Sunday remains a day that inspires laziness. It must be genetic; either that or cultural. Or social. Definitely one of those big concepty things. Sunday laziness has nothing to do with me enjoying sitting on my arse watching Indiana Jones and Cooking in the Danger Zone; it is an unavoidable natural human trait evolved for survival on the savannah. Tens, perhaps even hundreds, of thousands of years ago when our primate biped ancestors first wandered the plains of Africa and began the long quest to populate the planet, they took it easy on Sunday and didn’t bother writing their blogs until early on Monday morning. It’s just the way it is, was and always will be.
After a successful week-long hunt when the antelope has been brought down, butchered, and brought back to the nest to feed the tribe, the decent right-thinking men and women of the early human species would settle down to watch events in the life of a fictional detective played out before them on freeview channel Quest. They ate their antelope with Yorkshire pudding and gravy. Nice thick gravy; not that watery rubbish that modern man sometimes dabbles with. And it’s under those kinds of conditions that we evolved to face the challenges of a 24 hour day and a seven day week.
The habit has been settled into for generation after untold generation, week in week out, bringing us squarely to today with me laying back on the sofa, brain dribbling out of my nose, slack-jawed gawping at the screen, eyes taking in pictures and sounds that I can barely comprehend, not knowing why I waste time so but feeling it on some guttural or primal level. No, caveman was not the archetypal alpha male, hunting, fighting, brutish sexual predator you have been lead to believe. He was, on Sundays at least, a fey, wet, wastrel, with the heart of a poet, the mind of a philosopher, and the get up and go of a dead dog.
Even by trying to complete this blog I am battling against nature; overcoming the brutal desire to just, you know, sort of not bother. But to overcome certain primal traits is the privilege and duty of that single species (as far as we know) in possession of a higher brain capable of reasoned and enlightened thought. This laziness is a misfiring of some evolved habit that was useful in caveman life (perhaps laziness was a sign of wealth and prosperity and was therefore evolved by sexual selection), but which now must be overcome. Like a moth, that navigates using the parallel rays of light from the stars at optical infinity, this works fine until it encounters a lightbulb or worse, a candle. The moth that could overcome its assumption that light rays are always parallel, adapting its navigation techniques under presence of artificial light, would never be stuck inside a lamp shade, or indeed wasting its time in any other way on a Sunday afternoon.
Dear me, what a load of old bollocks that all was.
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