Sunday Times

Idle time’s not wasted if you know how to use it

At the licensing office, don’t moan, crush a snotty kid instead or learn about friendship, writes Darrel Bristow-Bovey

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You may not believe this, but I enjoy visiting the traffic department. In the middle of our hectic lives it’s comforting to know that for the next few hours I can take my ease (the plastic bucket seats at Gallows Hill are quite surprising­ly comfy) and do some reading and be pleasantly checked out from the hustle and flow of this too clamorous world. Some people pay good money for mindfulnes­s retreats where nothing is asked of them but to surrender to time and observe the sweet, poignant passing of the world. Not me! I just need to lose my driver’s licence.

But what I most like about it is the other people. The traffic department, like Home Affairs, like heaven, like hell, is a great social leveler. We’re all the same in there. It doesn’t matter who we are or how important we think our time is, we all have to enter that same narrow door and take that ticket — U0734 — and look optimistic­ally at the digital board to see how many numbers must still be called before us — 692 — and search our own souls about how best to confront the next three or four hours of life.

There are always some people — sorry, fellow white folks, but I think we all know who I’m talking about — who choose to spend that precious time huffing and fuming and feeling put upon and personally aggrieved. Of course, it’s everyone’s right to make themselves more miserable, but it does seem rather a waste.

Today, while waiting my turn to have my green form stamped, stapled and laminated, I read a hundred pages of Jonny Steinberg’s startling new book, then totally crushed some upstart small child in a staring competitio­n, then spent 20 or so minutes gazing into space and letting my mind wander of its own volition.

What a gift, to have the leisure to drift untethered

through time and space.

I found myself unexpected­ly five again and sitting in the shade while my father mowed the lawn and I played with my toy cars (one was a black London cab; another Roger Moore’s white Lotus Esprit from The Spy Who Loved Me). I had the rich green heavy scent again of the mown grass and the sound of my father swearing as he tried to turn the heavy mower around, and I remembered how he accidental­ly mowed Iain our tortoise to death, and how I acted more upset than I really was so that he would take me to the movies. And then I tried to remember the Philip Larkin poem where he accidental­ly mows a hedgehog, and then I wondered where capers come from, and then I spent some time speculatin­g on how far I’ve walked in my life, if you were to count up every footstep, and then I read some more of my book and then after that I chatted to the guy beside me and learnt something about friendship.

He was ticket number U0328, but it’s all freestylin’ and higgledy-piggledy at Gallows Hill. You don’t have to sit in numerical order — you can move around and mingle like a Vanity Fair cocktail party. We sat watching a mom loudly complainin­g to someone she thought worked there, but who didn’t, that she had to take her daughter to choir practice, and we had a little chuckle together and then we started chatting and he told me that he was having a very good year. His son was doing well at school and his daughter was making him proud. He was promoted at work and bought a new lounge suit and a La-Z-Boy recliner. We agreed that every man should have a La-Z-Boy recliner. He confessed that his wife made him keep it in the garage because she thought it was too ugly for the lounge, and we agreed this was harsh but probably fair.

He told me that his health was good, and that although he hadn’t lost any weight lately, he reckoned he could if he put his mind to it. He told me he was very happy that in all these years his wife had never divorced him.

As our time together was drawing to an end — ticket number U0327 was at the counter, and to all things there is a season — he thanked me for the chat. He said he hadn’t been able to say all these things out loud before.

“You know,” he said, “if things are going wrong in your life, you can talk to your friends. But when things are going good, who can you talk to? What if their lives aren’t good? You have to be a very, very good friend to be happy for your friend when your life isn’t good. What if I look in my friend’s eyes and see that he’s jealous? How do I think the same way about him after that? No, sometimes your best friend is a stranger.”

“We should be careful Of each other,”

said Philip Larkin in that poem about the hedgehog.

“We should be kind While there is still time.”

 ?? Picture: www.123rf.com/Natalya Aksenova ??
Picture: www.123rf.com/Natalya Aksenova
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