From Loose Afternoons to the Timetabled Week

Organised activity expanded into the space that unstructured time used to occupy, and brought its own logic.

As unstructured time contracted, something moved into the vacancy. Organised activity, scheduled, supervised and often skill directed, now occupies a substantial part of the week that once had no particular shape. The expansion is easy to understand and hard to fault in any individual case. Each activity is defensible on its own terms: it is enjoyable, it develops something, it is supervised, and it happens at a known time in a known place. The difficulty is not with any single item but with the aggregate, and aggregates are notoriously hard to see from inside, because no one ever chooses the aggregate.

Organised activity has a particular logic. It has a purpose, a beginning and an end, an adult who knows what is meant to happen, and usually a standard against which the participants can be measured. These are not defects. They are what makes it useful. But they are also the opposite of the conditions in loose time, which has no purpose, no scheduled end, no one who knows what is supposed to happen, and no standard at all. The two are not interchangeable. Filling the second kind of time with the first kind of activity is not a substitution, it is a replacement of one thing by a different thing.

What follows is not a complaint about organised activity, which is often the best part of a week. It is an observation that a week composed entirely of it would be missing a category, and that the missing category is difficult to notice precisely because it has no name, no venue and no advocate. Loose time does not appear on a calendar. It is not booked, not paid for and not reported on. It leaves no trace when it disappears, which is one reason it can disappear almost entirely before anyone remarks on the fact.