Several years ago this column mentioned how it came about, that the late Professor Parkinson evolved his theory that ‘Work expands in proportion to time available for its completion.’ A few years later, experience and experiment proved him right and we now see that his law applies across all sectors and segments of society. It has become a law of life!
An early example of its operation was seen in the way in which household refuse was collected. A Round used to take all day, but when operators were told to finish when the task were completed, they were home by lunchtime and some took afternoon jobs.
Parkinson’s Law was soon tested on students, and groups were given ten hours and one hundred hours respectively to conduct the same research. The groups with 100 hours reported back but asked for more time. Amazingly however, the others completed the work on-time and to the total satisfaction of the tutors.
A more recent example of the law in operation is the Chilcot inquiry into the second gulf war. Like all public inquiries a lot depends on what its participants are asked to do, but there can be no doubt, that the ‘Law ‘discovered by John Northcote Parkinson is alive and well. Sir John Chilcot blames the report’s slow progress on slow-moving bureaucrats, and on his decision to give criticised witnesses time to reply.
At first glance it may seem fair to give those criticised a right to respond, but surely after six years the report’s writers have had time to get their facts correct; especially as the inquiry has already cost £12m to-date.
Chilcot was tasked with finding and analysing facts and making recommendations, he is not being paid to write history or to let his report become a tract in which participants promote their own views. He, like us, will have to accept that it is the role of historians and commentators to balance competing views and put events into perspective.
Wow! I’ve just read what I have written and this is heady stuff! So it’s probably time to end.
But before closing with an account of a parsimonious Nottinghamshire cricketer, readers may have sung a couple of lines from the final hymn of last month’s Evensong at Pauntley, after which twenty eight locals shared home-made cakes and wine: During the singing of ‘Abide with Me,’ I remembered that last month we talked about the Greeks who invented the word entropy to explain how eventually everything decays and that this same idea was echoed by Henry Francis Lyte in 1847 as he lay dying from tuberculosis. One verse goes:
Swift to its close ebbs out life’s little day;
Earth’s joys grow dim; its glories pass away;
Change and decay in all around I see;
O Thou who changest not, abide with me.
These thought provoking words remind me that I must tell my own dentist, what the late comedy writer Frank Muir said about the dentist who, on examining his teeth, sucked in his breath and then quietly sang into Frank’s ear, “Change and decay in all around I see. A thorough daily brush will set plaque free.”
Time now to close with that tale from my friend Stuart who is a member of the Nottinghamshire Country Cricket club; It concerns the retired County and England batsman Derek Randall who was notorious for being extra careful with money.
During the tea interval of an away game at Bristol he visited the lavatory and, too late, was horrified to discover that there was no paper on the roll. He looked anxiously around and then slowly felt in his shirt pocket to find only a single ten pound note; Just then he heard the clatter of his team-mates going back onto the field where one of them heard his plaintiff cry, “Has anybody got two fivers for a tenner?”
View from the Pew 