On the weekend of the 2nd to the 4th of July, we are running a Simple Living Weekend at our home in North Devon. The course is run in association with the School of Life. The course will combine philosophy, husbandry and merriment. We will debate usury and learn about bread-making, bee-keeping, wood storage, poultry and vegetable growing. We will go ‘wild’ swimming, and an expert forager will show us the edible treats on our own doorstep. We will feast in the village hall. Here is Dixe Wills’ account of last year’s course. Go to the School of Life for more information. There is a discount for Idler readers. TH
Download and print your own version of the freedom manifesto by clicking here.
This Little Piggie Stayed at Home
Download the Idler Price List, listing all the books we sell, plus t-shirts and other stuff.
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 [...]
FOLLOWING THREE months of neglect, I have finally started work on the vegetable patch. Alan came round and we spent six or seven hours up there with the fork, spade and unrelenting mattock. The first step was to throw out the raised beds. On the advice of gardener Kirsty Knight-Bruce, I have abandoned the idea [...]
INSPIRED BY VIRGIL’S GEORGICS, which I have been reading in the excellent Loeb edition, I have written my first ever piece of Latin verse. It is: Rastris adsiduis glaebas frango Herba insecto arvaque iuvo [With unrelenting mattock I break the clods I harry the weeds and thus improve the soil.] The mattock appears with great [...]
USING A VERY SIMPLE recipe from Jocasta Innes’s excellent The Country Kitchen, I made eight pots of hedgerow jam. The first step was to collect the hedgerow fruits. Arthur and I went out with a basket and filled it with sloes, elderberries and blackberries. At home we got out a huge pan and threw the [...]
THE OTHER EVENING, as I went to empty the compost bucket into the scruffy bins that I made out of pallets four years ago, I was surprised to see a badger eating up yesterday’s vegetable scraps. He scrambled away but I got a good look at this fine animal. He was large and a little [...]
THANKS TO THE GOOD weather, everything in the vegetable garden has been shooting up. I lifted the early potatoes. There were about ten kilos of them, which at Riverford prices are worth about ten pounds. Delicious, but is it really worth growing potatoes? They are in actual fact quite a difficult crop to grow because [...]
MAY HAS come at last, the merry month of May, and I have bought a copy of Thomas Tusser’s One Hundred Points of Good Husbandry, first published in the 16th century. Tusser himself was rather a comical and even sad character.
Problems with Wood OVER THE LAST two months, we have been mainly concerned with keeping warm. Now that we have two wood-burning stoves, writes Tom Hodgkinson, the amount of work for me in wood-chopping and preparation has nearly doubled. The major problem has been the wood supply. The wood I bought this time last year [...]
ONE MORNING IN MID OCTOBER, I DECIDED THAT I could save a fortune by brewing my own beer. Right now I am spending anything from £1.20 to £2 per bottle of fine ale, and it’s all adding up to a considerable outlay. So I took myself off to the local homebrew shop. I was looking [...]
IN THE VEGETABLE GARDEN, not much is happening apart from nasturtiums. There are nasturtiums everywhere: yellow, red and orange. Such a fantastic flower. Very easy to grow, nice to look at and delicious to eat. The pods can be pickled in jam jars for a caper substitute. And at a time when there is little [...]
IT‘S BEEN A LONG COLD miserable summer. We took a three week road trip around the UK, putting on events at festivals, visiting friends and family and staying for a week on a fruit farm in Norfolk. On arrival home in mid-August, the weather stayed bad. The problem with going away is that the veg [...]
2 July 2008 THE CROWS HAVE been irritating me. The sound they make is deeply unpleasant, a kind of mocking croaking, as if they are laughing at you. They attack smaller birds and do damage to the vegetable patch. So I have been trying to shoot them. But they are crafty: there they all are, [...]
THE ALAN METHOD for successful chicken keeping has been a great success. Since moving the feed bins out of the henhouse, and locking them in till one o’clock, and disturbing any other stray nests, we have been averaging six eggs a day. Arthur is already salivating at the extra income this could give him. If [...]
WE CAME HOME the other day to find that Milly the cat had brought home a little wild bunny. Presumably she intended to kill it and eat, but when we arrived, she was doing a bit of laid back torturing and tormenting prior to moving in for the kill. The bunny was perfectly alive. It [...]
I’VE JUST read a diary entry I wrote for 15th March, but never posted. It makes for rather depressing reading: “Sometimes I wonder why I bother. Children and wives wreck everything… the pony is just an expense and a hassle, and now we’ve got this new puppy. Do the children look after it and feed [...]
THIS MORNING I ate a triumphant breakfast: toast from home-baked bread, bacon from home-killed and home-cured pig, and egg from our own hens. Needless to say, the taste was far superior to anything you could buy in the supermarket, and the fact that all the products were from our own home gave the meal an [...]
A Country Diary 74 13 March 2008 ALL IS NOT well with the chickens. First two of them lay down and died. We think they might have suffered from the cold. Then, after four or five days, they simply stopped laying. That’s right: thirteen hens and not one single egg. It’s the same every day. [...]
27 February 2008 LAST WEEK we brought home fifteen chickens. We want to get serious about egg production. Victoria had gone to get them from a big organic farm, for only one pound each. Organic they may have been, but elegant they were not, and rarely have you seen such a raggle-taggle band of scrawny [...]
WELL, you try and do something good and you only get hassle. Yesterday morning we had a knock at the door from our local environmental health officer. He had come round to tell us that according to a law that was brought in two years ago, what we had done with our pigs—that is to [...]
Monday 7 January 2008 OF ALL THE animals we’ve had here, by far the most useless, costly, time-consuming, toilsome and stressful has been the pony. What an absurd indulgence. We have to rent its field, feed it, give it hay, take it in and out every day. It wears expensive coats and needs a visit [...]
The new 'Back to the Land' issue features a major interview with David Hockney who has also contributed two sketches. Essayists include Paul Kingsnorth, Harry Mount, Penny Rimbaud, Jay Griffiths and Simon Fairlie,.
READ MORE …
350 page Idler, a collection of radical essays by Alain De Botton, Penny Rimbaud, John Mitchinson, Jay Griffiths, Paul Kingsnorth, Oliver James. Published 17 June 2009. In Stock. Order now.
READ MORE …
Order Now. Published 5th March. "Wise, funny, practical and personal, The Idle Parent puts the fun back into parenting." Oliver James
READ MORE …
A sumptuous compendium of one hundred pleasures, each lovingly described and illustrated.
READ MORE …
"Packed with wit, anecdotes and ideas ..." Word Magazine
READ MORE …
Take control of your life and reclaim your right to be idle.
READ MORE …
"Very funny...should be at the top of Tony Blair's reading
list." The Times
READ MORE …
Recommended to anyone interested in either angling or doing nothing.
READ MORE …
"Read this eye-opening and amusingly written book" Daily Mail
READ MORE …
The Idler is an annual, book-shaped magazine that campaigns against the work ethic. It was founded in 1993 by Tom Hodgkinson and his friend Gavin Pretor-Pinney. The intention of the magazine is to return dignity to the art of loafing, to make idling into something to aspire towards rather than reject. As well as providing a radical and thought-provoking read, the Idler is also very funny. MORE …
"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." Conversations: Damien Hirst
Designed by Noble Savage | © 1993 - 2010 The Idler