Page 128 - Cultural Change and Ordinary Life

10 Conclusions

In the late spring of 2006, I spent parts of four consecutive Saturdays in the
following ways: On the first, I went with my wife and our two sons (aged 19 and
12) to see the American singer and guitarist Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy perform with
the Edinburgh-based Scottish/Irish ‘traditional’ band Harem Scarem. This
happened during the course of a short break in the north of Scotland where we
stayed with my parents and visited members of my wife’s family and other
family members of mine who live nearby. During the visit we did a range of
other things, including shopping for food, books and CDs and walking on the
beach. The next weekend we celebrated my birthday by going away for the
weekend with our closest friends. The weekend in Helsinki included eating out,
visiting a contemporary art museum, hearing a salsa band in a jazz club and
exploring parts of the city by simply wandering around. The next Saturday
evening we attended the birthday party of a friend who lives close by. This took
place in a local village hall and involved dancing to music provided by bands
involving the friend and her husband. The first part was ‘traditional’ folk music
and the second a 60s’ covers band. On the final Saturday we took part in a safari
supper organized by neighbours, which involved local friends eating different
courses of a meal in different houses and walking around between.
This short account obviously leaves a lot out, such as a number of the
more mundane things that I did in between. It thus perhaps makes my life
sound rather more exciting and active than it actually is. In between these
Saturday events, for instance, I listened to lots of music, read books, devoted
much time to television (still the leisure activity that takes up most of our
time), went to work, did provision shopping and so on. In addition, many
times I spend my Saturday evening cooking and watching programmes like
Doctor Who, Strictly Come Dancing, The X Factor, Match of Day and The West
Wing on television. However, the activities on the four consecutive Saturdays
of my ordinary life mean rather a lot to me and therefore involve a number of
investments in my diffused identity that are important and in that sense
extraordinary. Let me just pick out some aspects relative to some of the themes
that I have deployed and explored during the course of the book.
First, these Saturdays involved a number of occasions when I was a
member of a ‘simple’ audience such as at the Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy concert,