Work - a four letter word?

click photo to enlarge

"Nothing is really work unless you would rather be doing something else."
J. M. Barrie (1860-1937), Scottish author and dramatist best known for "Peter Pan"

There are many who would agree with the implied definition of work that lies at the heart of Barrie's quotation. For many - probably most - work is a four letter word, a daily grind that is necessary for the income that it produces rather than the accomplishments that it entails. I've heard it argued that capitalism provided the wherewithal for a life that satisfies the bodily needs of the greatest number, but did so at the expense of increasing the amount of stultifying work. And yet, hasn't much work always been physically and mentally wearisome, at least since the time mankind started cultivation and a range of personal tasks became the role of specialised workers; jobs they did to the exclusion of all else in exchange for bartered goods or money?

What I found interesting during my experience of a variety of employment is the way that people find in their work rewards beyond money that make it more pleasurable. Factors such as friendship and camaraderie are not often the intentional product of an unfulfilling job, but frequently they make it more bearable. Those of us who have experienced employment that is generally fulfilling, and is seen by people as socially useful, have been fortunate. However, even this work has its downside as management techniques, systems, and the like impinge negatively on the core activity. It was certainly the case in my line of work that the higher I got within the system the more this happened. It was frequently the companionship of co-workers that kept me grounded at these times.

The other evening I cycled past a combine harvester working over a field of wheat. The sight of the driver in his noisy, air-conditioned isolation, only feet away from the tractor driver, similarly alone, caused me to reflect for a moment on the lot of the Fenland farmer. In the past, when agriculture was more labour intensive, human companionship (or even animal companionship) was common. Today many large Fenland farms are entirely managed by a single person with help hired, or else sought from friends and family, when needed. For much of the year man and machine do the necessary ploughing, sowing and tending of crops alone. Even the buying, selling and other routine exchanges often no longer involve face-to-face discussion but is conducted from the fields by phone. This increasing solitude is the experience of more work these days, from call-centre staff in their booths, hundreds in close proximity, individually spending most of their time alone, to home-workers at their computers and smartphones, communicating without speaking a word.

I stopped  my bicycle and got my camera out to take this shot. Immediately that was done I packed it into its case and put it in my pannier, sealing them tight as a cloud of wind-blown dust and chaff enveloped me.

photograph and text © Tony Boughen

Camera: Canon
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 73mm
F No: f8
Shutter Speed: 1/250 sec
ISO: 100
Exposure Compensation:  -1.0 EV
Image Stabilisation: On

Harvest done, swifts gone

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Towards the end of my third summer living on Lincolnshire's Fens may be a little early in terms of formulating theories about the region, but one did occur to me yesterday.

I've been watching the cereal harvest come to its end. Over the past few weeks wheat and barley fields have been falling to the combine harvesters, and already quite a few have been turned by the plough. Here and there the odd field is still being cut, but with less urgency than earlier, giving the tractor drivers who haul away the grain the chance to get out of their cabs and have a chat, as in my photograph above. The summers of 2007 and 2008 were much wetter than this year, and the harvest continued well into September, with machines kept off the sodden ground until it had dried. Cereals were left standing to enable them to get as dry as possible, and when they were harvested the grain sheds thundered to the sound of the electric dryers.

However, this year Eastern England has experienced much more typical weather with light but regular rainfall and fine weather. As the harvest winds down at the end of August I've been watching the skies trying to note when I see the last of the swifts (Apus apus). This interesting, fast-flying bird arrives in the UK in May and leaves at the end of August. It is a species that spends almost all its life on the wing, even eating and sleeping as it flies. Its stay in our country is long enough to raise a brood in its nest under eaves and in church towers, the only time it spends on terra firma. So what is my theory, you may be wondering? Well, perhaps it's the case that, in this part of the world, in a typical year, the end of the harvest and the departure of the swifts coincide. Not an earth shattering theory, I'll grant you, but one that I'll test each year. Incidentally, after two "swift-free" days I saw a lone bird yesterday when I took this photograph.

Note 1: The church on the extreme left of the horizon is St Mary, Swineshead, that features in yesterday's post.
Note 2: Today the wheat field opposite my house was cut and I saw one swift.

photograph & text (c) T. Boughen

Camera: Olympus E510
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 40mm (80mm/35mm equiv.)
F No: f6.3
Shutter Speed: 1/500
ISO: 100
Exposure Compensation: -0.3 EV
Image Stabilisation: On

Above us only sky

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From the mid -eighteenth century, through painters like Richard Wilson (1713 - 1782), Thomas Gains- borough (1727 - 1788) and Alexander Cozens (1717 - 1786), English landscape painting found its feet. Yet, their art still shows that century's belief in man's superiority over nature, and the idea that it can and must be "improved". It was the group of artists who followed them - Thomas Girtin (1775-1802), John Crome (1768-1821), John Sell Cotman (1782-1842), J.M.W. Turner (1775-1851) and, pre-eminently, John Constable (1776-1837), who cast aside this mindset in pursuit of the natural world as they found it, and created "a prodigious flowering of landscape painting in England, unparalleled in any one country on the Continent."

Drawing his inspiration from Titian backgrounds, the work of Rubens and Dutch landscape painters, as well as the English artists of that earlier generation, Constable painted scenes from around his home in Suffolk. Cottages, barns, trees, ruins, waggons and horses - all were worthy subjects in his view. However, his interpretations were mediated by an English sensibility and depend for their power on his rendering of the changing English sky. Constable called the sky "the keynote" of a landscape painting. He gave much of his energy to capturing the fleeting beauty of clouds and light at different times of day and different seasons. The lessons he learned from his cloud studies were transferred into his major paintings. Constable's skies are suffused with the variations that come from weather that originates over the Atlantic, is moderated by passing above our small island, and is further changed by never being far from the influence of the sea. These qualities can be seen in paintings such as Weymouth Bay (1816), Brighton Beach with Colliers (1824), Hadleigh Castle (1829), The Valley Farm (1835), or Norham Castle (1835-40).

Today some people appreciate Constable's work for its depiction of an idyllic, English countryside that has either disappeared or changed, except for in a few corners of our land. But, whilst Constable was not insensitive to the beauty of the English landscape of his time, he simply painted what he saw. In 1820 it was a haywain by a farm and stream: if he had been painting today I'd like to think it would have been a bright red combine harvester passing over a field of ripe, yellow wheat! And, whilst Constable would not have recognised this piece of modern farm machinery, he most certainly would recognise and celebrate the wonderful clouds drifting over these flat, Lincolnshire Fenland fields.

photograph & text (c) T. Boughen

Camera: Olympus E510
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 40mm (80mm/35mm equiv.)
F No: f7.1
Shutter Speed: 1/1600
Exposure Compensation: -0.3 EV
Image Stabilisation: On

The staff of life

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Britain's farming population is in long-term decline. In 1996 there were 616,000 people employed in agriculture. By 2007 this had gone down to 526,000, the result of increasing mechanization, the amalgamation of farms into ever larger units, and the declining profitability of the sector. Over the same period the age profile of those employed in agriculture increased.

Changes in wheat farming are fairly typical of the sector as a whole. Over the same period the area devoted to cultivation declined from 1976,000 hectares to 1816,000 hectares, and the volume produced also went down.The income generated by milling wheat and feed wheat slumped, and the amount of wheat produced as a percentage of UK use fell from 125% to 106%. There was, and is, money to be made by producing wheat, but of the 60,000 cereal farmers in the UK it is principally the large landowners and corporate bodies who can benefit from larger subsidies who are making it. The smaller, independent farmers have seen incomes fall drastically, then rally slightly recently. A consequence of this is that a significant number of cereal farms, with hundreds of acres under cultivation, are now worked by the farmer alone, assisted by no permanently employed farm hands. Family members, friends, and occasionally some bought-in contract hours, are the only additional help. It's true to say that the main ingredient of the "staff of life" is grown and harvested with virtually no staff at all! Not surprisingly, since as much of the work as possible is mechanized, the land (and landscape) where these crops are grown is tailored to be managed by farm machinery.

I gleaned this information some time ago from the Statistics pages of UK Agriculture, and from Corporate Watch, and it came to mind as I was looking at this photograph of a combine harvester. I took it a while ago on the Yorkshire Wolds near Weaverthorpe. The solitary driver, alone in his cab in the large, regimented, rolling fields of this cereal growing upland area, seemed to encapsulate the predicament of today's wheat farmer in Britain.

photograph & text (c) T. Boughen

Camera: Olympus E500
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 134mm (268mm/35mm equiv.)
F No: f6.3
Shutter Speed: 1/160
ISO: 100
Exposure Compensation: -0.3 EV
Image Stabilisation: N/A