CHAPTER 5

Being Rather than Doing

From the time we’re born until we die, we’re kept busy with artificial stuff that isn’t important.

—Tom Ford

A few years ago, I had the pleasure of visiting a school friend in Belgium for her birthday. On the Saturday night, we went to a thirty-plus party to celebrate. Basically, a thirty-plus party is like the parties we went to when we were at school; beer in plastic glasses, a DJ with one of those rigs with ‘disco lights’ on it, and music from the late 1980s and 1990s. Having hung up our coats on the coat rack (there was no cloakroom attendant), we spent the next three hours dancing as if we were eighteen years old again, finally leaving around two-thirty in the morning. It was only later that morning that ...

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