Working

I spent the most of the day doing legal research. It's not a particularly compelling job, though I can have something interesting on television in the background (so long as I can follow it mostly by listening), and the cats seem to appreciate the long stretches of my sitting still. But it can be surprisingly exhausting, somehow, when done for four or five hours at a time.

Keeping me company, it seems appropriately enough, has been Tony Robinson, host of (and not entirely willing participant in) The Worst Jobs In History. If you've never seen this series (it turns up from time to time here in the US on History International), it's the story of 2,000 years of ordinary life, told (in part) through wretched, often dangerous means of employment from different periods of British history. How wretched? You might have been a "Gong Scourer" (a Tudor-era cesspit cleaner), a "Pure Collector" (a Victorian-era collector of dog and cat excrement to take to tanners), or a "Resurrection Man" (a Georgian-era body snatcher). "Toad Eater," "Vomit Collector," and "Spit Boy," are, I think, all fairly self-explanatory.

Not all the tasks are so unpleasant, though — many are just arduous, backbreaking labor. (You could be a "Bridge Builder," for example, or an "Asphalt Pounder.") Robinson demonstrates each of them, albeit reluctantly. You can find several segments from the series on YouTube. (Robinson has also compiled a few books on the subject, drawn from the series.)

This legal research doesn't seem quite so terrible.