Cash idle into survey taking time turn

Pleasure is such hard work

We are spending a fortune on leisure, yet have less and less time to enjoy ourselves.

Which of the following statements is true? 1) "We spend more on leisure than ever -- taking more holidays and going out to restaurants, cinemas and the theatre." 2) "We have less leisure and work longer hours than ever and have no time to enjoy the fruits of our labour."

For Mr or Ms Average in the UK, the answer, strangely, is both. The recent family spending survey revealed that leisure goods and services now take the lion's share of the household budget. The average family spends [pound]62 a week on leisure, against [pound]60 on food, [pound]57 on housing, and [pound]52 on cars. We are, it would seem, approaching Utopia.

Yet we also work the longest hours in Europe: around three and a half hours a week more than the EU average of 40.5. And the higher paid the earner, the longer the hours: the top 20 per cent of earners work more than 50 hours a week, according to a British Household Panel survey.

We spend more on leisure. Yet we have less of it. The apparent contradiction arises from a revealing ambiguity in the word "leisure".

The leisured classes used to be men and women of private means who woke each morning with few or no demands on their time. Today, leisure is almost exclusively something that is purchased -- the massage in the lunch hour, the drinks after work, the health club membership, the trip to the theatre. Leisure has become something that over-worked managers and professionals with spare cash but very little spare time buy to make themselves feel better.

The traditional notion of leisure -- a blessed few hours where the clock stops ticking and work is left behind -- is no longer seen as desirable. Having time on your hands has come to denote unenviable and impoverished unemployment. But this cannot be the only reason; the unemployed existed in even greater number alongside PG Wodehouse's purposeless country-house set. More important, perhaps, is that status now derives, not from the money that permits an idle lifestyle, but from work itself. To be idle now is to be not in demand and therefore probably poor. Being busy has cachet.

The notion of work has also changed. Once a boring necessity that interfered with home life and home-based social life -- and something that should occupy as few hours as possible -- work has become for many a place of friendships and life support, the only place, indeed, where they can have such relationships.

A requirement to work long hours is therefore not drudgery but proof that one is needed and valued. The insecure must also work longer, to prove that they, too, are needed, creating a vicious circle whereby nobody dares to go home and test the hypothesis that their bosses could manage perfectly well without these 12-hour days.

While we treat work as a social event, we treat leisure as a series of tasks to be completed: the morning swim, the working lunch, the networking with colleagues after work in the wine bar. There is nothing leisurely about any of these activities. They are a continuation of the office ethic -- as parents realise when they sacrifice time with their families to participate in "leisure" that may be important to their careers. The boundaries between work and leisure have blurred.

"Work", said one economist in the 1930s, "is something you can pay someone else to do for you. Leisure is not." So you can pay someone to clean your house, but not to eat a meal or see a film for you. Apply that to modern attitudes and it no longer seems such a clever distinction. You can employ someone to cook your meals. But watching Nigella Lawson or Jamie Oliver on television, buying the book and cooking a special meal, is, for many, leisure -- particularly since the daily chore of providing meals has been made easier by ready-prepared food.

On the other hand, you can't pay someone to meet a contact after work or to exercise for 20 minutes on the rowing machine that keeps you in the shape your company would prefer its lean, mean executives to be.

The modern leisure boom, then, is not leisure at all: it is an attempt by those who work the longest hours in Europe to compensate themselves for their lack of leisure. Further, we pay for things that used to be cheap or free. Britain's city centres are packed with gyms that charge up to [pound]75 a month and may be used only once a week for a swim, or a run on the treadmill. A mile or so away there are probably old municipal swimming pools, desperately in need of refurbishment, which used to cost less than [pound]1 a swim. Further out of town may be parks with free running tracks or even open countryside for walking. But these activities take time, so the boom in quick-fix city-centre clubs continues.

Jonathan Gershuny of the Institute for Social and Economic Research at Essex University, whose Changing Times was published by Oxford University Press last month, believes we can turn this increased leisure spending by the rich into a variant of Keynesian social policy. In the 1930s, he argues, we redistributed income to the poor who, it was expected, would spend it in a way that would generate new jobs. "Now we have the opportunity to do something much easier: redistribute not money, but free time to the relatively rich, which they can combine with their incomes so as to consume sophisticated services," Gershuny said in a lecture last year. "More free time means more demand for restaurants, more cinemas, more theatres and galleries and sports facilities -- and, hence, more jobs."

The explosion of clubs and bars in British cities appears to vindicate Gershuny's argument. But this circle is not completely virtuous; the main leisure consumers still don't truly enjoy their leisure. They have become time-slaves, who give up games -- playing football or tennis with friends -- for sterile indoor gyms, and miss family celebrations for business lunches and after-work drinks with colleagues.

Mr and Ms Average Executive are certainly healthier and wealthier than their great-grandparents. They will live longer and earn enough money to buy comfortable lifestyles, cultural experiences and exotic (but not too long) holidays. They may even generate new jobs in the leisure industry and thus contribute to a wealthier society. But the price they pay is that they must work harder and harder and forfeit genuine leisure.

Maybe, post-Thatcher, we can identify free time only with boredom or poverty. Or perhaps we simply don't see the true time-cost of our increased wealth and need new kinds of official work indices to show us our real work/leisure balance. These would have to include the increasing time we spend travelling to work, doing unpaid work (childcare, shopping, cooking, housework, all of which place a particularly heavy burden on women), maintenance of self and clothes and work-related socialising. The dual-income professional couple might then begin to ask each other what advantages they have over their great-grandparents, a farmworker and wife with eight children, let's say.

Today's couple may be able to fit in a film or a Pilates class, take a short winter skiing break, eat out occasionally and even read to the children now and then. And they may be much happier in their work. But do they have time to sit in the garden, or learn a new song, or carve a piece of wood, or just do nothing?