Leave them alone!
From Idler 37, 2006
Tom Hodgkinson has some tips on childcare for idlers
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From Recent Issues:
Take a look at these two pieces from the latest issue. Leave Them Alone: Tom Hodgkinson’s guide to responsible parenting for the lazy and our brilliant conversation with the laid-back Michael Palin.
Idler 37: Childish Things can be bought from Amazon or our own shop.
Free at Last: Former Viz editor, Chris Donald, on the [...]
FAT AND POOR
MAX CARLISH on life as a slightly effeminate version of Giant Haystacks at the crusty fag end of the twentieth century.
Taken from Idler 25, Winter 1999
LAZY BIRDS
Researchers in Gruenau, Austria have provided a flock of lazy birds with a car and driver because they are incapable of migrating on their own. Ornithologists from the Konrad Lorenz research centre have spent more than two years breeding the Northern Bald Ibis species.
The birds were escorted to their winter quarters in the Maremma region [...]
In Defence of the Middlebrow
In the eighties, pop culture fought for the same critical treatment as the so-called highbrow arts. But, writes LOUIS THEROUX, the cultural grail lies somewhere in between
BED LIEUTENANT
Getting up is never easy. John Lennon, Elvis, Rossini - they all had incurable horizontal tendencies. So what’s the answer asks Louis Theroux
YOU HAVE TO BE MAD TO WORK HERE
GARETH ELLIS on the latest corporate trend: employing court jesters to say the unsayable
HENRY CYRIL PAGET
The Fifth Marquess of Anglesey converted the family chapel into a theatre and squandered his fortune on fancy jewellery for his band of amateur players. The family tried to erase his memory, but SIMON McAUSLANE has the inside story. Illustration by Lorna Miller
THE WILD HIGHWAY
The WILD HIGHWAY Being the memoirs of wild hearted Black-Arsed Jack, by himself, in gaol, awaiting the rope at Plymouth, for Mutiny, Piracy and crimes against mankind. As discovered by Mark Manning in a bin in Clerkenwell ….
Sweet Vincent
Van Gogh is the patron saint of the unpublished, neglected, and insane. Which is why Mark Manning loves him so.
BLISS TO BE ALIVE
Penguin have brought out a collection of journalism from our great friend Gavin Hills, who tragically died in 1997. It’s been brilliantly put together by former Face editor Sheryl Garratt, and contains many of his Idler pieces.
Here is his first My Wonderful Life column, published in Idler 12, November 1995
THE LINEACRE GASWORKS MYSTERY
A true story about a father and son whose temperance couldn’t save them from the ultimate betrayal.
By MATTHEW DE ABAITUA
Mutant Genius
GREG ROWLAND examines the early days of the Marvel misfit mutant adolescents, the X-Men taken From Idler 26, Summer 2000
THE SIX MYTHS OF TV COMEDY
Sitcom Supremo GRAHAM LINEHAN - co-writer of Father Ted, Big Train and Black Books - offers a handy guide to the mistakes we make when discussing sitcoms.
"I do nothing and then I do something. But it's taken years of investigating idleness in all its forms to be able to achieve this. My discipline is borne out of concerted study of idleness."