I've been on a sabbatical for the past few weeks. I just looked up "sabbatical" in an online encyclopedia.
It's a "prolonged hiatus . . . taken in order to fulfil some goal, eg writing a book or travelling extensively for research". Writing a book, a children's book, is what I am supposed to be doing now. Not eating my weight in blueberry yogurt or waiting for Deal or No Deal to start on Channel 4. Ahem.
I prefer the biblical definition to the Wikipedia one. The very useful Catholic Encyclopedia describes a sabbatical as a periodic "year of rest" for agricultural land, according to the books of Leviticus and Exodus. "The seventh year thou shalt let it alone, and suffer it to rest, that the poor of thy people may eat, and whatsoever shall be left, let the beasts of the field eat it: so shalt thou do with thy vineyard and thy oliveyard." (Exodus 23:11).
So it was about reminding people that the land really belonged to the Lord and that they were only tenants at his mercy. "In the seventh year thou shalt doss" about sums it up.
Because no crops were being reaped, paying your debts was virtually impossible, so the creditor was requested to "withhold his hand" for the year, which sounds like a practice worth re-establishing. Are you listening,
Mr AIB and Ms Bank of Scotland? No? I didn't think so.
Anyway, it turns out that being on a six-week sabbatical is not conducive to fulfilling a goal unless that goal happens to be doing millions of activities other than the one you are supposed to be doing. It's being on sabbatical that drives one to do things such as look up "sabbatical" in an online encyclopedia. It's being on sabbatical that leads one to become addicted to a TV programme called Flog It!
Flog It! is Antiques Roadshow's less sophisticated cousin. People all over Britain bring along their toby jugs, Royal Worcester pottery and ancient teddy bears and get an expert to estimate how much they're worth. More often than not they say between £40 and £60 - €60 and €90 - which might not seem much to you, but the participants go on as if they've won the pools when their teddy or toby is sold.
Flog It! is also responsible for my new obsession with Clarice Cliff pottery. Every second item on the show seems to be a Clarice Cliff number, all crazy colours and vibrant designs.
Walking along Portobello Road in London recently, I got all excited by a serving dish with green stripes that the cockney vendor insisted was "a nice bit of Clarice Cliff". I wasn't convinced, knowing from Flog It! that a real piece would have Cliff's lovely sweeping signature on its underside.
It wasn't to be seen, so I bought a couple of very old Ladybird books instead. Just the thing to bring along if the folk from Flog It! ever decide to do a programme in Ireland.
I had lots of other plans for this sabbatical, too. Plan number one: I was going to join the National Library of Ireland and make its beautiful building my base. But somehow I have a different base every day, anywhere from a bookshop, which sounds appropriate, to a pub, which doesn't. My sabbatical style can only be described as nomadic, and not in a good way.
Plan number two: I was going to meet people for lunches that lasted only an hour, because, as I would tell them as I rushed back to the library, "a sabbatical isn't a holiday, you know". But I am being invited to lunches that seem to last four hours. When I'm asked if I want another glass of wine, I hear myself declaring: "Why not? I'm on my holliers."
Plan number three: I was going to spend a week in a rural writers' retreat, to escape the distractions of urban living. But I'm toying with the idea that visiting friends in Berlin and New York would be much more beneficial to my writing a book for children. Much.
I bumped into a couple of former senior Irish Times staff the other day. They assured me that in their time a sabbatical was indeed a year-long hiatus, just like the Bible says. I can't help concluding that its dramatic shrinking is yet another example of the damage being done by the secularisation of Irish society.
And I'd love to discuss this issue further, but I have much more important things not to do.