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
22 June 2010
Thank you to Matt Wingett for pointing out my error in assigning Midsummer Day to the 21st of June (see Country Diary 96, below). In fact, tradition places Midsummer Day on 24 June, while 21 June is the summer solstice. 24 June is also the principal feast day of St John the Baptist. John was imprisoned by Herod Antipas, who John had condemned for marrying his brother’s wife. Herod had John beheaded at the request of his step-daughter Salome: ‘she, being instructed of her mother, said, Give me here John Baptist’s head in a charger’ (Matthew 14.8). Anyway, this means that I still have time to organize a feast for Midsummer’s Eve. The problem is that no one will come, because it coincides with the blasted football. Football ruins everything, or follibus ludere omnia perdit, as Virgil might have put it. Maybe I will just read A Midsummer Night’s Dream instead. The good thing is that our first day at Glastonbury will be Midsummer Day, by custom the time when the good people of Albion would go completely mental. TH
21 June 2010
TODAY IS Midsummer’s Day, the summer solstice. Really I should have held a Midsummer’s Eve party last night, and put on a Mummer’s Play. That was the pre-Reformation custom. We modern people still like to celebrate this time of year, but generally our revels are in the commodified and contained form known as music festivals. They’re a lot of better than nothing, though, and in fact I am off with the family to the Glastonbury Festival of the Performing Arts on Thursday.
Well, the glorious weather has been doing wonders in the vegetable patch which, though I say so myself, is the best it has ever been. I’d say it is positively Edenic. I have just been to visit it with my tape measure and proudly bring you the following progress report: (more…)
This is a big-up for the Real Seed Company in Wales. I bought loads of vegetable seeds from them this year, and they have all done fantastically well. The Real Seed Company also encourage seed-saving, which has got to be a good idea, and point you to all sorts of valuable resources, whether it’s good books, good techniques or good tools. Here is their latest newsletter.
Following my article about Latin teaching which appeared in a recent issue of The Lady, I have received numerous requests about the Latin grammar tea towels which I mentioned in the piece. These fantastic items, which elegantly combine beauty and utility, are produced by Latin teacher Mrs Barbara MacSweeney, and are on sale at very reasonable rates, with the profits going to a charitable cause. For more information, please call her on 01727 857958. TH
26 May 2010
Back in January, I appeared on the BBC’s Daily Politics show and advised viewers to boycott the banks and buy gold coins. It was the same advice that we have been giving in the Idler for over a year, thanks to Dominic Frisby’s essay on the magic of gold in Idler 42: Smash the System.
Well, in the last six months the gold price has rocketed by nearly 20%. Sovereigns that cost £172 in December 2009 are now changing hands for over £200 (have a look on Ebay). This compares to the 0.025% interest that my bank would have paid over the same period. And pundits predict that the gold price will carry on going up as currencies around the world continue to be devalued and the stock market continues to get the jitters on a regular basis. (more…)
24 May 2010
I’M AFRAID that I have many animal deaths and disappearances to report. The first is Twister the ferret. About six weeks ago, we separated him from Whisper, the female, because we didn’t want them to have babies. He was vasectomized, and we put him in a different cage to recover from the operation and because it takes a few weeks to take effect. Two days later, I found an empty cage and a dead rat in the yard. Twister was on the loose. (more…)
14 May 2010
The US edition of The Idle Parent was published today by Tarcher/Penguin with a rather lovely new cover. Stateside idlers, or aspiring idlers, can buy the book from Amazon or, better, go down to your local bookstore and have a chat with the staff.
10 May 2010
We have now received our copies of Idler 43: Back to the Land. The printers, the fine folk at MPG Biddles, have done a fantastic job and the book looks very nice indeed. We are sending out subscribers’ copies today and tomorrow, and then we’ll send out individual orders.
From Idler 43
Just to remind you, the book features a long interview with David Hockney, covering the Renaissance, Facebook, smoking, bespoke tailoring and much else besides. Hockney has also done two sketches for us: a self-portrait and a diagram which explains the change in artistic perspective that came about in the Renaissance, and its relationship to a new theological worldview. Also in this issue we have essays on hedgehogs, the 13th century, the medieval guilds, land reform and the garden as a political statement. Contributors include Harry Mount, Paul Kingsnorth, Jay Griffiths, Penny Rimbaud, Jay Griffiths, Stanley Donwood and Clifford Harper. Click here to buy your copy. Alternatively, buy it from your local independent bookshop and have a chat into the bargain.
Another sample spread, with illustration by Alice Smith
06 May 2010
Turmoil, chaos, mess… come, one and all, to the Rough Trade shop off Brick Lane in London Town, tonight, Friday 7 May, for a night of merry anarchy. We’ll have two hours of music to launch the new issue of the Idler, Back to the Land. Starting at 6pm sharp, we have Tim Burgess of The Charlatans on the wheels of steel. Your editor will lead a singalong of the great hobo fantasy song, Big Rock Candy Mountains. Then we have gentlemen slackers Ian Bone and Ray Roughler Jones on stage, followed by the delightful Louis Eliot. Also appearing will be Zodiac Youth, and then Zodiac Mindwarp and the Love Reaction, with a special guest appearance from Mr Adam Ant. To wind up, Asbokid will play. Doors will close at 8pm, after which it’s time for curry and beer. Here’s hoping for a weak and unstable government!
30 April 2010
THE VEGETABLE PATCH IS now almost completely sown and planted. There are about seventy broad beans plants, now about three inches high. Then come twenty or so lettuces and cut-and-come-again plants. Then ten cabbages. Then a large patch of radish sown with parsnip. Then a block of peas, Telephone and Hatif d’Annonay. Then a block of rocket, also parsley (Gigante di Napoli), Mizuna and Salad Bowl. On the other patch, I planted about seventy seed potatoes (Maris Bard, Orla, Amorosa and Colleen). Also a block of turnips and a block of beetroot. There is now only one block left unsown, and I will have to decide whether I go for beans or carrots. The problem is that I wanted to grow a lot of beans, and I have three packets of different bean seeds to try, and they are: Cherokee Trail of Tears climbing French bean; Cosse Violette purple climbing bean, and Minidor yellow dwarf French bean. Maybe I should have not bothered with all those potatoes. I wonder if I could grow some of the beans in pots in the front garden, or even in the flower beds? (more…)
29 April 2010
I have been shocked, horrified and appalled by a new campaign to promote Microsoft’s email service, Hotmail. The creative team has created an aspirational model for us to aim at, a new category of happy, hard-working superbeings called “the new busy”. In common with the “superhuman” Blackberry advertising campaign of a couple of years ago, this brainwashing campaign suggests that just by using Hotmail, you will be transformed into something more efficient than the average human being. The “old busy” were stressed out and tired, but the new busy are fresh-faced, full of upbeat energy and relentlessly cheerful. It is positive psychology gone bananas. The campaign, which is global, is peppered with sentences such as the following (I don’t think it is grammatically correct to begin a sentence with “because”, but anyway). And it’s a lie, anyway:
“Because we know that having a full calendar means having a full life.”
This is presumably all excellent news for the corporations. If Hotmail can somehow make it cool to be busy, then management – ie, the art of extracting the maximum amount of money from each employee – is made a hell of a lot easier. The campaign also provides the self-improving new busy with some ideas about how to fill up that calendar in their quest for a “full life”. These range from the insane—”Would be open to taking a class in their sleep,” to the horribly twee and patronising—”Make pancakes into exotic shapes.” The new busy, we understand, “make beavers look lazy” and are schooled in the arts of aggressive optimism: “Have 100 good reasons why it will work.” As ever with such conditioning campaigns, we do not hear any mention of beauty or truth.
Truly, this is merely the latest form of Calvinism, or the corporate attempt to create happy slaves. Luckily for us, the journalist Barbara Ehrenreich has written Smile or Die, a devastating attack on the American cult of positive pscyhology, which I would urge everyone to read. It’s a trend that is coming over to Blighty, where whooping and high-fives are appearing in our offices. The new busy, I’d suggest, can be easily identified by their blinkered, self-important stupidity. The new busy is the new slavery.
We must all resist this brave new world with every core of our beings and get grumpy, uncommunicative and pessimistic. In other words, let us embrace the old lazy.
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"Institutions fear idle populations because an idler is a thinker and thinkers are not a welcome addition to most social situations. Thinkers become malcontents,"