The Idler

Idle Pleasures

The best things in life are free. Like love, or oxygen. At the Idler we have long sought out such pleasures, and here present a selection for your enjoyment.

If you would like to submit your own Idle Pleasures, please email us at the Idler and we’ll publish our favourites.

Balcony

A good balcony is an essential ingredient for a day of languor. It can be on the eighteenth floor of a tower block, where you water the window box of daisies, sit on a deck chair with a can of Holsten Pills, and consider the intricate, interwoven stories of the city. It can be on the third floor of a villa in Portugal, with the sea below waiting for you to make up your mind, as you stumble around in front of the barbeque, gripping a bottle of red wine by the neck. It can be on the fourth floor of your office, site of clandestine joints, snatched sexual liaisons and an exultation of indifference toward that bloody job.

Wherever you find your balcony, savour its essential pleasure – half inside, half outside. Like the Hokey-Cokey, you have one foot in the world, and one foot out.

Boats

There’s nothing quite like messing around in boats. From Ratty and his chums to Jerome K. Jerome’s Three Men In A Boat, the daydreaming enemies of work have always sought solace in the slowed-down worlds of our rivers and canals. There can be no better way to drift off into peaceful reveries than lying in a drifting boat, opening one’s eyes to see a patch of sky, a cloud, slow moving treetops. Like so many idle pleasures, boating is a way to legitimise doing nothing. There is plenty to occupy oneself with – locks, preparing food, turning the steering wheel – but in reality you are doing nothing of any use to anyone. Which is wonderful.Boating doesn’t get you anywhere – it would always be quicker to go by car. The pleasure lies in the moment.

Innovations

Like the cartoons of Heath Robinson, the absurd labour – saving devices lovingly pictured and described in Innovations catalogues are strangely seductive. How often have we nonchalantly picked one up as it fell from the Sunday supplement, expecting to swiftly discard it and return it to the Home News pages, and then found ourselves utterly enthralled? Even the call to Sunday lunch has no effect: we sit rapt in the armchair, deaf to all entreaties to join the others, unable to move. The pleasure is compounded by the knowledge that we will never in a million years actually fork out for an air ionizer, electric translator, Corby trouser press, water purifier or mechanical grasper. No – the pleasure lies in indulging the fantasy of an easier life.

Staring

You’re inside, the world is out-side. Staring through the window offers thinkers and dreamers unparalleled opportunities to ruminate, and, in the best tradition of the Pathetic Fallacy, the sights beyond the glass will always reflect our mood. If we are feeling bright and optimistic, the birds will be singing and the children playing. If we’re feeling miserable and black then it will be raining and the trees will be bare. Window – starers, however, usually find that it is raining and the trees are bare. There is something about staring through a window which is suited to melancholic temperaments. Perhaps we associate it with the Sunday mornings of childhood, when Dad is playing golf and we’ve been fighting with our siblings. It is only through steady application to window-staring that we will manage to transform it from a sad exercise into a positive one.

Laundrette

Every other Sunday I lug bin-bags of dirty knickers around to the laundrette and settle in for the afternoon. The laundrette hones the pleasure of doing bugger all whilst still sorting your life out. It is virtuous inactivity, it washes you whiter-than-white. Games abound too, like watching the tumble of a green sock as it gallivants on its bi-weekly vacation away from your feet. Or you can eavesdrop on the squabbles of couples who have resolved to do all their domestic chores together. There’s also the chance to work your karma by being absurdly nice to the cackling biddies who do the service wash. I become the perfect gentleman, laugh at their lame jokes and make saucy comments about corned beef thighs and arses lik two badly parked VW Beetles. And if this is too much for you, you can still immerse yourself in the mantra of the machines, and meditate upon the underwear revolution.

Just Looking

It used to be called browsing. But browsing implied a freedom to roam with no obligation to buy. “Just looking” is different. Your entry into the shop ha aroused expectation in the Armani-clad assistant. You are his ticket to a sale, an extension of the band. A well place “just looking” shifts the power balance. Pick some things up and put them back down again. Shop rents are so high that every minute you’re “just looking”, you’re also shop-lifting – stealing attention, space and valuable “brand-time”. You are a fl?�neur dwelling within the flow of the shop but individually unchallenged. Everyone else is a consumer. You’re “just looking”.

ANDREW MALE

Smoking

Many Idlers love to smoke. It gives us something to do when we’re not doing anything. “The smoker simultaneously injects and excuses idleness into his life with every cigarette,” observed Collette of this dignified pastime. This ancient aid to relaxation and thought is ceaselessly bombarded by the envious snipes of the scurrying swarms of the anti-idle. Will these busybodies not leave us alone? All idlers – smokers or not – should resist members of the anti – smoking lobby for the oppressors of leisure and contemplation that they so clearly are.

Dreaming

Dreamland is the original cyberspace, our own built – in spiritual virtual reality. Our dreams take us into other worlds, alternative realities that help us make sense of day – to – day life. Dreaming is a connection to our unconscious, to our selves. It is to be treasured. Isn’t it extraordinary that an activity which takes up so much of our lives is so often relegated into the realms of unimportance? We are based on dreams, they are at our centre. Listen to them.

Bathing

Sliding down the gritty surface of the bath until your head is submerged is as sublime as slipping into unconsciousness. The power shower cannot compare to the methodical ritual of sponging the length of each limb, pointing your toes free of the water and surrounding yourself with a playpen of bubbles. And when it is over, the swirl of the water draining down the plug – hole conveniently informs you which hemisphere you are reclining in. The hours spent soaking take us back to the good old days before we crawled out of the ocean.

Driving

Treated in the right way, motoring trips can provide marvellous possibilities for idleness. If you manage to escape the seductions of anger and frustration that assail many of us on today’s congested roads, a long drive can offer unparalleled opportunities to pursue reveries with a luxury not afforded by daily life. In a car, you can be truly alone and truly in control of your own environment. You choose the music and the temperature, as well as the refreshments. It is best, when stuck in a traffic jam, to indulge as far as possible in this heaven – sent opportunity to do absolutely nothing. Driving can be a great cover for covert Idlers – to the rest of the world you are achieving something, going somewhere. But you know you are doing nothing at all.

Transatlantic Plane Journeys

Long plane journeys are most routinely associated with non -stop, high – pressure life styles. The true Idler, however, knows that they offer eight hours of delicious inactivity. Every need is catered for by the aeroplane staff: food, drink, entertainment. Everything is brought to your seat. The only physical activity required is a thanking nod of the head to the stewardess or a welcome leg – stretch to the lavatory. Above the clouds with nothing to do, you are closer to God and closer to yourself.

The Merry-Go-Round

The carousel goes up and around, nowhere to go, just the delight of undulating upon a gaudy horse and watching the older kids slouch towards sexual liasons. Your parents appear, smiling, after each revolution and you live forever as a spinning child. And when you step down onto the plastic stirrups, you beg for more money so you can go up and around some more, and finish your dream of riding a cock horse to Banbury Cross.