A pissing while

A few years ago I watched a documentary by Terry Jones, of Monty Python fame. He was looking at how lives were actually led in medieval England and recalled research that they'd done for the film "Monty Python and the Holy Grail". As well as avoiding the cliche of showing peasants with blackened teeth, which in the days before the widespread use of refined sugar simply wasn't the case, he also looked at our changed relationship to time. In the pre-industrial era jobs simply had to be done when they had to be done. Fields ploughed, weeds weeded, cows milked, sheep sheared and crops harvested. The rhythms of life were simply set by the daily movement of the sun across the sky and the annual progression from one season to another. This meant that for good chunks of the year there wasn't actually that much that needed to be done and there were far more "holy days" then than there are now; including the ad hoc St Swithin's Mondays that would follow overindulgent weekends. Whilst the days, months and years were natural units of time for longer intervals there were also ways of talking about shorter periods such as "a pissing while", which I hope is self explanatory.

The demands of industry and, in particular, of industrial machinery put paid to this lacadaisical attitude. The machines demanded that the people who'd operate them turn up on time. The bells that had previously rung to draw people to prayer now turned into the factory hooters that marked the changing of shifts. It's no accident that the working class version of rugby football, Rugby League, still uses a hooter to mark the end of a match and also no accident that the traditional gift on retirement was a clock; the worker was being given his time back.

Much more recently my attention was drawn to a kettle that can be switched on over the internet. Predictably named the i-kettle, its inventor makes extravagant claims about the amount of extra work that could be done by remaining at work just that few minutes longer. Given that the times when I feel like a cup of tea are precisely those when I need to get away from my desk for a moment and that we're I to switch on the kettle remotely I'd doubtless find myself dragged back into whatever it was I was doing  for just about long enough for the kettle to boil and then cool down again, I shan't be ordering one soon. Indeed, there are good health and social reasons to suppose that the overworked mouse jockey, click worker, whatever, might well be better of getting up and moving around for a bit and maybe even thinking a bit about what it was they were doing.

However, it did remind me of what I actually do during "a kettle boiling while". In the morning I put on the kettle and then go to the bathroom; one of the benefits of a diet rich in fibre being predictable bowel movements. At other times I use it either to get some washing up done, clean up the dogs bowl, or even practice a few scales on the piano. It never feels like wasted time, more an opportunity to think and get some domestic shit out of the way.

A "kettle boiling while" is inevitably followed by a "tea brewing while" where I might sit down and read an article from one of the many bits of print that hang around the kitchen table or wander up the garden with some scraps for the hens. You get the idea.

It's an empirical observation that most animals, small or large, tend to take about the same amount of time to empty their bladders. Recent mathematical modelling has shown that larger bladders are compensated for by larger urethras and, in the case of some larger animals such as elephants, by a bit of extra gravitational assistance. So we now know what a pissing while  is; 21 seconds. 

Unless, of course, you're like me and in the prostate club in which case there always seems to be just a little bit more and you're never quite sure when you've finished.