Beware the subtle pleasures of lockdown pottering
Each Christmas spawns its ubiquitous festive pop jingle, its tearjerking advert and its eccentric bestsellers: volumes whose combination of charm and mild selfimprovement is ideally suited to the aimless period between the old year and the new. Miscellanies, almanacs, amusingly pedantic grammar books
– all go down nicely with a glass of sloe gin and a mince pie, and this year Pottering: a Cure for Modern Life by Anna Mcgovern is set to do the same.
Mcgovern’s timing is perfect. We have spent so much of this year confined to quarters that the old lines of demarcation between work and home have become blurred. And while this is not without its small consolations, it can also result in an uneasy sense that we are never off-duty.
Mcgovern astutely recognised the phenomenon three years ago, when the idea of a national lockdown would have seemed the stuff of dystopian fiction. Threadbare from combining a full-time job with caring for three young children and her elderly father, she decided to spend one day per week doing nothing in particular – just pottering.
Her definition of pottering is a piquant combination of the precise and the vague: pottering is not drudgery, so household chores don’t count. Nor is it total idleness: scrolling social media or watching television lack the modest but necessary sense of achievement. Instead, it involves the kind of small, practical, but satisfying occupations for which the demands of everyday life leave little time: deadheading window boxes, rearranging spice racks, replacing missing buttons on a favourite shirt.
The benefits of notquite-aimless activity have robust philosophical antecedents, from Samuel Johnson’s exploration of the idea that “Every man is, or hopes to be, an Idler”, via the literary flâneurs of 19th-century France, to the “slow” movements of the late 20th century, with their emphasis on localism, reflectiveness and restoring rather than replacing.
In a year that has seemed impossibly chaotic, pottering has offered a welcome feeling of control. And while Mcgovern’s book, with its gentle pastel illustrations, seems aimed mainly at women, pottering makes men happy, too – although they tend to do it in places with functional names: the workshop, the garage, the study.
Yet I feel a certain foreboding about the longer-term effects of these slight pleasures. The cosiness of small triumphs conjures a flattering illusion of progress, but it also flirts with the 19th-century notion of the “angel in the house” who excelled, as Virginia Woolf wrote, “in the difficult arts of family life”. Busywork is more comforting than leaning in, and it offers unlimited opportunities for distraction from more solid achievements.
As an undergraduate,
I was startled by the vehemence with which my tutor denounced the final paragraph of Middlemarch, in which George Eliot describes the fate of her heroine Dorothea Brooke
– a passionate, energetic young idealist when we first meet her. As a mature woman, Eliot tells us, her “full nature… spent itself in channels which had no great name on the earth”.
The phantom afterlives of fictional heroines are unknowable; perhaps Dorothea was perfectly content with her hidden life. But it’s a question worth bearing in mind, as we prepare to spend yet another afternoon contentedly reorganising our kitchen cupboards.