Welcome to the Crap archives. Here you’ll find a selection of our favourite crap town, crap job and crap holiday nominations.
The Idler Book of Crap Holidays: 50 Tales of Holiday Hell - Published October
In Crap Holidays, Dan Kieran highlights 50 of the most disastrous - and hilarious - holidays from hell…From leaky caravans in Wales, to crushingly disappointing luxury hotels in Barbados…From dysentery in Goa, to bloody awful holiday companions who won’t leave you alone…In fact, from Butlins to Ball, here you’ll find stories of crap holiday sex, crime, food, accommodation, and of course, the inevitable famliy fights! Focusing on the gap between the wonderful promise and the grim reality, Crap Holidays takes a step back in time to look at hellish holidays from the past, whilst also examining 21st-century holiday culture - including information on a variety of more serious subjects, such as…The number of ‘holiday’ deaths that occur each year…The number and type of complaints received by different operators each year…The profits made - and the prices paid for holiday hell holes…Written once again by the Idler’s readers and contributors, Crap Holidays will be packed with hilarious holiday snaps and, of course, savage cartoons satirising the whole hellish business!
Click to buy via Amazon.co.uk
10 January 2007
MY FRIEND Oli Claridge came down just before Christmas to build us a treehouse. We were lucky weatherwise: the three days he was here came just after a period of non-stop rain and just before a period of bitter cold. We spent about fifty pounds on materials, the basic beams, the screws and bolts and flashing lights — and the rest was made with bits of wood that we found lying around. Oli was very keen on ‘cargo cult’: ie the idea of using old bits if rubbish as decoration or for useful purpose. So we used old bottle tops for washers, to hold on the corrugated iron roof, and bits of old metal for wind chimes. The treehouse consists of a large platform with the house bit on one side. As yet it has but three walls, but as Oli said, it’s just a start. The thing will develop and grow over the coming years. We found two old wooden windows in the neighbour’s shed which we used, plus a load of planks from a clear-out of a local hotel. The overall effect is quite charming: a sort of Caribbean shack. With any luck it will help keep Arthur away from the computer but I must confess we’ve hardly used it yet as the weather has been so unutterably foul.
YES, THE WEATHER. It seems to have been raining for about four thousand years. The house is surrounded by mud, the grass is sodden and it’s been far too awful to go and work outside. Even the hardcore farmers feel the same way: my landlady said they’d been staying in doing admin. Two days ago it was Plough Monday, traditionally the day when the twelve days of Christmas feasting was finally over and the men and women returned to the fields. So I had planned to resurrect that medieval custom, but when I looked out of the window I decided to stay in.
STILL, we had followed the previous part, the feasting bit, and had eaten well over Christmas and New Year. Plenty of capons, ham, pheasant and spiced wine. A friend gave us a brace of pheasants and I sat down on New Year’s Eve morning at the kitchen table and plucked and gutted both of them. This was the first time I had done this, and I did it with the relevant page of Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall open in front of me. Yes, I know I’m getting all this stuff through book learnin’, but without a relation or neighbour to show me how it’s done, then what alternative do I have? And we should be very grateful to Fearnley for giving us back these old self-sufficient skills. I now know that if we were starving all I would need to do would be to shoot some pheasants with my air rifle. The next step must be rabbit, another delicious wild food. Anyway the plucking and the gutting went fine, bar a bit of ripped skin, although I have to say that plucking is very time-consuming. We wrapped the pheasants in bacon, roast them in the Rayburn and had them for lunch with some friends. Delicious and completely free. We also ate parsnips form the garden and Victoria put the leeks into a fantastic leek soup which lasted for days.
MUNA the pony found her way into the veg patch the other day, and cleanly bit the head off the only cabbage up there that was beginning to resemble the sort of cabbage you might want to eat. She also laid into the diminutive brassicas. Other than that there was surprisingly little damage, and it also surprises me just how nimble that pony is. Yesterday I went into the dairy to find Muna in there. I had left the door to the yard open and she had wandered in, past all the empty bottles and rubbish bags, and was happily munching away at a bag of rice. With some difficulty I managed to persuade her to turn around and get out of the our larder. When she had gone I looked around and, expecting to find everything either smashed or chewed up. But there was no damage at all and apart from a lingering manure smell, you might not even have known she’d been in there.
We are giving away free copies of Idler Issue 35: War on Work, worth £10.
The issue is a great introduction to the Idler and features an interview with Situationist philosopher Raoul Vaneigem, wild man Keith Allen’s A to Z of Life, Folk Art by artist Jeremy Deller, Terry Hall’s Idler Questionnaire, plus articles by Adam Buxton, Rowley Leigh, Nicholas Blincoe, Pat Kane, Chris Yates, Pete Doherty and many more. AND there’s Dan Kieran’s indispensable guide to the Idle Life. All you have to pay is two pounds for postage and packing. Please, though, do allow 28 days for delivery. We are very slow.
Just click here for your FREE copy.
BACK IN 1983, in an inter view with broadcaster Brian Walden, Mrs Thatcher caught the public imagination with her promotion of “Victorian values”:
Walden: You’ve really outlined an approval of what I would call Victorian values. The sort of values, if you like, that helped to build the country throughout the 19th century. Now is that right?
Thatcher: Exactly. Very much so. Those were the values when our country became great, but not only did our country become great internationally, also so much advance was made in this country.
Now what did the Victorians value, exactly? Well, the 19th century was the era of hard work, exploitation, greed, chimney sweeps, 16-hour days, tall black hats, money-worship and strict discipline in the home. It was the era when the dark Satanic mills destroyed the cottage industry and lives began to be lived around the clock rather than by the seasons. It was the era of steam, coal and gas. It was the era that introduced the notion of the earth as a resource to be mined. It was the era of competitive living. It was the era of soul-deadening machinery. Anyone who doubts this has only to read Dickens.
These values motivated the Eighties and they are still the dominant ones today. Well, I for one am thoroughly fed up with Victorian values which is why in my new book, called How To Be Free, I propose instead a return to medieval values.
On first sight, this idea seems bonkers. Surely the medieval age was a time of bad diets, corrupt priests and abject serfdom? Well, no. This view is actually a calumnious caricature. When I started to write How To Be Free, I decided to read Mutual Aid by the great 19th- century anarchist Prince Petr Kropotkin, described by Oscar Wilde as one of the most cheerful men he had ever met. In Mutual Aid, published at the same time as Darwin’s Origin of Species, Kropotkin argues that cooperation is an essential part of animal and human life and development. He also reminds us that it was in the medieval age when the great free city-states such as Florence were created. The medievals, he says, valued craftsmanship, cooperation and justice. Mutual Aid led me to read other books on medieval customs and culture, and what I found was a society that made a sustained and conscious attempt to live fairly and justly.
The two great influences on the development of medieval ethics were Christ’s sermon on the mount and Aristotle’s Ethics, which had come to Europe via Arab translations. From this material they developed an approach to life which was eco-friendly, neighbourly and based on cooperating rather than competing. So here, briefly, is an introduction to 10 important medieval values, all of which seem radical to us:
ANTI-CAPITALIST: Lending at interest, or usury, is at the basis of the capitalist system. And usury was quite specifically proscribed by medieval ethics. It was sinful, they said, to sell something that does not belong to you, which is time. It was also sinful to take advantage of someone else’s misfortune by lending them money. Usurers were sometimes known to return all the money they had made on their deathbed, in an effort to ensure their salvation. Money was for spending, not for saving or lending.
ANTI-WORK: According to historian Jacques Le Goff, the medievals were opposed to hard work, because, he says, to put in long hours displayed a lack of faith in Providence. Theologically, medieval Catholicism was closer to an almost Taoist Oriental fatalism than today’s Protestant culture. And hard work might give you an unfair advantage over your brothers.
ANTI-COMPETITIVE: Craftsmen organised themselves into a system of Guilds. Guild members mutually agreed to keep quality high and prices uncompetitive. They instituted the notion of a “just and fixed price” for their wares. Goods were produced in small groups. This practice guarded against today’s problem which is giant companies producing a load of rubbish.
ECO-FRIENDLY: In the era before electricity, coal, gas or nuclear power, the medievals heated themselves from sustainable sources: ie, wood. They used water and wind power to grind corn. The UK was covered in eco-friendly windmills. All vegetable production was necessarily organic, and everyone “shopped local”. There were no supermarkets or call centres or lorries or cars. No logos, either. And crucially, no plastic. Therefore there was no waste as everything was returned to to the earth.
SELF-SUFFICIENT: Even the meanest medieval peasant grew vegetables and herbs and kept pigs and chickens. And the giant yeoman class became very prosperous. Chaucer wrote of his Franklin: “It snowed in his house of mete and drynke.”
HOSPITABLE: Just as indigenous people today would share their last crust with you, so the medievals emphasised the importance of good hospitality. The monasteries would take in wandering men and give them beer, bread and bacon, and indeed, the (later) problem of homeless, in the Elizabethan age, was a direct result of the destruction of the monasteries.
CHARITABLE: In the days before charity had become just another institutional mega-business, it really did begin at home. The importance of charity was constantly insisted upon and there were plenty of wandering beggars and other mendicants who were ready to receive your alms. There was no disgrace attached to poverty: in fact, it was a state to be celebrated, because the apostles were poor. We had the example of St Francis of Assisi who became voluntarily poor.
PARTY-LOVING: The medieval calendar was absolutely studded with feast days and festivals. Of course, we all celebrate Christmas now, but Christmas then was celebrated for 12 days, during which no one was allowed to work. Every three or four weeks there was some excuse for a party. May Day was for having sex and every three of four weeks there was a long break.
CHIVALROUS: It was the medieval knights and specifically the great Troubadours of Southern France who invented the custom of courtly love. Chivalry, respect and courtesy towards women was constantly insisted upon, and there were great female patrons of these poets, such as, for example, Eleanor of Aquitaine. Good manners were important.
NEIGHBOURLY: Christ had conceived of the world as a “brotherhood of man” and civility to your neighbour was paramount. This is because the medievals had a sense of collective responsibility: we are all in this together, so your well-being and my well-being are one and the same thing.
Medieval values were radical values. They were good values. And they were enjoyable values. We should embrace them.
The Freedom Manifesto
BAKE BREAD
MUCK ABOUT
QUIT MOANING
STOP CONSUMING
START PRODUCING
BACK TO THE LAND
SMASH USURY
EMBRACE BEAUTY
IGNORE THE STATE
REFORM IS FUTILE
HAIL THE SPADE
HAIL THE QUILL
LOVE THY NEIGHBOUR
BE CREATIVE
DIG THE EARTH
MAKE COMPOST
DOWN WITH HEALTH
DOWN WITH SAFETY
DOWN WITH WORK
DOWN WITH PENSIONS
BE ALIVE
BE MERRY
Be Free!
"The answer to how to live is to stop thinking about it. And just to live. But you're doing that anyway. However you intellectualise it, you still just live."