101 YEARS OLD AND STILL A MASTER OF NOTHINGNESS...

BEMUSED by a survey about nothing in particular, I went to an event to discover more about nothingness and was surprised to find something in it after all.

The event was the launch of BPme, which didn’t interest me at all because it is all about a new way to buy petrol. This “brand new customer experience from BP” as they described it, is a mobile phone that lets car drivers use their phones to pay for petrol when filling up at BP stations, and will quickly develop to let drivers make purchases at the attached shop and even order coffee to be brought to their car while they fill up.

None of this, as I said, was of any interest to me as I do not drive but prefer sleeping on trains. What intrigued me however was the idea that the whole paying-by-phone business would save drivers 10 minutes a day which would contribute to their valuable “me-time”.

Personally, I consider my entire life to be me-time, so I was a little confused, which grew more so when I saw the results of a survey in which people were asked what they would do with an extra 10 minutes a day. The top answers, they said, were, “Watch a film”, “read a book”, “have a bath instead of a shower”, “listen to music” and “cook a meal from scratch”.

How, I wondered, do you watch a film in 10 minutes? I have found that foreign films can be watched at double speed if you read the subtitles quickly, but 10 minutes is definitely pushing speed reading past its limit.

Reading a book in 10 minutes is much the same, unless it has a lot of pictures. As for a bath, just running it and getting the right temperature takes around 10 minutes. And how does one listen to a Wagner opera or make puff pastry in 10 minutes?

I was, to say the least, a bit sceptical about uses to which the 10 minutes of me-time could be put, so went to the launch event. It was held at a place called The School of Life and my attitude began to change when a fellow named Francesco Dimitri explained their philosophy of nothingness, even asking us to list our favourite ways of doing nothing, then comparing our lists with those of total strangers.

One of the things I have learnt from my recent obsession with sloths is that they are not lazy. They may look lazy, but in fact what they are doing is being energy efficient. I was so impressed when I first read this, that I adopted the phrase myself. “I’m feeling a bit energy efficient,” I would announce to those around me. “I think I’ll have a lie down.” In fact “being energy-efficient” came right at the top of my list of ways to do nothing.

Only when called upon to make a list however did I begin to realise how many different ways there are to do nothing. You can do it with your eyes open, you can do it with eyes closed. You can consciously think of nothing. You can fall asleep. And even if you do nothing for only 10 minutes, the benefits can be huge.

Saving time, which is what BPme is all about, is all very well, but in my experience, the best thing to do with the time saved is nothing at all.