Bennett on employment

From Wikipedia

The employed section of society, at any rate the larger part of that section, is suffering, as regards its work, from one specific malady: payment by time instead of payment by results. I admit that payment by time is the logical result of events in the industrial life of the country during the last hundred years. I admit it can be explained, and to a certain extent justified. But it remains the curse of labour. It robs the energetic man of the incentive to use his energy. It reduces the real worker to the level of the shirker. It ministers to and encourages the worst characteristics in human nature. And it lessens the total volume of work done.


Further, because it is unnatural, it dulls the conscience and affects the nerves. A man who spends his days carefully and deliberately doing much less than he can do, must perforce get himself into a strange and dangerous state of mind. His unused energy must find some outlet, and it finds an outlet in searching for trouble. And note that it is the best men who are demoralised, not the worst. Payment by time amounts to a canker, which is another word for cancer. Though the operation may be highly dangerous to the body-politic, the cancer will have to be cut out before there can be any genuine improvement in the general state of society.
Arnold Bennett - The Savour of Life - published in 1928

Bad cow day

Recently received by email. 

Sometimes the day just get worse.

H/T Dave H

Empty bottle

This pottery flask sits on the desk where I write all this blog stuff. I bought it at a minor auction many years ago. As you can possibly see from the photo, it's pretty crude because it doesn't even sit straight on my desk. Either that of the desk is wonky. It dates from around 1400 to 1500 according to Henry Sandon (of Antiques Roadshow fame) although it isn't easy to tell with ancient and rather nondescript pottery like this. That of course would place its likely origins from somewhere near the end of Chaucer's life to the early Tudor period.

It has a pale body with a kind of muddy, greenish, uneven glaze on the top half only. Incised grooves are the only other decoration. It would have been used to carry some kind of liquid of course, possibly oil or maybe perfume or even liquor. Nothing more than an empty bottle in fact.

How much is it worth? Not much - £50 I think Henry said, but even that seems high to me. Although rare, this kind of pottery isn't decorative and lacks collector appeal - apart from eccentrics like me I suppose. There is a very limited supply and a very limited demand.

I like it though and often wonder where it has been during its long life. It has a very faint, musty smell mingled with some kind of flowery odour, but it can't possibly be a fifteenth century fragrance. Maybe it originally contained a sure-fire anti-plague remedy or pox medicine.

You don't really feel as if you own objects like this, you just look after them for a while before they pass on to someone else.

Simple explanation

Grandson recently asked me "what's an electric car?"

"It has a battery," I replied, "like a toy."

"Oh," grandson replied, quite satisfied with my explanation.

Watering cans and cunning plans

Bought grandson a little plastic watering-can a few days ago. To my surprise I noticed it was made in Italy rather than China. Must be the latest wheeze to get the Euro back on track. Trust those EU wizards to come up with a cunning plan.

Ruskin lets off steam

Monsal Dale in Derbyshire which I know well, is crossed by the Headstone Viaduct. Built in 1863 by the Midland Railway, many people now see it as an elegant addition to the valley, but it was not always so.  John Ruskin from his Coniston lakeside idyll, decided that he did not approve.

There was a rocky valley between Buxton and Bakewell, once upon a time divine as the Vale of Tempe; you might have seen the Gods there morning and evening - Apollo and all the sweet Muses of the light - walking in fair procession on the lawns of it, and to and fro among the pinnacles of its crags. You cared neither for Gods nor grass, but for cash (which you did not know the way to get): you thought you could get it by what the Times calls 'Railroad Enterprise.' You enterprised a railroad through the valley - you blasted its rocks away, heaped thousands of tons of shale into its lovely stream. The valley is gone and the Gods with it, and now every fool in Buxton can be at Bakewell in half an hour end every fool in Bakewell at Buxton; which you think a lucrative process of exchange - you Fools everywhere.

Exotic Lancashire vamp

Balzac - from Wikipedia

No - it isn't the person in the above picture - that's Balzac and he wasn't at all exotic. 


In his novel Le Lys dans la Vallée (The Lily of the Valley), Honoré de Balzac creates a character called Lady Arabella Dudley. Lady Arabella is a beautiful, fiery aristocratic seductress with designs on the novel's hero. What more exotic origins could Balzac have given her than a Lancashire birthplace?

"I was born in Lancashire, a country where women die for love. Know you, and give you up? I will yield you to none, not even to Death, for I should die with you."


Le Lys dans la Vallée is part of La Comédie humaine, his vast collection of interlinked novels.