A reader asks what I do at the weekend

A reader wrote with a question I liked, because it was not really about money at all. He asked what I do at the weekend, when the markets are shut and there are, as he put it, no numbers moving. He seemed to suspect I sit in front of a dark screen, waiting for Monday. I am happy to disappoint him.

On Saturday mornings I go to the market before it is warm. Not for anything in particular. I buy the same things I always buy, a bunch of kangkung, some limes, a bag of anchovies that will outlast the week, and I let the man at the fish stall tell me what is good today even though I have already decided. The transaction takes four minutes. The conversation takes twenty. This is the point.

Then I cook something slow. This weekend it was a pot of bak kut teh, which cannot be hurried and does not care about your plans. You put the pork and the garlic and the peppery broth on the stove, and then you are simply not in charge for two hours. The kitchen fills up with the smell of it. Someone lifts the lid too early. The pot ignores them.

I read, but I try hard not to read about money. I have a rule, which is the only rule I will confess to in public: nothing on the weekend that has a price in it. History, mostly. A novel if I am lucky. Last week it was a fat book about the spice trade, and I will tell you, there is nothing in a modern market you have not already seen in a Melaka warehouse four hundred years ago: the same greed, the same panic, the same man convinced that this time is different.

My father sold hardware, and he taught me the thing I keep coming back to, though he would never have put it the way I do. He said the customers who worried him were not the angry ones but the ones in a hurry, because a man in a hurry has stopped thinking and started hoping. I watched him slow those people down. He would fetch the wrong size first, on purpose, just to make them wait and look again. Half the time they left with something different from what they had come in sure they wanted, and the right thing more often than not.

The best thing I do for my Monday is to spend my Sunday somewhere Monday cannot reach me.

I say this not as advice, because I am wary of telling anyone how to live, but as a plain description of what keeps me steady. The reason I can be calm about a number on a screen is that the number is not where I keep my life. My life is in the pot, and the market, and the fat book, and the four-minute purchase that turns into a twenty-minute talk. When something falls, and things do fall, I have somewhere to stand that is not falling with it.

So that is the honest answer. When the markets are shut, I am not waiting for them to open. I am hoping they stay shut a little longer, so the broth has time.

My idea of weekend reading is close to What the Numbers Remember: forty annual reports from an invented harbour-town ice factory, read in order, as a patient education in company accounts.