WHATEVER happened to all that leisure time? Remember when, a few years ago, experts were predicting that we would have all this free time. Computers would do all our work for us and we would all be working part-time. The great problem of the future was going to be how we were going to spend all that extra time and there was much talk about educating people for leisure.

Ha!

Instead, workers in Britain put in some of the longest hours in Europe. Nearly four million people in the UK work more than 48 hours a week. One in 25 does at least 60 hours (I know that one - he's the one who wakes me up when he comes home at midnight.)

We work three hours a week more than the average European and nearly five hours a week more than the French.

Just think what you could do with an extra five hours a week - anything from talk to your children, take up a sport, learn a language, visit your granny or just collapse in the pub knowing you didn't have to face a 12 hour day next morning.

But we have to differentiate between the different types of over-workers. There are those who do it because they thrive on it and those who do it because they have no choice, the only way they can pay the bills is by working all the hours God sends.

A woman interviewed on the radio last week managed to feed a family of four on just £30 a week. But I bet if she or her husband were offered some overtime, they'd snatch at it. But why should they have to?

The survey just concentrated on the hours worked by men which is just as well. Another survey a few weeks ago showed that once they're home, men do on average about two hours housework a week. Women do about 16. But that of course doesn't count because it's not paid Women's work was ever thus.

Ultimately, anyway, most long hours are pretty unproductive. People get tired and stale, day dream or get careless. Years ago, the kindly boss of a radio station where I worked when I was young and keen and work was almost as much fun as play, would go along the corridors in the evening and chase us all out - especially in the summer.

"Hire a boat and go out on the river," he would say, "row to the pub and relax with your friends. The work will still get done." And he was right. Coming in the next morning, relaxed and refreshed, we could usually get more done in a shorter space of time.

It was a rule he followed himself which is why sometimes we'd see him sliding off to the golf course at lunchtime instead of sitting in his office starting at bits of paper.

"An afternoon in the fresh air will clear my head and enable me to deal with your problems far more efficiently tomorrow." he would say.

And he was right. He was also nearly 60 and admitted that until he was 55 he too had equated hard work with long hours. The he realised, in fact, they had very little to do with each other at all.

Let's hope more of us can realise that just a bit sooner. Especially bosses.

FISHMONGERS have just about gone, as have thousands of corner shops. Butchers and bakers are going, chemists and dry cleaners could be next. Like a science fiction monster that sucks the life out of its victims, supermarkets have long been emptying the high streets, leaving them to charity shops and estate agents.

And card shops.

Can anyone explain why, when so many other shops are going, we send so many cards and need so many shops to buy them from? After all, supermarkets sell those too. It is something that always strikes me in Bishop Auckland. It might be my imagination, but they seem to have more than most there, though Darlington has plenty too.

OK, people are living longer, having more birthdays, getting married more often too. But that can't explain it - and cards are so expensive.

It's a mystery. But there's probably a deep sociological reason - and some university department probably has a grant to study it already.

THERE are measles outbreaks popping up in different parts of the country. Whatever the rights and wrongs of it, many parents have doubts about the MMR vaccine. The time has surely come for thorough research into the effects of the triple jab.

And if Tony Blair already knows more about it than the rest of us, perhaps now he could tell us what decision he has made and why - or will he wait until measles has done some child permanent damage?

NEARLY six million people cast their votes to see Gareth Gates and Will Young through to the final of Pop Idol. More young people voted in Pop Idol than in the last General Election.

Meanwhile, politicians and broadcasters are trying to make politics more interesting and appealing.

Time perhaps for Tony Blair to re-form Ugly Rumours - the band of his long-haired student days. But where does that leave Ian Duncan Smith?

INTRIGUED by the one hundred words, one for each year since 1902, chosen to represent the times by Collins Gem Dictionary to celebrate its centenary.

Its 1951 word is Discotheque, which I thought didn't exist until at least ten years later.

And if discos were invented in 1951 but rock'n'roll didn't make its appearance until 1953, then what discos did those early disco dancers dance to? Surely not Victor Sylvester!

Published: 06/02/02