On the weekend of the 2nd to the 4th of July, we are running a Simple Living Weekend at our home in North Devon. The course is run in association with the School of Life. The course will combine philosophy, husbandry and merriment. We will debate usury and learn about bread-making, bee-keeping, wood storage, poultry and vegetable growing. We will go ‘wild’ swimming, and an expert forager will show us the edible treats on our own doorstep. We will feast in the village hall. Here is Dixe Wills’ account of last year’s course. Go to the School of Life for more information. There is a discount for Idler readers. TH
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This Little Piggie Stayed at Home
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FOLLOWING THREE months of neglect, I have finally started work on the vegetable patch. Alan came round and we spent six or seven hours up there with the fork, spade and unrelenting mattock. The first step was to throw out the raised beds. On the advice of gardener Kirsty Knight-Bruce, I have abandoned the idea [...]
I’d like to mention a couple of excellent publications which deserve a wide readership. The Land: This is a magazine about land rights edited by Simon Fairlie, who founded the Tinker’s Bubble community and who sells excellent scythes. Fairlie has produced six issues of The Land so far. They are ad-free and have the best [...]
‘Why have you got all these animals?” asks my mother when she visits our farm. For some inexplicable reason, she is not a fan of chickens wandering in the kitchen, dogs jumping up at her or cats on the sofa. “You can’t cope with your children,” she says. “Why add extra burdens?” We have 16 [...]
While the spectacle of the American Empire falling is undoubtedly exciting, there seems to be a consensus that it is leading to general belt-tightening. Frugality, though, far from being feared is welcomed by the Idle Parent, who is trying to create anti-consumerist children because they are cheaper. The squeeze on money means that we Idle [...]
My own fantasy Christmas is pretty much the opposite of the one that is pushed at us by the commercial world. It involves a very small outlay of cash and a lot of revelry. My idea of Christmas is a 12-day feasting session during which all work is suspended. It is a series of sumptuous [...]
One of the many sad developments in education lately has been the death of Latin in state schools. Instead of being taught the classics, children today are educated in severely practical matters such as media studies, PowerPoint presentations and advertising. Employers no longer offer apprenticeships: they expect schools and universities to deliver their sales force, [...]
2 July 2008 THE CROWS HAVE been irritating me. The sound they make is deeply unpleasant, a kind of mocking croaking, as if they are laughing at you. They attack smaller birds and do damage to the vegetable patch. So I have been trying to shoot them. But they are crafty: there they all are, [...]
Thanks to everyone who came to our May Day Riot on Thursday May 1st, during which we managed to roast and eat a pig on a traffic island in central London, without having asked for permission. We had first attempted to roast the pig in the small park in Clerkenwell Close, behind the church, but [...]
I’VE JUST read a diary entry I wrote for 15th March, but never posted. It makes for rather depressing reading: “Sometimes I wonder why I bother. Children and wives wreck everything… the pony is just an expense and a hassle, and now we’ve got this new puppy. Do the children look after it and feed [...]
THIS MORNING I ate a triumphant breakfast: toast from home-baked bread, bacon from home-killed and home-cured pig, and egg from our own hens. Needless to say, the taste was far superior to anything you could buy in the supermarket, and the fact that all the products were from our own home gave the meal an [...]
A Country Diary 74 13 March 2008 ALL IS NOT well with the chickens. First two of them lay down and died. We think they might have suffered from the cold. Then, after four or five days, they simply stopped laying. That’s right: thirteen hens and not one single egg. It’s the same every day. [...]
27 February 2008 LAST WEEK we brought home fifteen chickens. We want to get serious about egg production. Victoria had gone to get them from a big organic farm, for only one pound each. Organic they may have been, but elegant they were not, and rarely have you seen such a raggle-taggle band of scrawny [...]
WELL, you try and do something good and you only get hassle. Yesterday morning we had a knock at the door from our local environmental health officer. He had come round to tell us that according to a law that was brought in two years ago, what we had done with our pigs—that is to [...]
THE PIGS ARE DEAD. The night before killing day, Sunday, Victoria and I sat with our John Seymour and Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall books and read about blood puddings, offal, quartering heads, brawn, chorizo, scalding the skin, butchering, salting and all the rest of it and found the whole thing mightily daunting. Because we haven’t got a [...]
Today’s poem is another Edward Lear favourite, The Owl and the Pussycat, that delightfully romantic ballad about running away together and dancing by the light of the moon. It is nice, I think, that it is Pussy who proposes to the Owl, when convention might have suggested the other way around. I The Owl and [...]
I am going to start posting the odd poem on this website, to help us cope with the dreary days and long nights of winter. As I am currently going through an Edward Lear phase, we will start with his classic poem, The Jumblies. Lear, I think, is one of the masters when it comes [...]
30 October 2007 DISASTER WITH THE pigs. Over half term we went away for a week to visit relatives, and we left the pigs in the charge of our neighbours. When we returned there was a rather stern note on the kitchen table from one neighbour telling us that the pigs had undermined the foundations [...]
THERE’S BEEN more death on the farm. The fox came back and took all the hens, leaving only the young cockerel, who now wanders around lone and forlorn, with only pigs, a rabbit and the cats for company. Often I see him hanging around by the gate to the pigs’ enclosure, as if chatting to [...]
WELL, IT’S been three long months since the last instalment, during which time I have done very little work, been to four festivals, drunk a huge amount of beer and wine, and watched weeds completely cover the vegetable patch. One weekend we left the pigs in the care of Divorcing Dad. During their time in [...]
I SHOT A RAT yesterday. Just to see it die. No, what really happened was that a rat got stuck in the pig feed bin. Victoria found it. It was leaping up in the air, but couldn’t get quite high enough to escape from the bin, and so kept slipping down the plastic sides. Great, [...]
The new 'Back to the Land' issue features a major interview with David Hockney who has also contributed two sketches. Essayists include Paul Kingsnorth, Harry Mount, Penny Rimbaud, Jay Griffiths and Simon Fairlie,.
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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. In Stock. Order now.
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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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A sumptuous compendium of one hundred pleasures, each lovingly described and illustrated.
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Take control of your life and reclaim your right to be idle.
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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 an 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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