Download and print your own version of the freedom manifesto by clicking here.
This Little Piggie Stayed at Home
Somewhere between an office and a factory, the call centre occupies a strange area between blue and white collar work. In Bristol, it is often said that when the slave trade ended, they just built call centres instead. Soon there will be so many that they will run out of land and start building them [...]
Many many years ago I set off to Australia as a young fresh faced gap-year student.
My parents had ‘kindly’ arranged for me to spend a couple of months working on a farm. It turned out that the main business of the farm was not sheep as I had not unreasonably supposed but chickens. Chicken [...]
During a summer break from University about 5 years ago I worked a ten-week stint at a Jigsaw factory deflating plastic wrapped jigsaw boxes.
I had just broken up very messily with my girlfriend of the time and was penniless to boot. After enduring the scorn and derision of jobsworth temping agency staff in my home [...]
The worst job I ever had was that of a fruit machine engineer. The job consisted of me driving from pub to pub in Coventry repairing amusement machines, pay phones and pool tables.
The average working day was spent in the most despicable dives; horrible urine scented community pubs situated in the middle of desperate council [...]
I used to have this summer job as a student in a factory that made bandages and cotton wool products. It was an old rambling victorian mill which was now half empty and was boiling hot and humid, with steam sprayers, as the cotton wool had to be kept damp.
It was also hugely dusty [...]
.. was how the fruit and veg shop was known after Southport rioters had picked the appropriate letters off the shop front. In university breaks (when I wasn’t laid up in bed on unpaid sick leave for a bad back sustained moving cardboard boxes of rotten cabbage from one side of the shop floor to [...]
Nestled in the heart of rural Mid Sussex lies Burgess Hill.
I grew up in a nearby village and shopping trips with the family often involved a trip there, though God knows why. A few years ago, they built a snazzy new shopping centre, but failed to
even half fill it with shops for the first [...]
With recipes, drawings, arcana, poems and other pearls of wisdom - the "Idler Diary" will help you gently float down river in 2009.
READ MORE …
The Idler joins forces with the men from QI for a celebration of curiosity and an attack on boredom, with plenty of William Morris
READ MORE …
A sumptuous compendium of one hundred pleasures, each lovingly described and illustrated.
READ MORE …
The US version of How To Be Free: "A work of crafty scholarship and
radical intent" - Michael Agger, Slate
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 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
Designed by Noble Savage | © 1993 - 2008 The Idler