How to ... be busy

In China, a common greeting is, "Have you eaten?" In the UK, it's more likely to be, "Keeping busy?" This reflects the fact that the greatest danger in China is starvation while ours is boredom. Busyness is the forward momentum on the tightrope of life that prevents us from falling into the abyss of self-consciousness on one side and boredom on the other. As boredom nearly always leads to unpleasantness and bad deeds, while selfconsciousness leads to unhappiness and bad art, you can see why jigsaws, sheds, knitting and sudoku are the bedrock of civilisation.

There is also great peace in a little busyness. Pottering at home or around the shops is the minimum amount of activity required to be busy. When people retire, they often say they have never been busier - that's primarily because they are in such a low gear that it takes half a day to buy a newspaper and the rest of the day to read it. The retired often select this low gear before they retire, because there's little left to do at work or because they can do their job standing on their head.

There is a saying that if you want to get something done, ask a busy person. They are so used to munching through massive To Do lists that having one extra item on it isn't going to make much difference to them. On the other hand, people who always say they're too busy to do anything have often lived lives packed with wall-to-wall idleness.

Bees are noted for their busy-ness. Having overcome the obstacle of technically being unable to fly, bees then choose to make honey, which is just about the most labour-intensive thing you can spread on your bread. After the poor bee has made 50,000 pollen-gathering trips to make its honey, our coming along and stealing it is surely in the same ethically dubious category as foie gras.

Aside from poverty, the worst thing about unemployment is enforced idleness. Unless, that is, you are naturally idle, and then the worst thing about employment, apart from the lack of benefits, is enforced work. Busybodies make it their business to know your business. In actual business, this is known as networking, but in real life it's called nosiness. Ironically, busybodies are particularly good at idle speculation.

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