Tom gets medieval at the Free University of Glastonbury.
HMS Sweet Charity, the Park area, Glastonbury Festival.
Sunday 28 June, 4pm
Tom hosts a holiday organised by the School of Life.
Martinhoe, North Devon
The School of Life
Friday 10 - Sunday 12 July
Tom gives a talk organised by the Wells branch of Waterstones, tel 01749 677881.
Town Hall, Wells, Somerset.
Wednesday 15 July, 6pm, £1 in advance, £2 on the door
Tom talks at the Port Eliot Festival. There will also be a uke singalong.
Port Eliot, St Germans, Plymouth
Sunday 26 July
Tom discusses alternatives to the neoliberal project.
Save Our World Festival, Tapeley Park, North Devon
Saturday 29 - Sunday 30 August
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.
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, [...]
So crap even the sand on the beach left about 10 years since.
Like a bad 50’s holiday to the worst seaside resort, Withernsea is where the Neandertal still has yet to become extinct.
Everything is run down, its just dreadful.
Why anyone would want to go on holiday there is beyond me. It’s difficult to get [...]
It’s probably my own fault.. as a man with stock phrases, using ‘like a wet weekend in Swindon’ as the last word in pejoratives for any dreary event was probably asking for trouble. But then the year before, my girlfriend had taken us to Rome for my birthday, so you could understand why I [...]
When I was at school I went on a cruise to Egypt, Israel, Turkey and Greece. For anyone thinking this was some posh school and some luxury trip let me stop you right there. This was a no frills, pack �em in, out of season torture fest. The week before we went the boat [...]
The island of Rhodes stinks of shit. The food, which comes from the same sea that Albania empties its lavatories into, is overpriced and tastes revolting. The local beer is awful. Most of the island’s architecture is half finished and covered in shit. Local flora and fauna consists of lizards and scrub coated in motor [...]
When our daughter was about 3, my wife and I decided it would be fun to spend a week near “Parc Safari Africain”, Quebec, in a small cabin on the shores of New York State’s Lake Champlain. We live in Ottawa, so the plan was to make a comparatively inexpensive arrangement that would allow [...]
To be honest it wasn�t a crap holiday, not to start with at least. I was thirteen when my mum, dad and I hired a powerboat and spent a fortnight gliding round the Islands off the coast of Greece. At first it was heaven. Deserted islands, cheap and delicious food, the gorgeous daughters of fellow [...]
Picture the pointless blight that is Las Vegas, subtract the vice, add lots of humidity, and then place the whole mess in a WalMart parking lot…and apparently what you are left with is the place where people from American crap towns vacation. I dare anyone to locate a business that is not a chain, [...]
Once upon a time Newquay was a sleepy fishing village that had some of the best surf spots in the country. That was then now you will find it promoted by ‘The Sun’ as the Ibiza in the UK.
Go mid summer or any bank holiday and you will find a town over run by [...]
Llangrannog was (and is for all I know) a muddy field perched high up over Cardigan Bay that was used by the Welsh Youth Movement (Urdd Gobaith Cymru) for summer camps.
Accommodation was provided in ex-Army bell tents and facilities were contained within WW2 era wooden huts mounted on brick columns (not dissimilar to Stalag-Luft 13).
Led [...]
A couple of years ago I started seeing a new girlfriend (who I shall call M), who only five weeks into the relationship suggested we went away on holiday together. Despite my misgivings that it was a bit soon for such things, she insisted that she had a good ‘2 for the price of [...]
The childish protestations had failed; my parents were packing me off on holiday with a semi-estranged branch of the family. I suspected that I’d been given as a sacrifice or peace offering as I hesitantly boarded the Isle of Wight ferry with my Nan, her husband, my Aunt and cousin.
On arrival we took to [...]
Looking for somewhere to go on holiday this summer? Well, if you’re the type of holidaymaker who likes to drink, beat, rape, and piss in the street then Great Yarmouth is the place for you.
In fact, if you’re even considering Yarmouth as a holiday destination, you probably fit the description above. Each summer the [...]
It seemed like a good idea at the time, but now my mind has blanked out the events of that horrible week to such an extent that I couldn’t even tell you where we were stayting – it was somewhere in France, and as it was pretty hot it must have been Southern – if [...]
Now I don’t know what the problem is, but over in Cairns (Australia) they seem to have nothing but praise for the “destination” of Fitzroy Island. The online brochure describes it as having “an ever-growing reputation for adventure, fun
and brilliant nightlife!” My friends and I were taken in by such promises, and so the [...]
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, [...]
The new 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. Pre-order now for £18.99.
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Order Now. Published 5th March. "Wise, funny, practical and personal, The Idle Parent puts the fun back into parenting." Oliver James
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With recipes, drawings, arcana, poems and other pearls of wisdom - the "Idler Diary" will help you gently float down river in 2009.
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A sumptuous compendium of one hundred pleasures, each lovingly described and illustrated.
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"Packed with wit, anecdotes and ideas ..." Word Magazine
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Take control of your life and reclaim your right to be idle.
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"Very funny...should be at the top of Tony Blair's reading
list." The Times
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Recommended to anyone interested in either angling or doing nothing.
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"Read this eye-opening and amusingly written book" Daily Mail
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The Idler is a bi-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 …
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