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.
I worked in a sandwich factory for a miserable pittance in the summer after my GCSEs. The permanent staff we’re bitter and resentful towards me (after all, I was a 16 year old getting a bit of extra pocket money so that I could afford to go on holiday without my parents for the [...]
The worst job I ever had was working on an animated feature in ‘91, a personal project of a critically acclaimed animator who had been a top Soho ad animator for decades. He had been making this thing since the 70’s and had finally got a little Hollywood backing and hired a small, underpaid [...]
The worst job I’ve ever had was one summer after I had dropped out of University. I took a job as a weedsprayer. Every day I had to wear a green boiler suit, carry a 35 litre tank of toxic weedkiller on my back and a sprayer in my hand. The look was finished off [...]
Washing dishes would normally qualify as a pretty dreadful job, but you might expect the misery to be somewhat abated by the opportunity for scoffing leftovers at the end of the day. Unfortunately, my experience of said job was in a pretty hardline vegan/healthfood sort of thing. Didn’t stop the well-meaning proprietor from stuffing [...]
During the summer of 1995 my friend and I obtained what seemed to be a dream summer job working for 300 bucks a week as “Re-agent Personnel” in a Californian warehouse production unit. However, initial portents weren’t good. On our first morning a call from reception in our motel awoke us from our drunken [...]
I started my career of crap jobs in a syringe needle factory. My task was in quality control, seated next to a conveyor belt carrying needles glued into plastic bases. Dangerously erect, they marched past at a rate of twenty five a second. I was a solitary addition to the conveyor belt with nothing [...]
I once got suckered by a Temp Agency into going for a job as a kitchen porter in a hotel in Bournemouth.
I was still at University and pretty naive and had no idea at the time what a kitchen porter did. After a formal half an hour interview (why?), I was offered the job on [...]
I once left a perfectly good college course to work as an apprentice spray painter in a hell-hole of a town called Kelty in Fife.
The wage was poor, the fumes were appalling and I was forced to clean out the filthy spray painting filter machine on a weekly basis.
The panel beater had a tendency to [...]
Determined to save money for an impending move to America back in 1986, I took a night job at some grotty little factory in Surbiton, Surrey. I had often passed the building sniggering at the unfortunates inside, a thought which kept coming back to me after I accepted 5 quid an hour under the [...]
I once did the door to door household goods thing, about 10 years ago, in London. It was actually a live-in job as the company owned a house in Uxbridge and recruited kids like myself from the Northern wastelands.
Basically, you worked 12 hours a day, 6 days a week and were expected to do ‘Spazzing’. [...]
Every Summer whilst on holiday from University, my best friend and I used to put up Marquees (see another story in this list) until it became harvest time, where we would sign on as ‘Seed Processors’.
This job involved travelling around to farms in a transit van with a diesel generator in the back, following a [...]
I had to Sign the Official Secrets Act and everything, so lets keep this between us, okay?
I work for the police, in their vetting unit.
We run background checks on anyone who will have anykind of “Unsupervised access to children”. Doctors, nurses, teachers, dinner ladies, couples hoping to adopt or foster, etc.
We perform checks on [...]
A few years ago I worked as a runner (ie. dogsbody) for a TV company. The accounts department was in a narrow building on 4 floors plus an attic and a basement.
One day the management decided to renovate the building, so we runners had to shift all the furniture, files etc from floor to [...]
I worked one summer in a rehabilitation hospital, working in the administration section. The job was great, the hours were standard, and the opportunities for skiving off were something I have been unable to match since.
As part of my job, I had to visit the offices on the wards daily to update the in-patient’s [...]
Back in the glory days of University my dad got me and my brother summer jobs at the semi-conductor plant where he worked. We were gophers, carrying boxes of semi-conductor wafers between the various processing plants in the buildings as they underwent all the different processes. My brother elected to take the night shifts, [...]
I once spent a particularly memorable week minimum wage-slaving as a kitchen porter in a hospital. Having finished university only a few weeks before, I was in dire need of a cash injection.
Despite having a good degree, the usual consultancies wouldn’t give me a look-in. The firm I eventually went to specialised in outsourcing unemployable [...]
I worked in a small cosmetics factory one holiday in Christchurch, New Zealand.
I was relegated the two jobs that absolutely no one else wanted to do. Initially this involved screwing ridged caps on tubes that were fired off a conveyer belt.
If you were too slow, and the things splatted all over the ground, you then [...]
I was once employed to stand on a pipe for two days. A building agency sent me to work as a labourer for some pipe fitters two floors underground in the dingiest cellar known to mankind. My task was to counterweight the pipe while it was set level by standing on it.
Why the hell they [...]
Before anyone had heard about web sites or e-business I used to work for a multimedia company.
This involved working seven days a week from 9:30 to midnight most days with unpaid overtime, even at weekends. I was fortunate enough to be one of only two girls which meant I didn’t have to share the [...]
When I was quite a bit younger and setting off into the world of work, I got one of the worst jobs imaginable.
It was at a time when temping was the only work available and permanent employment was rarer than rocking horse shit.
The factory was based in Chorley, Lancs and made plastic containers and other [...]
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 …
"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." Damien Hirst: Idler 10
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