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ARTICLE
Leisure: Living the Good Life.
Issue 12 The Leisure Issue Museums Drinking Shopping DIY Holidays
FREE warning: contains semi-explicit content
Leisure is a strange idea. It’s the word that denotes ‘fun time’ as opposed to ‘work time’. We engage in leisure when we are done slaving over a computer / workbench / cotton loom / student loan application, for peanuts or pay checks. The history of leisure has taken some twists and turns, and the word drifts in and out of use. Loaded with two hundred years of connotation, leisure is commonly understood to have begun its seminal rise during the industrial revolution as the culturally sanctioned antidote to protestant hard-work and Victorian sobriety. The nineteenth century saw the invention of package holidays along with the foundation of football leagues and the invention of Saturday as a ‘day off’. Free time wasn’t something new per se, but with machinery, work schedules and bosses, it was measured out and granted. It was a gift from the employer, the dictator of time. New industries sprang to cater for this allocated free time. Now in 2010, the Leisure Industry controls a massive swath of the economy. Everywhere from shopping malls to cinemas to restaurants to Wetherspoons provide places to spend hard earned cash in the pursuit of leisure. With this, leisure has become a defining feature of how we spend our lives, time, money and also, to some degree, how we define ourselves. ‘Hobby’ is a somewhat naff word to use in explaining what we do with our leisure time. It certainly conjures up images of backyard astronomy, ill-executed carpentry and ugly beaded bracelets. So perhaps understandably, it has fallen out of usage amongst the youth of today. One rarely says, my hobby is getting ratted on sambuca, going shopping, playing X-Box. Yet, if a hobby is what one does in ones leisure time, perhaps regular binge drinking
sessions are to be seen as a hobby, albeit an unhealthy one. Indeed, often it is these sorts of freely chosen activities that we use to define ourselves. I may work in a bar, but my real passion is civil war re-enactment and scrumpy. Given the choice, I would do it all the time! These hobbies often define who we associate with, to a further extent, who are friends are, and so some might argue, who we are. Perhaps what is peculiar about defining oneself by a hobby is that what may be a hobby or a leisurely activity for one, most often, is work for someone else. The breadth of possibilities of leisure activities, whilst simultaneously allowing opportunity to define one’s individualism, inherently blurs its own line between work and play on a general societal level. Farming may be work, but for those following in the foot steps of Hugh Fernley W. it is certainly a hobby. Likewise knitting and bracelet making are often hobbies for alternative indie girls, but exist on the other side of the world as horrible sweatshop jobs. Despite ambiguity, leisure, being the time we spend not working, both produces, and perhaps more importantly, appreciates ‘culture’. Looking back with un-merited nostalgia, we can observe that the Greeks invented Western Culture, sitting around, getting drunk and talking, a tradition carried out in many neighbourhood pubs, city centres and student halls today. However, debating the chicken and the egg is not all that constitutes culture. Art, film, music, design and food are all culture products often produced by people utilising leisure time in pursuit of their hobbies, often to be appreciated by others in their own leisure. It is this relationship, of people producing and consuming that allows culture and its artefacts to develop, exist, undulate. From this reasoning, one might conclude that if everyone was a professional artist, musician, designer, etc, the world would be a dreadful place. Instead of enjoying the works created, we would be simply left in a muddle of one-up-man-ship, passive aggressive compliments and sheepish apathy. Leisure and hobbies just make everything better.