pumpkinstrokemarrow

Now into the second pass of 'That they may face the rising sun' by John McGahern. An interesting tale of rural Ireland, set perhaps in the sixties or seventies. A rural Ireland which seems rather violent compared with the rural England that I know. A fair bit of coarseness, casual brutality and fighting. A fair bit of poverty. A world where music, song and amateur dramatics are, or at least were, important. A slightly tense relationship between those who have stayed, those who have gone and those who have returned. Much time spent on the natural beauties of the place, time which smells a little of the inkhorn. Not of someone who has lived in the country all his life. I await a copy of 'Amongst Women' from the library, Amazon, for once, having failed me.

Prompted to turn up my three volumes of the CODOT occupational classification from the Manpower Services Commission, fourth impression, 1978. These are the brave people who thought to produce a hierarchical classification of occupation with 18 major groups broken down into 73 minor groups, in turn broken down into 378 unit groups. The unit groups list some 3,500 occupations. The organisation is slightly classist, in that most of the higher grade occupations appear towards the beginning of the classification. Our members of Parliament have been placed, for example, unit group 001, ahead of big cheeses out in the real world at 002. Archaeologists do rather badly attracting just one occupational heading, lumped in with social workers and religious occupations. Mathematicians, an occupation I once aspired to, rate four occupational headings, albeit a lot further down the list. Whereas, as a middle of the road IT person I am comfortably ahead of the archaeologists, in major group II, in a gang attracting five occupational headings.

Pleased to see that even back in the benighted seventies, the Commission knew which side its bread was buttered on and listed no less than 18 different sorts of broker. But the brokers should not get too excited because the Commission also listed 20 different sorts of boiler. Down among the working classes I see I could have been a curtain glazing machine attendant, while the very last occupation is just a not elsewhere classified. But the three before that are heavy labourer, light labourer and stage hand in that order. So that puts wannabee luvvies helping out in their proper place. Real luvvies get to rub shoulders with conjurers and clowns in a more respectable part of the classification.

All in all, the business of trying to organise occupations in this way is much more interesting endeavour than I realised when I was involved with such things. Although perhaps doomed. Well, I might think doomed, but it looks as if the National Statistics Office are still at it, with the current classification being the offspring of CODOT and the thing done by the Census Office. Major groups still rule, although, to be fair, there are now rather fewer of them.