Afterword: Habits of the heart

‘What speaks to us, seemingly, is always the big event,
the untoward, the extra-ordinary: the front-page splash,
the banner headlines … The daily papers talk of everything except the daily … We sleep through our lives in a
dreamless sleep’

Georges Perec¹

‘You will never look at ordinary things in the same way again,’ promised Charles Warrell to his young redskins.² Warrell was the former headteacher who founded the I-Spy book series for children in 1948, becoming the first and most famous ‘Big Chief’. During its heyday in the 1950s and 1960s, the I-Spy club had half a million members. But it was still going strong when I joined up, for a brief but intense period, in the late 1970s. All the I-Spy books had a list of potential sightings on a particular theme, with points awarded for each spot. They were often about very everyday things – I-Spy on the Pavement, for example, being entirely devoted to street furniture like coalhole covers, road signs and traffic lights. The points you scored depended on how rare a sight was: five points for a standard red telephone kiosk, say, fifteen for an old-fashioned police box and thirty for something really rare like a thatched bus shelter.

After accumulating the requisite number of points, you got a parent to sign a disappointingly hedge-betting endorsement (‘I certify that I have examined the records in this book, and as far as I can judge, the entries are genuine’) and sent the book in the post to Big Chief I-Spy at the Wigwam-by-the-Green, which turned out, rather incongruously, to be just off London’s Edgware Road. By the time I sent off my books, Big Chief was no longer Charles Warrell but a man with the slightly more indigenous-sounding name of Robin Tucek – although I imagine it was one of his braves who handled the paperwork, and who sent me, by return of post, an I-Spy badge. We members of the I-Spy tribe could also read a weekly column in the Daily Mail which ended with the coded catchphrase ODHU/ NTINGGO (good hunting). As Julian Barnes, another former redskin, writes, ‘This sort of enforced looking is … comparatively rare in our lives: on the whole, we seek out the things we are already interested in. Our habits of inspection and our view of the world are reconfirmed each time we concentrate our vision or avert our eye.’³

I think it was the I-Spy books that first inspired my interest in the strange invisibility of the quotidian, that unobserved area of our lives which is suddenly rendered exotic when we pay it the compliment of prolonged attention. But when we grow up, we are supposed to put away such childish things, and focus on more significant matters. In fact, we tend to infantilise those (usually male) unfortunates who retain such obscure interests into adulthood as ‘geeks’, ‘anoraks’ and ‘trainspotters’. In any English thesaurus, the word ‘everyday’ is found alongside some rather unappealing terms: dull, workaday, common, monotonous, mundane, humdrum, run-of-the-mill. Then there are all those cult books about boring postcards, roundabouts, tea and biscuits, men and their sheds: the British in particular seem to find it hard to look at the everyday without dousing it liberally with irony and bathos (a trap into which I am sure I have also fallen).

Those who lived through the historical crises of the 1930s and 1940s might well have seen this sense of the banality of daily life as a hard-won luxury. During this period, simply getting through the day could be a matter of great discomfort and anxiety. In wartime, daily life was inescapably political. The government bombarded people with propaganda to show them how their everyday routines could be significant and meaningful, whether it was by donating saucepans to build spitfires, making and mending their own clothes or using only four inches of bathwater. But once post-war reconstruction began and shortages of basic necessities like food, housing and fuel became less acute, our social habits also became less troublesome and less visible. A new culture of consumption and affluence promised to relieve the drudgery of mundane life, tapping into the desires – for energy, abundance, stylishness, glamour – that this life did not fulfil. One symptom of this change was the way in which new forms of research into everyday life displaced the kind of domestic anthropology that Mass-Observation had practised. The growth industry of market research studied consumer lifestyle choices rather than our less conscious daily habits. Mass-Observation itself became Mass Observation UK Ltd, a more conventional market research company doing consumer surveys on products like toothpaste, fizzy drinks and washing powder. Like other similar companies, it focused on individual buying habits rather than ‘anthropology at home’.

This emphasis on personal preference and self-image in our daily lives would seem very strange even to our immediate ancestors. The concept of lifestyle depends on the principle of individual choice: if you don’t like your life, you can purchase a lifestyle. Private pleasures, from new kitchens to garden makeovers, can compensate for public tedium, from bus queues to boring meetings. But what I have tried to show in this book is that we can never be the sole, sovereign authors of our daily lives in this way. We cannot simply buy ourselves out of our involvement in each other’s lives by upgrading to a better car or a nicer holiday. Quotidian life, that overlooked area of existence made up of our collective daily habits, always gets in the way. And we might as well start noticing it, because it is the life we have in common, and how we will fill most of the rest of our days.

We need the everyday, the familiar and the predictable: diary full, deadlines to meet, emails to answer, in-tray ticking over, cigarettes to smoke, telly to watch, sofa to slump on. Depressives often find that absorption in accustomed routines helps them to ward off melancholia. Habits allow us to take certain things for granted, put our brains on automatic pilot and get on with our lives. ‘Continuity is no accident,’ as the sociologist A. H. Halsey writes. ‘Social customs, like personal habit, economize human effort. They store knowledge, pre-arrange decisions, save us the trouble of weighing every choice afresh.’⁴ But our social habits can also be a hindrance to new ways of thinking and acting – because they are so bound up with collective attitudes and feelings that we simply accept unthinkingly. Our daily habits are, in the words of the nineteenth-century thinker Alexis de Tocqueville, ‘habits of the heart’⁵– and when you have learned something off by heart, it is difficult to adapt to a new routine.

Our social habits are so often ignored and taken for granted that they only become truly visible when they are suddenly absent or changing. While I was in the middle of writing this book, two news stories illustrated this very well. In December 2005, London’s Routemaster buses – the famous ones with the lopsided fronts and the open back platforms – finally went out of service after operating for nearly half a century. ‘The Routemaster bus is being run off London’s streets by political correctness,’ lamented one of countless valedictory newspaper articles, in a reference to the poor disabled access that was one of the reasons for decommissioning it.⁶ Websites like savetheroutemaster.com campaigned for the bus to be retained. The right-wing think-tank Policy Exchange produced a research paper in favour of keeping the bus or producing a ‘child of Routemaster’.⁷ There was even a well-timed book about ‘the bus we loved’ which celebrated its ‘implacable, if polite, majesty’ and condemned the new bendy buses for having ‘all the aesthetics of the inside of a Hoover attachment’.⁸

Just as buses bunch up on a busy route, a very similar news story came along only a few weeks later. BBC Radio 4 announced that it was getting rid of its ‘UK theme’, a five-minute medley of traditional folk tunes which had begun the day’s programming at 5.30 a.m. every day since 1973. Everyone seemed to want the UK theme to survive, even if they were always fast asleep when it was being broadcast. Eighteen thousand people signed an online petition against its removal, three MPs tabled motions about it in Parliament, the tune reached number twenty-nine in the UK singles chart and the chancellor, Gordon Brown, told the Daily Mail that it was ‘one of the symbols of Britishness and a celebration of British culture’.⁹

Whatever the respective merits of the Routemaster and the Radio 4 UK theme, the acreage of newsprint expended on these phenomena was an interesting social phenomenon in itself. The disproportionate attention they received could be ascribed to the particular interests of metropolitan-based, early-rising journalists. But both stories also had a pleasingly melancholic finality – a familiar part of many people’s daily routine was about to end for ever with the last bus arriving at the depot, or the last play of the tune before the change of schedule. This is how daily life appears to us – in isolated, fragmentary images and moments, before disappearing again into the endless progression of days. As days come and go, our social habits tend to seem as eternal and inevitable as the sun rising and setting – but as I have tried to show in this book, this is partly a consequence of our neglect of the familiar. We might nostalgically lament the passing of the Routemaster and the Radio 4 UK theme, but perhaps we should also remember to celebrate the end of freezing cold bedrooms, airless railway carriages, endless queuing and nothing to watch on telly but the test card. Daily life is changing all the time for better and worse – and much of it is as tedious, debilitating and unfair as it ever was. But if you can see that it is part of an ever-changing historical process, at least you know that a dull routine need not be a life sentence.

It is only when we start to notice our daily lives a little more that we realise they take place in historical time, not in an eternal present of endlessly recycled routines. One of my favourite true stories is about the East German man who borrowed three books from the American Memorial Library in West Berlin in August 1961, and failed to return them on time. He did have a cast-iron excuse for this very unGermanic dereliction of civic duty: a few days after he had checked the books out, the Berlin wall went up and blocked his route to the library. But the man kept hold of the books, hoping he would be able to return them one day. And so he did, in pristine condition, on 10 November 1989, the day after the wall came down.¹⁰ It is a story that encapsulates the capacity of everyday routines to survive the most dramatic interruptions, the loyalty of people to communal rules – and the way that habits collide unpredictably with history and politics.

But the history of taking back our library books remains an oddly neglected area of study. What Tom Harrisson and Charles Madge argued in 1937 is still true. ‘How little we know of our next door neighbour and his habits; how little we know of ourselves,’ they wrote. ‘Of conditions of life and thought in another class or district our ignorance is complete. The anthropology of ourselves is still only a dream.’¹¹ Fortunately, it is an anthropology that everyone can undertake. We can all be quotidian detectives, excavating the buried meanings of the mundane. So I wish you well in your ongoing investigations of the seemingly boring, banal, trivial and obvious. ODHU/NTINGGO, as Big Chief I-Spy would say. And, to invert the ancient Chinese curse (which is actually neither ancient nor Chinese), may you live in uninteresting times.