As you read this, there will probably be a cup of tea going cold on Veronica Pullen’s kitchen counter. Every time she wants a cup, Pullen makes two, one milkier than the other. She drinks the milkier one (she likes her tea lukewarm) immediately. She lets the other one sit for 40 minutes before drinking it once it has reached optimum temperature. It is an efficiency – albeit a tiny one – that she has been perfecting for two years. A copywriter and online trainer, Pullen, who is 54 and lives on the Isle of Wight with her husband and their chihuahua, says it takes her five minutes to boil a kettle, so she saves five minutes with every other cup. Over 24 hours, that adds up to 20 minutes saved. Across two years? She has clawed back slightly more than 10 full days.
Pullen is just one of many people incorporating microefficiencies into their daily lives. There are people who brush their teeth in the shower; lay out their clothes the night before to save time in the morning; boil hot water for the day first thing and keep it to hand in a flask. But are these small, savvy streamlinings that shave minutes (sometimes, just seconds) off a task merely fun life hacks? Are they a symptom of a snowed-under society? Or are they indicative of an obsession with productivity?
Fear is rarely rational or proportionate. Occasionally we fear genuinely dangerous things (guns, say), sometimes we have entirely irrational fears (balloonsor dead birds) and other times our fears may be part of our evolutionary inheritance.
I saw my grandmother across the street when I was in line for a free ticket to a fancy talk by Annie Ernaux. I had never heard of Annie Ernaux before this afternoon, but I did always relish the exhilaration of standing in a queue—perhaps even slightly more, depending on the weather, than I enjoyed seeing my dear grandmother.
While many historical fiction novels focus on the battlefield, Dear Miss Lake uses the war as a backdrop for a more lighthearted, compassionate story — not about soldiers on the front line, but about the civilians holding everything together at home.
If you consume too much true crime it starts to infect your routine. Let your dog off the leash in any lonely overgrown place and you’ll start to worry she’ll come bounding out of the undergrowth with a body part in tow. Maybe that’s my personal fear, but Joyce Carol Oates taps straight into it with the gripping, disgusting and darkly comic opening to her latest novel, Fox.