How to colonise a bit of land for four days

On my way from work I saw this:

Tape and chairs and even an entire sofa on a usually empty lawn along a busy road in an upmarket part of town. What is going on here?

I had seen some things like this before in the Netherlands, but never on such a scale and with such an array of furniture. It had to have something to do with the upcoming hiking event, held annually in the town to which I moved three years back, although because of COVID this is the first time in three years it is happening. The Nijmegen ‘Four Days’. Organised since 1909. Four days of long-distance hiking, seven days of partying. Tens of thousands of hikers participate, cheered on by hundreds of thousands along the route.

More than a week before the start of the trek, the chairs started appearing in the landscape.

They became more every day. Who put them there, and why?

People were ‘booking’ a seat in the audience.

There was something uncanny about these empty seats and stretches of tape. To me, a historian of the nineteenth century, they looked like a colonial gesture.

Before I go on I want to make it clear that of course the Four Days’s audiences are no actual colonists. They are:

1. here to enjoy themselves and to cheer people on, not to earn money;
2. not likely to kill anyone in the process;
3. leaving again after four days.

However, there are some striking similarities, too, between the claiming of these viewing spots and what Europeans did on other continents in the last five hundred years:

1. this land belongs to the municipality, to the commons, in other words: to everyone in Nijmegen. And yet small groups of people claim it as exclusively theirs;
2. they plant their flag and expect this to be enough to make a lawful claim on the land. If I were just to sit down on the grass within one of these marked areas, the people who had claimed it the week previous would no doubt be very angry and expect me to leave. It shows how big is this faith in flags and tape. It is not actual usage and work and daily interaction that makes you belong to a piece of land (sowing crops, building homes), but a superficial, symbolic intervention such as posting a notice on a tree and walking away again;
3. who gets to make these claims? People who have access to tape and chairs or even sofas and who are able to move these to the designated piece of land. These are people either with a big car and arms and legs capable of moving this stuff (their own arms and legs or those of people willing to help them), or who live in this upmarket part of Nijmegen so that they did not need to lug their sofas very far. In other words: you cannot make this claim if you ‘only’ get up early each day of the hike to be here in time for a good spot (the hike starts at 4am, although from a different location). Your own body isn’t enough. You need capital. Access to labour. A plan. You need to invest, in the capitalist sense of the word;
4. although people invest in a spot, that does not mean they pay in full for what they harvest. That is not what investment entails. The lawn was designed by the municipality. The trees were planted by the municipality. The grass is cut by the municipality. And after the party-goers are gone, it is the municipality who cleans up their Mars wraps and Aperol bottles. Who is the municipality in this case? For most of this work, it is gardeners and cleaners. Cheap labour provides some people with a seat in the first row.

Is there a connection between Dutch historical colonialism and Dutch people routinely claiming public space to watch a sporting event or sell their wares on King’s Day? How deeply is this ‘claiming logic’ embedded in Dutch normality? I have not seen this form of appropriation anywhere else so far, so there might be something in Dutch culture that normalises this way of thinking. Meanwhile, I have seen many other places where people get up early and go and queue in order to get what they need or want. Or perhaps that’s only those with little money. Perhaps we should see this present Dutch form of appropriating space as a relatively benign way of claiming something that the entitled otherwise claim by using violence?

But let us stop rummaging around in the Dutch soul for a moment, go to a piece of lawn or pavement bordering on the march*, and sit down, loiter, squat, politely request, stand in front of, or get up really early to enjoy a bit of the parade. And let us hope that it is actually the people staying at the hospital next to the road who get to sit or lie in the best parts of the reserved areas.

* The event is partly a military event.

All photos taken by the author, 2022.

Slow Living: A Paradise Lost?

Do you frequently feel rushed? See the appeal of the Slow Movement? You are not alone.

A harried White Rabbit from Carroll and Tenniel’s Nursery Alice (London: Macmillan, 1890), digitised by the British Library.

To give an example from just one country in the world – a country that, incidentally, scores high in the happiness indexes: the Dutch, too, live a stressful life. Their national institute for social research reports that they have difficulty combining work, care, education and leisure. Many always feel behind schedule.

When under such pressure, it is not uncommon to envy one’s ancestors’ slower-paced lifestyle. Because this is often said: that the culprit of our stress is the acceleration of modern life. Before the arrival of smartphones, cars and steam engines, of highly regimented work hours and the capitalist fear of wasting our time, we kept a considerably lower pace. And even if we are aware that the trade-offs of going back in time may include having a more repetitive job, fewer possessions, fewer modern conveniences and a more limited social circle, we sometimes crave that old-life simplicity.

But has stress really become normalised only recently? I try to answer this question in an article for web magazine The Low Countries. The article looks at the diaries of four travellers from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Based on my research into these and related texts, I argue that many people were in fact already anxious about their own efficiency even before the Industrial Revolution. They had ambitious schedules and constantly felt they needed to catch up with their own rushed lives. Interested? Please read on on The Low Countries.

Coffee cups: a ‘circular economy’

It’s labour day! I think you may at least have earned a cup of coffee by now.

My employer organised a Sustainability Week this year. At the start of the week, I received the following cheerful message:

The University offers a discount of 20p per drink to anyone who brings their own reusable mug […]

Throughout Sustainability Week you can […] pick up your own reusable cup from any University or SU cafe, or from the Zero Waste Shop in the Students’ Union, for only £5 (£6 for a large).

I’ll leave aside for the moment the fact that my employer is trying to seduce me to hand some of my hard-earned wages straight back over to them.

But we can recognise in this e-mail a message so many companies are sending us these days. A message which performs a clever bit of PR. We are invited to feel good about replacing our disposable cups with a lasting one. But who was it who gave us the disposable cup to begin with?

Alanthebox via Wikimedia Commons.

Within the span of only a few years, coffee joints across Britain and in other rich countries have replaced ceramic drinking ware with paper and plastic cups. Not just for take-away orders, as had been the case for much longer,* but for customers who ‘sit in’ as well.

When travelling to see family for Christmas this winter, hands frozen, I had difficulty finding a place where I could have a nice sit-down to the tinkle of a warm cup of cappuccino on its saucer, instead of a hasty bite in a soggy piece of cardboard. There was one such place left in the entire station: a commiserating passer-by pointed it out to me as she saw me protesting at another coffee counter.

The sensual pleasures of hot beverages aside – and they are of eminent importance – there is also an ecological side to this story, not to mention the economic side.

As to the ecological side, my employer’s message itself already informed me of the following:

Of the 2.5 billion single-use cups used in the UK every year, only 1% are recycled.

And the makers of my own reusable travel mug (which I of course speedily procured) explain how I am helping to remedy this:

The outer thermal insulation layer of [the reusable cup] is made from used paper coffee cups. Every one of us throws away 350 paper coffee cups each year on average. By switching to [this reusable cup] you save these from landfill and contribute directly to the recycling of the used coffee cups that slip through the net. (company website)

And so, I am now the proud owner of

One great cup made from 6 rubbish ones. (product leaflet)

It is these and similar data which not only the sellers of travel mugs use (and I don’t blame them, in as far as they operate independently from the coffee sellers), but the PR-departments of cafés bombard us with when urging us to carry around our own durable cups. We must be very bad people do be doing this to our planet (to be sure, I think we are – but that’s stuff for another post).

Yet such durable cups form a solution to a problem that was never there to begin with. Or rather: they form a solution to a problem that was created only recently by the coffee companies themselves, and in full awareness of creating it; the same coffee companies who are now making us feel guilty for the paper cups they introduced.

For of course, coffee bars’ own old-school ceramic cups had no larger ecological footprint than the ones we now carry around with us. On the contrary: professional whiteware lasts far longer than the average plastic or bamboo travel cup you buy on the high street.

So let us move on from the ecological story to the economic one:

If Adam Smith were still alive, he might have said: what we see here is yet another marvellous example of how economic incentives – getting 20p off your coffee – stimulates moral behaviour and benefits society as a whole.

Karl Marx, on the other (quite visible) hand, might call it yet another marvellous example of the owners of large companies shifting the responsibility for their resource depletion onto the individual consumer and worker (and most of us are both).

Now Adam Smith was a clever guy, but he does not seem to always have been very precise in describing where the benefits go. Not only is it now the customers’ responsibility to buy a cup, previous to visiting a coffee joint; they also have to carry it around in their bags (leaky and all) and do the cleaning (of their bags, too), a cleaning which is both economically and ecologically less efficient than professional cafés can do it.

Here it may be good to remind ourselves that labour performed in rich countries makes up the largest part of the cost of anything we buy, far greater than coffee beans or hot milk. Therefore, companies can save a fair bit of money through such measures. What this also means, is that the costly labour which is now performed for free by coffee consumers, would otherwise have provided jobs for people.

All this while not so long ago, it used to be a customer’s reasonable expectation that a café would take care of all this. What business are cafés in, if not that of bringing us cups of coffee? So, to look at it in terms of money instead of work: half the product that we used to get when we gave two pounds to a coffee seller, is now provided by ourselves. Instead of coffee and cup, we now just get coffee. We only still get half our money’s worth.

And all it took for coffee companies to convince us to donate them a pound every time we buy a hot drink, was a few years of making us drink from paper cups, plus some clever guilt-tripping.

We are a forgetful people.

 

* though not always! A century or so ago, people would bring their own vessels to filling points. Of course, those vessels were not filled with American barista coffee, but with water, soup, or potatoes.

Killing time with cauliflowers

I have been reading essays by the nineteenth-century writer Vernon Lee. In some of these essays, the reader gets the uncanny sensation that Vernon Lee, despite dying back in 1935, knew all about TV shows and Instagram.

Nicolas Raymond, Green cauliflower, CC-BY-3.0.

I am standing on a railway platform. Waiting for the train to arrive, I look around me and see people absorbed in their screens. This image, so familiar to many now, helps us understand what Lee was on about when she wrote:

The fear of boredom […] encumbers the world with rubbish, and exhibitions of pictures, publishers’ announcements, lecture syllabuses, schemes of charitable societies, are pattern books of such litter. The world, for many people […] is like a painter’s garret, where some half-daubed canvas, eleven feet by five, hides […] the Venus in the corner, and blocks the charming tree-tops, gables, and distant meadows through the window.

Art, literature, and philanthropy are notoriously expressions no longer of men’s and women’s thoughts and feelings, but of their dread of finding themselves without thoughts to think or feelings to feel.

That’s easy: the daubing artists and performers of Lee’s day are the celebrities of today – we want to know what they get up to – and her publishers’ announcements and lecture syllabuses are our click-bait – we like to be distracted, and hate to miss the talk of the day.

There’s much more to Lee’s essay, however. It is not just a critique of mindless consumption. It is also a critique of mindless production: of plodding on unthinkingly, or under the powerful bane of status anxiety. She continues:

So-called practical persons know this, and despise such employments [bored art – or bored web browsing] as frivolous […]. But are they not also, to a great extent, frightened of themselves and running away from boredom? See your well-to-do weighty man of forty-five or fifty, merchant, or soldier, or civil servant; the same who thanks God he is no idler. Does he really require more money? Is he more really useful as a colonel than as a major, in a wig or cocked hat than out of it? Is he not shuffling money from one heap into another, making rules and regulations for others to unmake, preparing for future restless idlers the only useful work which restless idleness can do, the carting away of their predecessor’s litter?

Stevepb, Coins, CC-0.

In short, this work, too, though ‘practical’ and ‘productive’, is undertaken ‘to kill time, at best to safeguard one’s dignity’.

So what’s with the rush, the frenzied activity?

The quick methods, the rapid worker, the cheap object quickly replaced by a cheaper – these we honour; we want the last new thing, and have no time to get to love our properties, bodily and spiritual.

According to Vernon Lee, still writing in the 1890s, this emphasis on churning out cheap products fast creates self-asserting and aggressive people. And this is where the cauliflowers enter her essay:

Such persons cultivate themselves, indeed, but as fruit and vegetables for the market, and, with good luck and trouble, possibly primeurs: concentrate every means, chemical manure and sunshine, and quick! each still hard pear or greenish cauliflower into the packing-case, the shavings and sawdust, for export!

All effort revolves around tangible products, concrete deliverables:

So long as this be placed on the stall where it courts inspection, what matter how empty and exhausted the soul which has grown it?

Vernon Lee’s critique sounds familiar. Stripped of its uplifting elegance, it is printed in our newspapers. It is murmured at birthday parties. And do we not often think it ourselves?

Every period in history, it seems, has its critics of mindless production and consumption. Each epoch, complaints about the social rat race are renewed, and the boredom is deplored that masquerades as meaningful activity.

By quoting Lee’s essay, however, I do not want to say that we got it really bad this time round. Nor that the issues raised by Lee are of all times and therefore inconsequential, and we should stop sulking.

Rather, I want to say that she gives funny and subtle expression to a set of structural issues that almost all of us grapple with in our lives, to do with stress, status and self-worth, with an information overload and with the imperative to work. She also offers us the foundations of a solution. But for that, you will need to find the leisure to read the entire essay ‘About Leisure’.

Or study this painting:

Vincenzo Catena, Saint Hieronymus (early 16th century). Now in the National Gallery, London, no. NG694. Image from Wikimedia Commons.

 

 

The quotes are from Vernon Lee’s essay ‘About Leisure’, published first in 1897, in Limbo and Other Essays.

How to sell a sad thing

Sad things can be funny. But sad. But funny.

Here’s something spotted a while back by my partner. A bag of peanuts containing peanuts…

… as well as…

… the same volume of air.

Then we found this unbelievably cool DIY mural in a shopping centre:

… which made me worry a little about the people who wrote it.

And a little later, I ran into a street scene in our eminently post–industrial city, equally to do with the world of buying and selling:

It’s always good to assure potential visitors of Sheffield that, whatever we may look like from the outside, we do have Total Quality Within.

 

Photos taken by JHMS.