YOU CAN'T PUSH IT UNDERGROUND [494]

Lately, I have come to feel that I am always running out of time. I may start the day with a to-do list in my mind, and the best of intentions, but deadlines abound: what do you need to get done, or have ready, before you leave home, start work, or before you go to bed? What free time does a working day leave you, and how much drive you possess to use that time productively as well? Or should you wait until the weekend, and will you have the energy to do anything about it then?

This predicament nearly derailed my attempts to put something out this week. For the record, and in case I ever change it, I put out a social media message every Friday to say what I will be writing about for the coming weekend - this is a practice I picked up from old 1950s drive-in films, particularly Ed Wood films like “Glen or Glenda” and “Plan 9 from Outer Space”, where the poster would be created first to generate the interest, and hopefully funding, to make the film. This time, I realised that at no point during the preceding week, I had given any thought, or put aside any time to think, what I could possibly be writing about next.

When I first thought of squaring the circle, of addressing the problem by making it the subject, I initially dismissed the idea as a pathology that needed to be worked out in its own time, and not as a discussion to be reasoned with towards a conclusion. For me, it boils down to a feedback loop: an anxiety over not being productive enough with my own free time, and the linear nature of time itself, where every moment is a moment you won’t have again, which creates anxiety. In terms of addressing it, this will again be something to ringfence time to properly address it – ironically, that might also be the answer.

Two resources have been sent my way to address these from different angles: “Professors as Writers: A Self-Help Guide to Productive Writing” by Robert Boice, a book with comprehensive diagnostic tools to assess productivity problems, and to build and maintain – I got a laugh from randomly opening at a page where someone had told Boice, “My God, you’re asking us to change our whole lifestyles!”, only to be told that they were the ones in control. The other was an article by Oliver Burkeman titled “The unproductivity challenge”, attempting to address the “completionist urge” by setting aside time to do nothing at all: “You’ll be claiming your right to exist, and to enjoy existing, regardless of your productivity.”

I may not be able to shake off the feeling that everything I have written here is a placeholder where a better idea for an article would have been, but this is the problem when you have an obligation to yourself to produce something new each week.

YOU KNOW I READ IT IN A MAGAZINE [407]

Each Saturday, I have ripped out and saved Caitlin Moran’s weekly column from “The Times” newspaper, one of my inspirations for these articles. Printed in their magazine, my cutting down the page’s sides, to fit into an A4 folder, is always a job for another time. A week ago, the shape of the magazine thinned down to A4 size, much to my approval. This change was prompted by the closure of the Prinovis printing plant in Liverpool in June 2023, leaving Walstead, owner of five printing presses, as the UK’s last large volume printer of magazines.

The rising cost of paper is as much a contributor to the declining circulation figures for magazines as the preference to read online. Popular titles like “Marie Claire”, “Glamour”, “Time Out” and “NME” are only found online in the UK, the latter two having relaunched as free magazines before withdrawing from print altogether. Others either print fewer issues a year, like “Cosmopolitan” (from monthly to bi-monthly) and “Time” (from weekly to fortnightly), while I stopped buying the “Radio Times” once the price of a weekly issue reached £4.00 in 2022, having reached the point for me where the time-limited use of a TV listings guide becomes too expensive to be a disposable item.

The only magazines I now buy regularly are the cheap and grimly functional “What’s On TV” because, like bus timetables, I find TV listings easier to read on paper; the aforementioned “Cosmopolitan”, whose annual subscription rate remained static as the number of issues per year dropped; and “Private Eye”, the satirical news magazine whose enduring cultural relevance, and “print first” publishing order, means its sales figures have never been higher. Any other magazine purchase either has to be for something I know I am going to keep, like the “Sight & Sound” decennial list of the greatest films of all time, or for a specific article I need to read for research – I would not create an online login in order to read one article from, say, “The New Statesman”, but I wouldn’t spend £5.50 on a print issue unless they provided me with a really good reason.

From my own behaviour, I can see traditional print magazines dissipating into two categories: online-only publications, and “bookazines”, the latter name currently applied to special-edition magazines on one subject, or compilations of previously printed material, whose presentation without advertising means the price approaches the £10-12 normally spent on a book, and more likely to be kept by its owner like a book. To that end, the music magazine “NME”, originally a weekly music newspaper and magazine until it became online-only in 2018, will introduce a bi-monthly premium magazine in 2023, “reprinting” online articles aimed at capturing a moment in time instead of what is coming next, with a limited print run and restricted availability to build scarcity and hype, and a cover price of £10, all aimed at people who will treat the magazine’s purchase like they would a vinyl record. That doesn’t sound like something that can be put in a recycling bin once you have finished reading it.

AND I’LL NEVER HAVE THAT RECIPE AGAIN [4]

There’s nothing like a dystopian vision of the future to spark a conversation. Many science fiction stories comment on the state of the world by showing how it will get out of hand, unless the reader does something to stop it. This was what I had in mind when I tried to answer this question: what would be the two words that would bring Britain to its knees?

My answer was FINAL CAKE, for the prospect of no more cake, no matter how much a flight of fantasy that actually sounds, would tear a bigger hole in humanity than if something ever happened to, say, money, which is just as unthinkable. If “no more cake” is something that could ever happen, it is the sort of event that will hit when it is too late for anyone to do anything about it, having taken its existence for granted for too long.

Cake is entertainment. Cake is talked about as much as it is eaten. People are more likely to watch someone baking a cake on television than do it themselves and, with the level of artistry expected on “The Great British Bake Off” - for “artistry” is a word used more than “skill” here – anyone that bakes a cake will have their worth as an artist, and as a person, judged by that cake. To arrive at any meeting with a cake you made yourself will speak more about you, and invite more questions about your craft, your decisions and your temperament as a result, than having bought one from a shop. Perhaps, the person that bought the shop-made cake could get off more lightly, as everyone scrutinises what those layers of sponge say about how your friend’s mind works.

Cake is business. The growth in self-employment in the last ten years, especially after the financial crisis of 2008, has fuelled a boom in businesses that cater to the sweet tooth, as people look to how their abilities can be made into a service. The point where a hobby becomes a livelihood does makes getting hold of a hand-crafted cake, always that little bit more desirable than a shop-bought one, easier to reach than ever, but if you can’t bake for the love of it anymore, would your cake taste as good?

Cake is time. The points where we choose to break routine have become routine themselves. Elevenses, tea time, the dessert that follows dinner, birthdays, Christmas, any reason to celebrate – we have found a way to work cake into them. The diet industry would not exist without cake. I do not need to explain that any further.

Now I can look someone in the eye and tell them that I wrote an article about cake, I don’t feel that I want a slice for real – at least, not right now, possibly tomorrow. Perhaps, this really is the beginning of the end.