to do the same thing all over again. It’s exciting to imagine that we might come back as something or somebody completely different.

The catch, of course, is that there’s no knowing what or who we might be in a future life. We might come back as anything at all – a bear, a broccoli plant, or a bug. I quite like the idea of being a bear, because I wouldn’t have to make many changes in my lifestyle. But the sting in the tail of traditional reincarnation doctrine is that it has a moral dimension. We come back as the thing we deserve to be, whatever that is. If we haven’t lived well in this life, our next one could be pretty nasty. On the other hand, if we have lived well through many lives we achieve Nirvana. We escape the endless wheel of rebirth and enter a kind of disembodied state of eternal bliss, much like retirement in Florida. Most people find this uncertainty about the future disturbing. They prefer to focus on their past lives.

Putting people in touch with their previous lives has become a major therapeutic industry. Oddly enough these past incarnations were all rather splendid. Everybody was famous, powerful, and beautiful. Nobody, it seems, was ever a scullery maid or a dirt farmer in a previous life. When you talk to people who believe in reincarnation, which is always a surreal experience, they always talk about the important characters they used to be. Napoleon and Cleopatra seem to be popular choices. They don’t seem to reflect that this descent from glory to obscurity must have resulted from some pretty bad behavior in their previous incarnations.

One version of reincarnation doctrine suggests that when you die you are reborn at once, which means that your previous incarnation must have died on your birth date, if you follow me. This immediately sent me to the genealogy pages to discover who had in fact died on my birth date. I found a lot on nonentities, a decorated Major General from the Boer War (I can’t have been him) and, to my amazement, the remarkable Pope Pius XI – and I don’t think I could have been him either.

If you really believed in the moral purpose of reincarnation it would keep you on your toes. Nobody wants to come back as a carrot or a cockroach. But I don’t believe there’s any justice in this life, or the last, or the next. Why couldn’t I have been reincarnated as Sean Penn, or even better Catherine Zeta Jones? My life would be quite different, to say nothing of my wardrobe. So what exactly did I do to deserve this?

The only really strong argument in support of reincarnation is the existence of cats. If you are owned by one or more cats you know, you just know, that they have lived not just nine but hundreds of lives over thousand of years. Their wisdom and cunning are infinite. They like to pretend that they were aristocratic princes and princesses in their previous lives. But that’s just a cat joke: they have more sense. Cats always arrange to be reborn on the very highest step of the ladder of reincarnation, as cats.

Copyright: David Bouchier

Since the economy collapsed on our heads in 2008 a huge number of people have lost their jobs, and there’s not much sign of any improvement. Even before the recession the habit of sending American jobs abroad (outsourcing) was a big issue in the coming years. Its supporters claim that, if we can produce more goods more cheaply overseas, we will be more competitive. Also, outsourcing lowers the cost of goods and services for Americans, so everybody should be happy. People who lose their jobs in the process should contemplate the BMWs lined up outside the golf club, and take pleasure in the good fortune of others. As a consolation prize they can buy a Chinese-made DVD player for thirty dollars and while away the empty hours watching movies.

Those who condemn outsourcing warn that every kind of paid work can potentially be outsourced, except direct service jobs like lawn care and waiting tables. Millions of manufacturing, data processing and phone service jobs have already gone. There’s no end to this rational economic process. One estimate says that fourteen million more jobs will vanish in the near future.

Nobody’s job is safe. Teaching, for example, can easily be outsourced. Many colleges are doing it right now by creating online courses that can be taught by anybody, anywhere. A novel by Deborah Moggach, These Foolish Things imagines outsourcing the care of elderly people to Bangalore in India. The climate is perfect, with temperatures in the senior citizen comfort zone between 68-80 degrees, and staff wages are minimal. Do you want to bet it will never happen?

The rules that govern outsourcing are simple, and brutal: if the job can be done just as well and more cheaply elsewhere, then it should be done elsewhere. So let’s consider the economics of the U.S. Congress. What Congress does, essentially, is to talk – and it is very expensive talk. Members of Congress get $158,000 a year, a combined wage bill of almost $77 millions, not counting their very generous perks and benefits. Now, many jobs are being outsourced to India, where wages are a tiny fraction of this, and Indians are wonderfully adept at talk and argument. A Congress relocated to India would talk just as much about such issues as term limits and campaign finance reform, with exactly the same result. Of course they would probably also vote to raise their own salaries, which would defeat the purpose of the exercise.

Aye, there’s the rub, as Hamlet might have said if he had been a corporate executive instead of a verbose prince. When we outsource work to poorer countries we raise their living standards. Expectations rise, and wages are pushed up. Those foreign workers won’t always be so cheap. Back home, shareholder’s profits and director’s salaries will be swallowed up by pointless extravagances like housing and health care for these foreign workers. Outsourcing is a short-term strategy. Meanwhile, after years of unemployment, millions of impoverished Americans will be willing to work for peanuts. So the jobs will come home, eventually. The process is called globalization. Everything goes around and comes around.

I thought this was all quite amusing until I realized that it applied to me too. Ironic essayists must be two a penny in Bangladesh or the Bahamas. The whole machinery of culture could be outsourced. With satellite communications it doesn’t matter what comes from where, and a few more indigent writers and artists will scarcely be noticed. I may have been outsourced already, and nobody will ever know.

Copyright: David Bouchier

Let me tell you how it was to spend two weeks in England with my ninety-seven year old mother. We wanted to give her a break from her busy life of watching television and drinking tea at home, so we stayed in a rented cottage on a sheep farm in the middle of the beautiful Sussex countryside. The cottage was so isolated that we all experienced a kind of sensory deprivation. The nights were utterly silent. During the daytime we could hear various comments from the surrounding sheep and birds, the occasional tractor, and nothing else.

All our regular activities and commitments simply stopped – no meetings to attend, no classes to teach, no deadlines to meet, no radio programs to prepare. Without a telephone connection we didn’t even have access to the greatest time waster ever invented – the Internet. Nothing was left to do but a bit of shopping and cooking.

Within twenty-four hours of arriving at the cottage our days had filled up. Suddenly, we were busy, thus proving yet again the infallibility of Parkinson’s Law. This famous law, promulgated in 1957 by the English genius C. Northcote Parkinson, states simply that work expands to fill the time available for its completion.

Parkinson’s Law explains many things: why retired people always seem to be in a hurry in spite of apparently having nothing to do, and why government agencies take twice as much time and five times as many employees to accomplish anything. We all know the truth of the old adage that if you want to get something done you should give the job to a busy person. Unlimited time means unlimited delay.

I decided that our vacation would be an ideal opportunity to study how Parkinson’s Law actually works. This is the sort of thing I do when I have nothing to do. I observed carefully how a very tiny number of activities had so quickly expanded to fill the empty hours of each day. It turned out to be very simple. We just took much longer to do all the everyday things we usually do in a hurry. Everything was stretched out. In the village shop, choosing a salad dressing took two minutes instead of two seconds; a shower might take half an hour; getting postage stamps fifteen minutes. Odd moments were filled in by talking with the farm’s three sheep dogs, Billy, Bramble and Moss, the farm workers, the nameless farm cat and (when absolutely desperate for conversation) the sheep. Cooking became a major enterprise, washing the dishes was a whole evening’s entertainment. Taking a walk could occupy half a day instead of half an hour. We also took long pointless drives in the countryside, just to fill up the time, often stopping for lunch at small country pubs where service was extremely leisurely. We watched television. We drank tea. Everything happened in dreamy slow motion, like a Tai Chi class.

Our lives were arrested, like speeding bullets fired into a barrel of molasses. Each day seemed like a week (or, when it rained and we had to play cards, like a month). We filled time. We wasted time. We lost track of time altogether. Time ceased to matter. We entered the Zen zone of timelessness that is the goal of all true vacations.

There’s a lot to be said for sharing your holiday with a nonagenerian. It slows you down, it lowers your blood pressure, and it prepares you for the future. As for my mother she said she had a lovely time: it just went by too fast.

Copyright: David Bouchier

There are good reasons to be nervous about traveling these days. We share the roads with drivers who are absorbed in phone calls or texting, and perhaps enjoying some kind of drug experience into the bargain. When we take to the skies we are at the mercy of mad shoe bombers, underwear bombers and soon, we are warned, bombers who actually hide explosives inside their bodies. That will really slow things down at the airport check-in.

But I love to travel, and hate the idea of being stuck in one place. The environmentalists are right of course when they say that pointless travel and tourism are eating up the planet. We could use the ecological argument to stay at home and avoid all the worries. But, inevitably, we head for the airport and join the huge crowd of other people who have made the same irrational and immoral choice.

If we human beings were sensible creatures we wouldn’t travel at all; in fact we would never have left our cozy homes in Africa a hundred thousand years ago. The risks of something going wrong on a long journey are enormous. Even the perfectly straightforward from New York to the South of France, which we take regularly, is fraught with possibilities of disruption and disaster: strikes, storms, air crashes, car crashes, illness and this year, as a special bonus, the Icelandic Volcano that may bring us all to a standstill wherever we happen to be, like a global game of musical chairs. Each time (so far) we have arrived safely and decided that had been nothing to worry about.

In the past few years a whole industry has grown up to exploit our fear of travel. We get a catalog for anxious travelers that offers solutions to problems we never even knew we had, including masks to protect against real or imagined viruses, several kinds of antibacterial hand cleaners including some that work with ultraviolet light, and even an antibacterial seat cover to put over your aircraft seat in case your body rests where some alien body might have rested. Fear of pollution outweighs even the fear of looking ridiculous. The same catalog has emergency radios, first aid kits, drugs, health products of many types including portable air purifiers, and all kinds of devices to protect the anxious traveler against foreign bathrooms. It doesn’t make travel seem like much fun, and I suppose it isn’t if you worry about all these things. Robert Louis Stevenson said that to travel hopefully was better than to arrive. But that was in the 1870s, before we were encouraged to travel with gritted teeth and a bag full of emergency products, fretting about the next disaster.

Yet travel was never as safe or reliable as it is now. Before airplanes came along untold numbers of people perished at sea in storms and shipwrecks. The Titanic was just one in a long line of transatlantic shipping disasters. Travelers were (and still are) taken by pirates, caught in train wrecks, kidnapped by bandits, starved, or simply lost and never found. The horrors of old-time travel have been well documented and exhaustively exploited by Hollywood. Yet people still traveled in spite of it all, and not just explorers and adventurers like Odysseus or Columbus. After tourism became fashionable in the eighteenth century the world set out to see the world, no matter how uncomfortable and dangerous it might be. Their robust spirit should be an inspiration to all of us as we wait nervously in the airport security line.

Copyright: David Bouchier

In the merry month of May most of us had had the experience of being almost run off the road by gigantic white limousines racing from one ceremony to the next. We live near a spot much favored for wedding photographs and, on the weekends, the happy couples are lined up like jumbo jets waiting to land.

Weddings are big business, to the tune of about fifty billion dollars a year. The average wedding costs twenty thousand dollars. Now that people marry for life, not just once but several times, the wedding industry’s turnover has increased in proportion. If the President is looking for an example of economic growth he need look no further than this. His advisers should whisper in the Presidential ear that gay marriage is yet another source of economic good news. Six million new couples will potentially qualify for the full wedding industry treatment, and the profits will be vast. That should end the argument about gay marriage.

There is no reason for any bride to go into this ordeal unprepared. She can refer to any one of five big magazines called, with stunning lack of originality, Bridal Guide, Bride’s, Elegant Bride, For the Bride, and Modern Bride. There are no magazines for bridegrooms, unless you count Sports Illustrated. When magazine publishers catch up with gay marriage, no doubt we’ll see titles like Brides and Brides.

I don’t see why they need to keep publishing these bridal magazines. One single issue of any of them – and they are larger than most college textbooks – would have served very well for the past fifty years, and possibly for the last hundred. Nothing really changes. There are beauty secrets, tips on etiquette, articles on choosing the dress, choosing the flowers, how not to insult the in-laws, advice for the nervous bride (but none for the terrified bridegroom), celebrity wedding stories, and so on.

It is a reassuring, highly regulated world, though strangely lopsided. The wedding will last for only a few hours, and the marriage might last for years. Seven years is the average, not too long to keep those old bridal magazines in the closet for a rainy day. Weddings are never easy. Honeymoons are even harder.

We were vacationing on the island of Nevis a few years back. Several young honeymoon couples came and went from the hotel. They were, like most honeymooners, wrapped in gloom, scarcely speaking to each other. They looked the way you imagine bungee jumpers look, about two seconds after they leap into space. They were thinking about the future. Even if they’ve been together for a while, marriage changes everything. Practical questions crowd in: how will they file their taxes? How many cats will they have? Will he get to keep his own name? The honeymoon is a period of transition, out of romance and into reality.

Old-fashioned honeymoon resorts kept young couples busy with activities and entertainments from morning till night, so they didn’t have time to think about anything. especially not about each other. But modern honeymooners head for the islands – there’s even a magazine called Island Weddings and Honeymoons. But islands are all wrong for honeymoons. Islands are too small, too quiet, and much too romantic.

These are very ancient rituals. The wedding represents the public commitment of the couple to each other, so everybody knows it’s ok. The honeymoon originated with the ancient Norse practice of kidnapping a bride from the neighboring village. The result, then as now, was that she left her family and got to travel a bit. Both rituals function as a kind of test, an ordeal designed to sort out the winners from the losers, genetically speaking.

It’s good to see young people keeping these traditions alive. Those of them who can survive a traditional wedding and a traditional honeymoon will find marriage comparatively easy. Good luck to them.

Copyright: David Bouchier

The desire to make things clean and tidy in the springtime seems to be an almost biological urge. Like most biological urges, it should be resisted. Spring may be the season of renewal and new beginnings, but there’s no point in going mad about it. The energy and optimism we feel at this time of year shouldn’t be wasted on cleaning.

Only a few hundred years ago spring was a season of joy and happiness, music and dancing, not domestic labor. The Romans had a great festival in honor of Flora the goddess of springtime and low-cholesterol and, in primitive countries like England, the annual spring ritual would be the Maypole Dance, in which young virgins, youths and maidens, would dance around on the village green, holding long ribbons attached to the top of a pole. As they circled the ribbons would wind around and get shorter and shorter until the dancers were all very close together. Obviously, this sort of thing couldn’t be allowed in these puritanical days, even if we could find young persons qualified to take part.

Naturally there were accidents during the celebrations – drunken falls, heart attacks, and inappropriate liaisons. Nobody cared much about that. But now we have legal liability, and political correctness, and the health police. A bit of wild partying can easily land you in court. The maypole dance might get you sued for discrimination against the disabled, or the merely dizzy. Excessive drinking will lead to huge medical bills. It’s safer to stay home and tidy the closets.

Another dismal modern phenomenon is what we might call springtime double jeopardy. Not only are we expected to clean, we are also expected to diet. In fact the quest for domestic order is very like dieting. It’s easy to achieve some short-term success, but almost impossible to maintain it. We are seduced by the many forms of disorder, just as we are seduced by the infinite varieties of food. The habits of a lifetime are just that – the habits of a lifetime.

I feel the tug of the spring-cleaning disease myself, but only very faintly like the gravitational pull of a distant star. I never have any trouble ignoring the symptoms. In fact I can allow my mind roam over the many possibilities that present themselves to my imagination as the weather improves. There’s outside painting, of course, and some power washing would be a good idea. The bird feeders need cleaning, the garage is a mess, my car is a disgrace, and there must be a hundred small odd jobs waiting for me to attack them with a hammer, or a chainsaw or a screwdriver, or a power drill. I have a lot of tools in the garage, because I like tools. But I don’t like using them, in case they wear out

The good news is that there are more and more specialized services out there to take over these tasks and allow us to enjoy our lives. Domestic cleaning is a whole industry, and even the traditional handyman is back in the form of a franchise operation. Thousands of “professional personal organizers” are poised to sort out our messy paperwork for about $200 an hour. It’s only a matter of time before we can look forward to dieting services – offering a range of large people who will lose weight on our behalf.

But the best and cheapest solution to springtime madness is just to wait it out. Once the weather gets really warm all these labors will become humid and unpleasant, the great outdoors will pull us away from domestic concerns, and weight loss will come as nature intended: through exercise, heat exhaustion, and plenty of sweat.

Copyright: David Bouchier