For those of us who are lucky enough to live their adult lives through the straightjacket of a regular full-time office job, it becomes apparent quite quickly that the one commodity you can’t buy (or at least, not on the money I make) is time. Time flashes past in a blur of commuting, laundry, gym sessions, work, desperate socializing, unspecified “admin” and more laundry. As I sit here at 4pm on a weekday afternoon, I wonder what I have done with my day. Why there wasn’t more time? Where did it all go?
My relationship with time hasn’t always been thus.
When I was at university, time never felt like a particularly scarce commodity. This is probably because I was one of those irritatingly diligent characters who lived to a strict, pre-planned, and often colour coded, schedule. I assumed, as one might if you stuck to a plan for a long enough period of time and completed all your coursework embarrassingly far ahead of the deadlines, that all this panicking over looming exams and essay due dates was just an excuse for the lazy. Study earlier! I thought. Make a schedule – you’ve got the time! I see now that karma is a total bitch.
On reflection, I also see that life has slowly sped up as I have grown older. As an adult, time gallops past as if a racehorse at full pelt. At university, it trotted slowly enough for me to saddle it, grasp it, colour code it and ride it gently along. As a child in suburban English nothingness, when days seem endless, time seemingly just laid down at the side of the road and took a nap in the shade while I waited for it down the road.
The one thing I found I could do usefully with my time at that point was to turn it into something that felt more useful; money. In those heady days, using time to earn money was a no brainer. I had loads of time and it was usually boring, but I could use some of that time to be bored at someone else’s expense and turn that boredom into hard cash.
On reflection, this was the Adam and Eve-like moment of original sin, when I tasted the first sweet bite of the apple of wage slavery, but at the time I really didn’t see it that way. This naiveite led to a succession of often-sh*t, occasionally amusing and generally survivable part time jobs.
There was the delicatessen, my first outing into the corporate world, where I was paid cash in hand by a man who had no problem employing literal children to run his shop, and where I supplemented my pitiable hourly rate by using the deli counter as my snack bar mid-shift.
There was also a stint waiting on hospitality suites at horseracing courses, where I quickly realized that the punters would generally tip better if inebriated past the point of reason, and so made it my mission to keep every glass filled to the very top with sickly pink champagne for the duration of the day.
Some of my endevaours were, frankly, more workmanlike. The “summer of potwashing” for one catering company involved being sent to various dingy staff canteens around the area, where I would stand by an industrial size sink listening to the radio and washing-up pot after pot after pot of whatever slop was being served to the non-hourly wage employees for breakfast and lunch. It was dispiriting to wash the same pot multiple times in the shift as much as it was to realise that major commercial radio stations have a track list which is repeated in a slightly different order for each three-hour show.
Being on the lowest rung of a catering company’s books did lead to some surprises though. As I was mentally preparing myself for another morning of potwashing and Radio 1 at a new venue, the cheery receptionist ushered me into the kitchen and asked what I was having asking for my lunch. I replied that I wasn’t sure, but it depended what the chef was planning on serving. On being informed by the cheery receptionist that I was the chef for the day for myself and 100 of their employees, and being too young, shy and stupid not to immediately disabuse her of this notion, I found myself in somewhat of a pickle.
My cooking skills at that point were, shall we say, limited. I knew what good food tasted like, I just didn’t know how to make it. Especially not for 100 people on 3 hours’ notice. The usual menu of coq au vin and homemade quiche was about as far beyond my technical capabilities as could be imagined, despite my resumé proudly boasting a top grade in GCSE Food Technology.
There were, I’ll admit, some extremely anxious moments as I stood, alone apart from my washing up gloves and rubber apron I had brought from home, in a fully stocked kitchen with the clock ticking loudly down to lunchtime in the background.
I did, however, know how to make my own preferred lunchtime-staple of toasted sandwiches par excellence, so toasted sandwiches they got. Although I was not invited back to serve up microwaved jacket potatoes (the only other thing in my repertoire at the time), the staff were kind enough to eat their tuna and cheese toasties – until I ran out of tuna, at which point it was just cheese - without mentioning to my face the ugly truth of my total and utter incompetence.
It was experiences like these, and another at a pizza restaurant where I simultaneously waited tables and cooked lunch for Paul McCartney’s ex-wife while the restaurant manager and the actual chef had a heated row out the back, that instilled within me a huge respect for anyone who chooses to open and run any kind of catering establishment.
Take Garden, for example. Garden is a small upscale bar in my locale, big enough to seat 20 for drinks and small plates of food, but only ever staffed by a single owner-operator bartender. As well as mixing impeccable cocktails of your choice from freshly juiced fruit and hard liquor, the barteder also serves up small plates of delicious food and classic easy smalltalk, all seemingly effortlessly and without being constrained by anything so pesky as a lack of time or assistance. His ingenious trick to serving the food was, apparently, to have it pre-portioned and heated sous-vide at the time of order. My teenage colour-coding self could sense a kindred spirit, but my adult self still wondered if this man was phased by the four or five loads of laundry inevitably waiting for him at home.
In fairness, the owner-operator thing isn’t uncommon in Japan. We experienced a slightly chaotic version at dinner at Paseri (literally pronounced “Parsley”), a small basement Italian restaurant near Meguro station. Our estate agent was treating us to a meal by way of an apology for having sneakily miscalculated our rent to make it appear cheaper than it was, and promised us this place was as interesting as it was delicious.
Unlike the smooth-as-silk service at Garden, the man at Parseri was a whirling dervish of flailing limbs, sweat, chaos and just in time delivery. He made it work, but barely, and made me wonder if I should introduce him to sous-vide and colour coding. The food was acceptable, but the main drama was working out if he had remembered your order and if and how he was going to cook and deliver it whilst simultaneously clearing and serving the table of 8 to our left. It mainly just felt a bit stressful; like watching a high wire at the circus and just being relieved for the guy when it was all over. Perhaps, I thought to myself, he should have stuck to cheese toasties.
