Looking Back: Rush, rush, rush! I'd like to get you on a slow boat to China!
Why is the world obsessed with speed? We seem to be wishing our lives away in the belief that everything should be done more quickly.
‘What is this life if full of care, we have no time to stand and stare’ The words of poet WH Davies have never been more important than they are today, and yet he wrote it in 1911, when the pace of life compared to now must have been so slow.
In 1986,Italian Carlo Petrini started the ‘Slow Food’ movement in the town of Bra in Piedmont. Describing himself as a gourmet, he was concerned about what he perceived to be the dangers of fast-food restaurants eroding the traditional Italian way of life.
One of the most wonderful and yet simple pleasures in life is to sit, in convivial company for hours, with good food and wine.
Booking a meal in a restaurant in Sheffield this week, I was asked which sitting I required of two-hour slots. Sorry, I required the sitting which allowed me to sit all evening if I so wished, enjoying the food in an unrushed atmosphere. I cancelled the booking in favour of another restaurant.
Do you remember the interludes which were a feature of BBC television in its infancy?
Watching the potter’s wheel, waves crashing on the shore, the spinning wheel and the windmill. They seemed to show such a peaceful world.
A popular song, written in 1948 and a hit in 1960 by Emile Ford and the Checkmates was ‘Slow Boat to China!’ People today would be tearing their hair out at the thought.
We seemed to have moved on from there and life now is all about how quickly we can do everything. Rush, rush, rush!
There was a time when people mattered more than speed with lazy days, especially when we were young and travelling by train to holidays in Scarborough or Bridlington? It seemed as if we would never get there and the journey went on for ever, but what a wonderful time of relaxation, spotting cows or cars and having fun as a family.
As Paulo Coelho said ‘We think so much about the future that we neglect the present, and thus experience neither the present nor the future’