I had been reading about artificial intelligence (AI), and the effects it will have on entry-level employment roles. I was formulating thoughts to spin into a column – something about how AI might liberate our creative capacities by hoovering up remedial grunt work. That might be true. But then after a weekend at Glastonbury festival, and in the languid heat of early July I realised, however true it might be, that it was boring. And my mind drifted elsewhere, onto more urgent matters.
Noble Rot, the quarterly magazine of a restaurant group that goes by the same name, published a special feature on lunch this week. In it, seasoned long-lunchers make the case for the pursuit, and they vaunt the romance of a meal with friends or colleagues that starts at 1pm and slowly, soporifically eases into the evening, aided by wine (as expensive as you can afford, they conclude), and unconcerned about looming professional commitments.
Oisín Rogers – progenitor of the best Guinness in London, landlord of the Devonshire – contributes: “Get up early, do your work diligently and then go for lunch. That is the end of the working day.” Meanwhile Gary Lineker chimes in: “Conversation is always better at lunch”. And Jess Corrigan, the daughter of celebrated Irish chef Richard Corrigan writes: “A proper lunch is still an adventure.” TV producer Kenton Allen rightfully declared it “the most sacred meal”. I like these people. I think they get it.
[ The best new restaurants and cafes to open in Ireland in the past yearOpens in new window ]
The breakfast meeting vs the long lunch is a helpful binary for understanding people and institutions. In the former camp you have the buttoned up, reliable, literal-minded types. They are grounded and levelheaded. Among their ranks you will find the hard-nosed political and diplomatic historians; Keir Starmer, a man with no favourite novel or poem; the Irish Government, in all its professional but undynamic ways; civil servants the world across; the military strategist; and primary school principals. Society needs these people to get from A to B.
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But in the other camp you will find the louche Mediterraneans, Catholics, the disorganised and haphazard, the bourgeois bohemians, the passionate campaigners and the hopeless romantics. Think publishing execs and literary agents; Boris Johnson; the French; the generation of journalists older than mine; the trade unionists; artists, writers, painters; hedge-funders too (they can, in the least, afford this expensive pastime). Society needs these people too: to generate ideas, to hold interesting conversations, to remind us that life is to be enjoyed not suffered through (and all that sentimental dreck).
Direct thinking over spreadsheets and emails and video calls is the necessary scaffolding of the workplace. But when it comes to problem-solving, it can only go so far
Social historians get a lot of flak for operating on the soft end of the discipline: they study feelings and emotions, fashions and faith, eating habits and climate. These are things traditional historians dismiss as unrevealing and wooly. But the Annales school – founded in 1929 by Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre in Strasbourg – had it right when it argued that all of these things were as important to understanding the past as the linear stories of politics and diplomacy. In their eyes, everything was worthy of historical investigation, nothing was off-limits.
In other words, the Annales are long-lunchers (and would, coincidentally, take Noble Rot’s study of lunch as a valuable historical text). And they understood the central importance of variety, discursion, and breadth of inquiry to their discipline.
[ Paul Flynn: three perfect dishes for a long family lunchOpens in new window ]
Most crucially, what we can learn from the Annales’ arrival into the field of historiography is that it takes more than one, narrow understanding of history to access truth. And so we come back to the hard-nosed political historians who dominated the subject for centuries – breakfast meeting types, and the Annales, who disrupted the scene with wacky notions about clothes and food and the weather and changed the course of historical inquiry – long lunch types. To understand the past, and to run a country today, we need both.
Because direct thinking over spreadsheets and emails and video calls is the necessary scaffolding of the workplace. But when it comes to problem-solving, it can only go so far. Ireland – creative and dynamic some of its industries are – is a country broadly stuck and shackled by linear thinking; this is precisely the same problem Starmer faces with his literal legal mind and fear of deviation from the script.
And so, in the summer heat – when your colleagues are away – take Rogers’s advice and sneak out of the office at 1pm and put your email settings to “busy”. There are serious reasons to do this: Irish tourism is down and the restaurant industry desperately needs our help, the country is blessed with good produce and better chefs, their staff need our money and sure, it’ll be good for the economy.
But there are woollier, Annales-style reasons to do this too: variation is critical for inquiring minds; conversation is a better way to get to interesting ideas than solipsistic laptop time; it is hot and languid and white wine can help with that; lunch is a sacred meal – and it might just help you get unstuck.
