22 October 2010
Many of you will have come across the irrepressible conductor and musician Charles Hazlewood at Idler gatherings. He taught a delighted Idler’s Academy audience at this year’s Port Eliot Festival to sing medieval madrigals in the round. Charles has just announced a special gig in Bristol with his band the The Charles Hazlewood All Stars, a sort of avant-garde super group featuring the likes of Portishead’s Adrian Utley and Goldfrapp’s Will Gregory. TCHAS will be improvising around Terry Riley’s psychedelic masterpiece ‘A Rainbow in Curved Air’, and a night of intense musical adventure is promised.
The gig takes place at the Bristol Old Vic on Friday 5 November. Doors open at 7.30pm and tickets are priced from £5 to £20. Click here to book your tickets for this amazing night.
A million thanks to all those many readers who sent in such supportive emails about the Idler’s Academy project. The scheme is moving forward well and I will soon put a detailed outline of the plans in the post to any who is interested. If you haven’t already done so, send an email to mail@idler.co.uk and we will put you on the list.
15 October 2010
As some of you may have heard, we are investigating the idea of starting an Idler’s Academy and Coffeehouse in London. It is intriguing to discover that in the ancient world, schooling and leisure were interwoven concepts. The Encyclopaedia Britannica Eleventh Edition opens its entry on ‘Schools’ with the following comment:
‘As is the case with so many of the institutions of modern civilization, so with schools; the name, the thing, the matter, the method, have been derived from Greece through Rome. A strange fortune has converted the Greek word skolia, which originally meant leisure, particularly the “retired leisure that in trim gardens takes his pleasure” of men, into the proper term for the modern school.’
As for Academy, Britannica tells us: ‘The word “Academy” is derived from “the olive grove of Academe, Plato’s retirement”… a pleasure-garden or or gymnasium situated in the suburb of Ceramicus on the river Cephissus.’ Plato taught here for about fifty years.
Our own Idler’s Academy would teach a wide range of subjects, from Latin and Logic to Rhetoric, singing, carpentry and gardening. It would be an intellectual resort and salon for idlers, and we’d sell excellent coffee. The Academy would also run a bookshop stocking relevant titles, both new and second-hand. It would have the feel of an 18th century coffeehouse. Watch this space for more news, as it happens. TH
10 October 2010
THERE WAS NO mention of idlers in David Cameron’s speech at the Tory Party Conference last week. He praised the toilers; his phrase was the “doers and grafters” of Britain. Idlers were made to feel a little guilty. This praise of toil is common to all governments. Under New Labour, it was the long-suffering “hard-working families” who were singled out for special praise. And in Nazi Germany, Himmler created a project known as “Operation Workshy”, designed to get the shirkers back into useful employment. The problem is, that paid employment rarely delivers the benefits that its promoters, who must be either naive or disingenuous, claim for it. Overwork destroys lives and wrecks families. Work kills: the TUC estimates that 20,000 people in the UK die each year as a direct result of their job. (more…)
04 October 2010
The Idler organization has undergone a major reshuffle. After over a year of sterling service in the mail order department, Miss Samantha Chalkley has left us to pursue a solo career. She has been replaced by Miss Victoria Hull, who will be known to some of you as the mother of my children. Poor Miss Vic is a trifle lacking in experience when it comes to putting things in envelopes and giving them to the post office. So doubtless there will be some terrible delays and mistakes in the early days. If so, please blame her and not me.
Mrs McSweeney’s Latin Grammar tea towels have been flying out of the shop, and I was pleased to notice that there is one in the kitchen of My Toby Young, the noted educational pioneer and philanthropist. The tea towel featured in a recent television programme about Mr Young’s plan to set up a school that teaches Latin and the attempts of various totalitarian socialists to thwart him. Luckily the New Labour Thought Police, who were determinedly opposed to the teaching of Latin, are no longer in power, so Toby’s task should be a little easier. Anyway, thanks to Toby we can now advertise our tea towels with the slogan “As Seen On TV”. TH
YESTERDAY, Henry and I went down the lane with a large basket, and came back with eight pounds of blackberries, elderberries, sloes, hips and haws. I put aside three pounds of the elderberries, with the idea of making them into wine, and made a batch of hedgerow jam with the rest, using the recipe from the great Jocasta Innes book, The Country Kitchen. (more…)
03 October 2010
Thanks to master printer Christian Brett, who brings to our attention the following spirited diatribe against the new art of printing, written by a Venetian monk in 1473:
“I, a scribe of good reputation, have been driven out of house and home by cunning printers. They print with no shame, and at a very low price, matter that inflames men’s passions, while we scribes die of hunger. Cure this plague, if you will, by getting rid of printers. They persist in their wicked paths, setting Tibullus in type, while young girls read Ovid to learn about sin. These printers incite this behaviour because they make such huge profits from it. They flood the market with anything that hints of lasciviousness. DESTROY THE PRINTING PRESS I BEG YOU, OR THESE EVIL MEN WILL TRIUMPH.”
Which reminds me: I must get those nice Loeb editions of Ovid’s love poetry.
A similar or at least related sentiment is expressed by the young Charles Ryder in a lately discovered Evelyn Waugh short story, a little prequel to Brideshead Revisited. Charles’s house master presents him with a printing press. Although Ryder is secretly excited by this piece of equipment, he affects a lofty disdain, saying: “I think the invention of movable type was a disaster, sir. It destroyed calligraphy.” TH
27 September 2010
For all those who wanted to see a picture of those Latin tea towels, here we are:
Beauty and utility, elegantly combined
Buy one
here and intellectualize your kitchen.
24 September 2010
The Idler’s printer, MPG Biddles, has just delivered two pallet-loads of the third edition of Idler 42: Smash the System. One load went to our distributor, Central Books, and the other to Idler HQ. This is the third edition of the book, which has now sold over 3,000 copies. To get your copy, order directly from us by clicking here, or buy it from your local independent bookshop.
Also new in this week are our wonderful Latin tea towels. These are designed by Mrs Barbara McSweeney, who got in touch after reading a piece by me in the Daily Telegraph about the joys of learning Latin in the old way, that is, learning the grammar by heart. Mrs McSweeney’s tea towels pack in a huge amount of grammar: all four declensions of nouns, the four conjugations of verbs and the principal parts, plus adjectives and adverbs. The tea towels were a huge hit at this year’s Port Eliot Festival. Join the Latin revolution now and click here to buy your tea towel for only five pounds.
20 September 2010
I’d recommend Your Money Or Your Life by Vicki Robin and Joe Dominguez, available in Penguin, to anyone who is contemplating quitting the day job. It’s an excellent and very practical primer on how to get out of debt, save money and enjoy your everyday life. In particular it does a very useful service in demonstrating how your job, far from supplying you with a living, in fact represents your biggest outlay, and should be abandoned at once. First you must consider the huge tax cost. Then you need to add up all your job-related costs, ie, the expenses which would vanish if you were working from home, and these are: clothes, meals, after-work drinks, coffees, commuting, entertainment, little treats after a ‘bad day’, expensive holidays and gadgets, job-related illness and so on. It’s the best work on creative thrift that I’ve read.
I have been bingeing on the great P. G. Wodehouse and would like to offer the following quote for the day from Carry On, Jeeves (1925). Bertie Wooster is describing the character of the supremely idle Rockmeteller Todd, an American pal, and I offer it as an inspiration to anyone who yearns to cast off the shackles of the nine to five:
‘[H]e had told me himself more than once that he never got up before twelve, and seldom earlier than one. Constitutionally the laziest young devil in America, he had hit on a walk in life which enabled him to go the limit in that direction. He was a poet. At least, he wrote poems when he did anything; but most of the time, as far as I can make out, he spent in a sort of trance. He told me once that he could sit on a fence, watching a worm and wondering what on earth it was up to for hours at a stretch.’
And if anyone is interested in finding out what the worms are up to, they could do worse than read Charles Darwin’s excellent study of 1881, The Formation of Vegetable Mould Through the Action of Worms with Observations on their Habits (Faber), the result of Darwin’s close study of the humble earthworm. TH
08 September 2010
I HAVE BEEN disappointed by the beans. They ailed and died. Brown spots appeared on the leaves and on the pods, and the plants then withered. Our green-fingered friends Andy and Leanne of the Loop project stayed with us last week for two nights, and they removed the worst hit specimens, and indentified the disease as halo blight. They also dug over the potato patch and the broad beans patch. Then they sowed what was the broad bean patch with nine different kinds of winter lettuce and greens. A week later and every seed has germinated. (more…)
02 September 2010
We have just finalized the timetable for this weekend’s outing of The Idler’s Academy, at the Curiouser Festival near Totnes. Alas, Mr Ben Moor has had to cancel, but we are pleased to announce that we will be joined by Mr Robin Harford, the renowned forager, who will be leading a wild food ramble around the festival site. In between lessons, the tuck shop will be open, and you will be able to join us for informal chats and ukulele sessions. See you there. TH
The Idler’s Academy of Philosophy, Husbandry and Merriment
Autumn term
Timetable
FRIDAY
4pm: Headmaster’s Address.
Tom Hodgkinson introduces the Idler’s Academy and outlines its aims and methods.
5pm: Music with Princes in the Tower.
Learn about medieval music and merriment with Michael Tyack and Will Summers.
SATURDAY
11am: Foraging class with Mr Hartford.
Wild food expert Robin Harford leads a foraging expedition around the site.
2pm: Needlework with Mr Cogdell.
Learn the basics of sewing with Savile Row tailor Frederick Cogdell.
4pm: Latin with the headmaster.
Learn some basic Latin grammar and a little bit about Virgil.
6pm: History with Mr De Abaitua.
Learn about the strange camping cults of the past with author Matthew De Abaitua.
7.30pm: Music with the Headmaster.
Ukulele class and singalong with Tom Hodgkinson.
SUNDAY:
Noon: Sunday Sermon with the Headmaster.
2pm: First steps in beekeeping with Miss Hull.
Victoria Hull on our wondrous honey-makers.
3pm: Music: kids’ ukulele lesson with the Headmaster.
4pm: Close.
24 August 2010
I HATE HOLIDAYS. You come back from them to find that the vegetable garden has degenerated hugely. Mine looks very sad: wilted, browning, grassy, with lettuces bolting and rocket going to seed. It is a real low compared with the high of the bright, neat, well-kept garden I had in June. I think this feeling of being overgrown is possibly common to all gardens at this time of year. While they may still be very productive, there is something sickly about them. My turnips, for example, have split and grown too big. The beetroot look nibbled and woody. The carrots, though, are splendid. My priority this week is to dig over the empty beds and fill them with brassica plants of all sorts: kale, cabbage, sprouts, broccoli, cauliflower, purple sprouting. I am going to buy the plants from the market and from the local nursery. Leeks, too. And more lettuce. This should ensure a plentiful supply of winter crops. And on the bright side, we have still not bought any vegetables, bar onions, for the last three months. (more…)
I have just finished reading Penny Rimbaud’s brilliant and beautiful new novel, This Crippled Flesh. It combines intensely romantic flights of the imagination, self-effacing humour, philosophical enquiry, pornographic language, righteous fury and a spiritual pilgrimage with innovative typesetting. Truly radical, you could call it the great Beatnik novel. The book is presented in a lovely limited edition with illustrations by Alice Smith. It is published by Bracketpress and Exitstencil Press, and costs £18.
15 August 2010
A couple of years ago, I wrote an attack on Facebook. It was actually simply a description of the agenda of Peter Thiel, one of the principal investors in the business, and that of a few other investors. I admit I had never really looked at it from the point of view of a user. Now I have, and I am absolutely amazed at the pure drivel that people spew out. And also at the level of intimacy that people will share with it, almost like it’s a priest. Have none of the millions of people who upload rubbish, and also non-rubbish, read Orwell’s 1984? Facebook is Big Brother. And no one realizes it. It watches you. It records your tittle tattle. Your likes and dislikes. You waste a horrendous amount of time on it. And people confess things to Facebook that they would not confess to their nearest friend or relative. Think about it. You are being watched, analyzed, counted and commodified by a vast American business. And you have allowed this to happen voluntarily. Wake up. TH
14 August 2010
Some of you may have come on the ‘Ditch the Day Job’ courses that Graham Burnett and I ran earlier this summer. I am now passing on two useful looking websites for those looking for practical help in this area. The first is by 30-year-old Jacob Lund Fisker and is called Early Retirement Extreme. Here Mr Fisker shows you how to cut your costs down to the bone, become resourceful, and enjoy a life free from drudgery. The other is the Retire Early website, which also offers practical tips on those wishing to escape the rat race. Both are practical about the money issue.
13 August 2010
Following the storming success of the Idler’s Academy at Port Eliot, we are pleased to announce that we are running a second term. This time we are guests at the Curiouser Gathering 2010: Back to Albion, a small music and crafts festival in the grounds of Berry Pomeroy Castle near Totnes in Devon. It takes place on 3-5 September.
We Return for a Second Term
The Idler’s Academy at The Curiouser Gathering will boast: Mr Ben Moor who returns as Sports Master with his Frisbee Tree Golf tournaments; Mr Matthew De Abaitua, our English and Healthful Outdoor Recreation Master; Miss Victoria Hull (Home Economics and Bee Keeping) and Mr Michael Tyack and Mr William Summers as new additions to the music faculty. They will be running our Early Music department. Justin Welch will be running a drumming class again, and we also welcome back master tailor Mr Frederick Cogdell, for a lesson in the basics of needlework. The Head Master, Mr Tom Hodgkinson, will be giving classes on the ukulele, Latin and the evil of usury. The Academy will also feature tuck shop and bookshop, and you’ll be able to buy Idlers old and new, Tunnocks wafers, teas and coffees, sweets and radical anarchist pamphlets. Who could ask for more?
Also playing at the festival are the amazing ASBO KID, comprising Justin from Elastica and James from EMF; Cornish stompers BLACK FRIDAY and folk-rock troubadours MAD DOG MCREA.
11 August 2010
Idler shop customers may have found that they have had to wait longer than usual for their stuff… apologies for this. It’s to do with the summer holidays. We plan to catch up by mid-August. Another problem is that the second edition of Idler 42: Smash the System has completely sold out. We have ordered a third edition from the printer, and would hope to get it delivered by mid-September. So we’d be grateful if shop customers could, in that awful phrase beloved of call centres, ‘bear with us’. TH
29 July 2010
THE VEGETABLE GARDEN continues to thrive. We have feasted endlessly on new potatoes, beetroot, carrots, peas, broad beans, saladings of all sorts and the biggest cabbages you have ever seen. Truly, labor omnia vicit. Now the climbing French beans and the bush beans are beginning to flower. I harvested the last of the broad beans. There were over 20 lbs of them. I podded them, bagged them up, and froze them. Hugh F-W says that they freeze well. And talking of Hugh F-W, I met him last Friday at the Port Eliot Festival. He demonstrated how to bake bread and cook mackerel at your camp fire on stage, and I was his straight man. Hugh was very affable and we made a curiously entertaining double act. I was also able to meet another hero over the weekend, and that was Simon Fairlie, who came to give a scything course as part of the Idler’s Academy. The sight of eight men and women swishing away at the lawns of Port Eliot with their scythes was one to remember. And I learned that I’d been scything all wrong: I’d been hacking away rather than sliding the blade along the surface of the earth.
Everything grows so fast at this time of year that to leave the garden for just a few days means that you return to a wilderness. So I tidied up with the shears. It’s actually amazing how much you can do with a pair of shears, and very quickly too. I edged the paths with the spade and things looked much better. I’m particularly delighted by the parsnip patch. I allowed three or four radish plants to go to seed, and they spread right out over the parsnips, and produced pretty little purple and white flowers. These flowers turned into gorgeous little seed pods, shaped like scimitars. I hope to collect the seeds. It really is truly remarkable, how one seed can produce hundreds or thousands of new ones, and in doing so makes beautiful and unique shapes. The flowers and seed pods of vegetables would make a fascinating area of study in themselves, and in fact I call for a new movement, Vegetable Art, where artists will paint and sculpt from nature’s miraculous creations.
THE HENS HAVE started to lay, and we are getting five or six eggs a day out of ten hens, which ain’t bad. We have also bought ten small hens for meat purposes: it makes sense, while we are keeping hens, to raise our own organic, free range chickens.
VICTORIA HAS PURCHASED a colony of bees, and a nucleus. Roy and Tony came round to install them in their hives, and the whole process went very smoothly. The bees seemed to be unangered by the move, and swiftly started to explore their new habitat. This is Victoria’s second attempt at bee-keeping, the first lot having died over the winter. She is now a soberer and wiser bee-keeper, and will be helped in the process by Tony, with whom we shall share the produce of the hives, the honey and wax. In fact he is going to show us how to make candles. And so it is that we will benefit from those immortal gifts of the bees: sweetness and light.
ENDS
12 July 2010
Miss Smith's Design For Our Sign
WE HAVE now finalized the timetable for the first term at the Idler’s Academy, taking place this year at the Port Eliot Festival, 23-25 July. New additions to the faculty are Mr Charles Hazlewood, our choirmaster, Mr Ian Bone and Mr Ray Roughler-Jones, who are giving a careers advice talk, Mr Justin Welch, who will be leading a drumming masterclass, and Mr John Moore, who will be teaching us how to play the saw. I’d remind you also that Mr William Peers, the famous sculptor, will be running a sculpture workshop, and Mr Bill Drummond, our woodwork master, will be building a bed without the use of power tools.
Our new crest, complete with our motto, ‘Libertas per Cultum’, meaning ‘freedom through education’, has been designed by Miss Alice Smith of Rochdale. TH
Next Page »
"All pubs are terrible places now. I mean you wouldnÕt have known a decent pub at your age, I shouldnÕt think. They didnÕt have fucking music. They didnÕt have cigarette machines. They didnÕt sell the chemical beer. They were for proper drinkers, not for fucking yobs, hooligans. I want to go into a pub and meet interesting people, not to look at a lot of people sitting on the floor drinking out of tins. I canÕt stand it. Mostly people in your age group. Ruin pubs."