Founded by Alain de Botton and friends, the School is the perfect venue to mark the launch of our philosophy-inspired fourth issue. The School is officially closed for the duration of August, but they’re opening especially for us. Special thanks to The School for this.

The event will feature a talk by New Escapologist Editor, Robert Wringham and a unique ‘conversation breakfast’ run by Mark Vernon. It’ll also be a great opportunity to meet some of the New Escapologist staff and writers as well as other New Escapologist readers.

We’ll have advance copies of the magazine for sale (or for free collection to subscribers).

For those who fancy it, the event will informally continue at the nearby St. George’s Gardens and/or local Camden drinkery.

The event is limited to twenty places and costs £20. Tickets will be on sale until July 30th (or until they sell out, whichever comes first). Come along! It’s going to be great.

“It’s pathological!” my girlfriend teases me after I decline a carrier bag at the pharmacy. As a result of doing so, I had been forced to walk around the rest of the shops with a box of condoms and a roll-on deodorant, repeatedly showing the receipt to security guards to demonstrate that I’d bought the goods elsewhere.

“Don’t you see? When your minimalism interferes with day-to-day activities, you’ve got a problem,” she said.

I refuted this because, to me, the mild inconvenience of walking around with a box of johnnies and a niff stick™ was preferable to the burden of being responsible for another fucking carrier bag. But was this the skewed perspective of a mentally unstable individual?

Later in the week, we went for dinner with our friend Shanti. Somehow we’d gotten onto the subject of whether or not you’re supposed to jam your wallet into the mouth of someone suffering an epileptic fit.

“That’s not for fits,” someone pointed out, “You’re thinking of spoons. You have to put a spoon in their mouth to stop them from swallowing their tongue. You do the wallet trick if you need to snap a broken bone back into position. They bight down on it to distract from the pain.”

I love discussing the strange idea that shoving a spoon into the mouth of an epileptic is supposed to be useful. Imagine recovering from a horrible fit only to find that someone had placed a spoon in your mouth. “What’s this?” you’d ask. “Oh, you know, it’s a spoon,” a well-meaning stranger would reply. And you’d say, “Right.”

I also like the idea that you might have to do the wallet trick one day only to enrage the patient who, a lifelong vegan, becomes offended that you’d forced a piece of cowhide into their gob.

On this occasion, however, I didn’t wax lyrical on the epileptic/spoon myth or the sudden idea of snapping the bone back into place in an angry vegan. Instead, I got my wallet out.

“My wallet wouldn’t be much use there!” I bragged, “It’s about as thick as a beermat.”

I never miss an opportunity to brag about the slenderness of my wallet. To the dedicated minimalist, a slim wallet acts as a sort of talisman: a symbol of minimalism carried around at all times. So proud am I of my super-slim wallet, I actually like to get it out and demonstrate the contents at dinner parties, much as I was doing now, oblivious to the fact that nobody is really interested. The way I see it though, is that since I’ll never have children, I should be able to use the time normally allotted to showing photographs of my children in any way I like. People at dinner parties have no choice but to listen.

“Look, here are my cash cards, a health insurance card, a few bank notes, my casino membership card, my press ID card AND THAT’S ALL,” I conclude proudly. “No receipts, no business cards, no loyalty cards, no photographs of my mewling spawn. Just the essentials.”

Our friend, to her credit, seemed genuinely impressed.

Upon demonstrating the handful of essential plastic cards, I saw that my library card from Glasgow was still in there. I have no plans to go back to a Glaswegian public library and by the time I’m in one again the card would have surely expired. I had a rare opportunity to permanently remove something from my wallet.

Naturally, I made a big show of this by removing the card and stuffing it ceremonially into the milk jug.

My girlfriend, presumably recognising the signs of my “pathological” malaise, extracted the from the milk jug, cleaned it off and popped it into her handbag.

At first I shrugged this off. If she wanted to harbour this burden out of the extreme off-chance that we’ll want to borrow something from a Glaswegian library, she was welcome to do so. But now it’s slightly starting to bother me that the card continues to exist in my material sphere. I don’t want it any more! The fact that it exists outside of a garbage can is starting to pull at my attention. Even though my girlfriend has ostensibly taken responsibility for it, I still know that it’s there and still mentally account for it.

The worst thing about all this is that I can’t possibly tell my girlfriend about this and ask her to throw it away because then she’ll have the final confirmation that I’m mental.

Suicide is the only way out of this.

One of the officers was even keeping their rhythm with a set of sleigh bells, adding quite the festive vibe to an already merry scene. I’m not sure which was the biggest juxtaposition: singing policemen or the sound of ‘Jingle Bells’ in the 30°C Montreal sunshine.

My first thought was that the carolers weren’t real policemen but surely some sort of performance art troupe. Such would be typical in the public spaces of Montreal, so this would explain the strange out-of-season caroling to which we were bearing witness.

I then noticed that the uniforms of the cops – complete with night sticks and firearms – were pretty authentic. What was going on?

My girlfriend pointed out that the nearest car to the trio of festive policemen contained a woman seemingly sleeping in the passenger seat. Ah, now it was clear. The cops, perhaps concerned that she might suffer heat stroke behind the car’s windscreen, were in the process of waking her up through the medium of Christmas songs. They were being civil-minded but also playing a joke: when the woman woke up, she would disorientatedly think she had slept until December.

Even to a curmudgeon like me who hates all acts of merriment or human happiness, this was pretty funny. I watched on for a while and enjoyed seeing the expression on the dozing passenger’s face as she awoke to this slightly bizarre spectacle.

I wondered for half a second where the cops could possibly have found sleigh bells at such short notice. The park is always full of creative buskers though so maybe the cops had formed an alliance with one of these musicians and borrowed the sleigh bells to complete the charade.

It was a quite brilliant and lovely scene. The policemen of England might be savage and humourless meat-heads but it became clear to me that their Canadian counterparts were not so bad.

We set down our beach towel and settled down for an afternoon in the sunshine. No more than ten minutes had passed when the chorus of Jingle Bells once again picked up from the location of the three policemen. Strange.

Ten minutes later it happened again. And again. And again. What the fuck was going on?

It soon became apparent that my impression of cops waking a sleeping woman in a jovial fashion was to overestimate the value of their joke. They hadn’t been trying to wake the woman in the car.

This had not been a spontaneous or well-meaning prank. The cops had been in the park all afternoon on some slack duty and had decided somewhere along the way that Christmas caroling in the 30°C sunshine would be amusing enough a joke to perform repeatedly in public. Drunk from the attention that the public (sadly including myself) had been giving them, this would continue ad-nauseum until the sun went down.

Or possibly until it went Nova and destroyed all life on the Earth.

But what about the sleigh bells with which one of the officers had been keeping festive rhythm? God, the bells were the damning evidence of a further level of preparation. They hadn’t quick-wittedly borrowed them from a busker at all. One of the cops must have planned this in advance and brought the bloody things along with him from home.

Not only was this not a spontaneous act of impromptu wit, it wasn’t even something they’d connived suddenly by way of passing the time. It had been planned at least a day previously. Perhaps it is an annual tradition they have. Perhaps they do this every day.

Comedy should really be left in the hands of experts. It’s a dangerous commodity and shouldn’t be tossed around by just anyone. In fact, I’d be willing to volunteer for some sort of comedy police force who go around arresting people who dare to make poor, dim-witted or laboured jokes in public.

The Plain People of Cyberspace: “Ah, but don’t you see that by being a humourist dabbling in the policing business, you’re committing the same sin as the cops were but the other way around?”

Quiet you.

The manual correction of typos in library books strikes me as a slightly odd thing to do but is something we’ve probably all seen before. Oddly enough, the last one I can remember seeing was in a copy of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle: also an Haruki Murakami novel. Maybe there is specifically something about Murakami readers that leaves them so inclined.

If we were to ask them about this behaviour, I’d like to think that they’d have an appropriately mindful Murakami-esque response: “I just can’t stand to see an incomplete or misspelled word. I don’t know why. I just can’t. It is what it is”, and then maybe they’d go and talk to a stray cat for a while.

It strikes me that you’d have to be a very singular person to do correct a typo in a mass-market paperback. What is the motivation? When I see a typo in a book, it may momentarily derail my reading but once I’ve acknowledged the typo, I just ignore it and move on.

By correcting the typo with a pen, all you’re doing is correcting the typo in one copy of a book, of which there are thousands, even millions, of other copies. There’s presumably no motivation on behalf of the corrector to fix all of the copies of the book. (Unless, of course, there is. Perhaps there’s a subculture of typographic bounty hunters travelling the libraries and bookshops of the world, patiently waiting to be discovered and interviewed by Louis Theroux).

Maybe this is the difference between typo correctors and people like me. If ever I find myself correcting typos, it’s as a professional editor and always in the master or proof copy of a book which has not yet been mass-printed.

This being said, I think the typo correctors should be praised for making this tiny difference in the world. I’ll miss this sort of thing when everything is digital and correctable at the source.

“Or suppose you get completely paralysed from the neck down. A proper superman job. How are you going to get home then?”

We are having a conversation about travel insurance. All I have asked for are the names of a few reputable brokers. Instead, my dad has opened my eyes to a seemingly endless score of terrifying “what ifs” that can happen around the globe.

“What if you put your foot down a rabbit hole and trip, cracking your head off a rock?”

I never knew this man had such a cool imagination. He lives in a world of “indemnity policies” and “negative equities” and “shadow cabinets”: things I had always assumed to be mind-picklingly officious. It turns out I might have been wrong. The field of insurance is as entertainingly grisly as a trip to the London Dungeon.

Come to think of it, the shadow cabinet sounds pretty spooky as well. Like something Lord Voldemort might be involved in.

“You hear about these kids,” he says, “who step on a jellyfish in Crete and spend the next forty years in a grubby Greek hospital, wriggling their eyebrows at nurses – once for yes, twice for no.”

After some more blood-curdling tales of potential holiday woe, my dad explains that my policy should include something called “repatriation”. Apparently, it is best to have a sort of escape plan built into your insurance policy: so that the company will charter a flight back to Old Blighty if you end up in a coma or a head in a jar.

“LastMinute.com isn’t much use if you’re in an Iron Lung in Baghdad with organ leggers asking suspicious questions about your teeth”, he warns me sagely.

I’m not going to Baghdad though. I’m going to nice places like Montreal, where there’s a really good socialist health service in place. A nice Canadian hospital is probably a good place to be in such an event. At least I wouldn’t have orange-skinned British nurses sponging me down with MRSA.

“And China? You don’t want to think about what you can catch in China. They invented SARS. And India? That’s where Delhi Belly comes from. And Poland? Whoa, Poland. Try pronouncing allergic to penicillin in that language.”

All this talk of jellyfish and eyebrows is putting me off going anywhere ever again. Who needs beaches and bad wax museums anyway? I might just stay at home.

“Home? Do you have any idea how many accidents happen in your own home? You’re scared of terrorism but you’ll twice as likely suffocate in your own bed.”

That’s it then. I’ll take one middleclass life of living in fear, sustantivo.

New Escapologist has a new home on the web.

We hope you enjoy the new look. The site was built on the proceeds of Issue 3 sales. Huge thanks go out to our loyal readers.

As ever, you can leave comments at the new site and send us your lengthier messages by email.

Remember to update any bookmarks, especially in Google Reader!

www.newescapologist.co.uk

For these reasons, Wringham & Godsil are taking a break from the podcastery but will be back in October for a second series of their sub-par Alphabites programme.

Here’s a picture of the boys with fellow podcaster Mr. Richard Herring at the Birmingham Glee Club last week:

You can still be a part of their independent projects by following Dan’s Twitter feed or buying Issue Three of Rob’s magazine, New Escapologist.

This issue features a conversation with Tom Hodgkinson, David Gross on tax resistance, Leo Babauta on shopping, Brian Dean on anxiety culture, Reggie C. King on the works of Moondog, Dickon Edwards on pseudonyms and truly loads more. Discover what to embrace and what to reject in this bumper “How To” issue.

My personal contributions, as well as overseeing the enterprise, include some words about autonomy, trifles, Montreal, sea-turtles and escape-route plotting.

In my grotesquely biased opinion, it’s our finest issue to date.

For intellectual consumption only. Buy it here!

If, like me, you’re a scowling misanthrope who hates all music, art and sport, you might want to try some standup comedy. The main joy of comedy is in the jazz-like poise of a performer’s delivery but, if you’re lucky, they might talk about cocks as well. Brilliant.

Glasgow is a good city in which to enjoy comedy, partly because of the great clubs and brilliant native comedians but also because of Glasgow’s unique combination of civic pride and self depreciation; and its historic local politics: fertile ground for standup comedy.

The Glasgow comedy “scene” (kill me) is overshadowed by two main forces: Jongleurs and The Stand. Jongleurs is a nightclub-style venue in the city centre where you can expect to see fairly mainstream acts followed by a disco and a midnight sense of loneliness and despair. Ideal for office, hen and stag parties.

If you prefer to see real comedy from comedians, both resident and touring, who work hard and don’t leave you feeling hollow and bereft, The Stand is probably the best bet.

Unlike the Wetherspoony Jongleurs, The Stand has only two clubs – one in Glasgow and one in Edinburgh – so it maintains a degree of independence and the comedy experience doesn’t feel mass produced. As venues, they are dedicated exclusively to standup comedy, making the atmosphere conducive to only one thing. The result is a nurturing environment for the performers and the feeling amongst the audience that something unique and never-to-be-seen-again might unfold. Every Sunday, Michael Redmond compares a package show of local and imported acts: Michael himself is a hero of comedy (adored by Graham Linehan and Stewart Lee and plagiarised by the Pasquale family) and it is a great privilege to be able to see him, not just occasionally, but on any given Sunday at The Stand.

The Stand is undoubtedly the best venue for comedy in the city (and frankly one of the best in the whole UK), but there are other fringe venues worth exploring in Glasgow too. Many local bars and cafes run comedy nights: a particularly good one is the ‘Comedy Womb’ at The State bar on Holland Street. Although the club only runs once a week and doesn’t have the heritage of The Stand, the acts are usually pretty good and are angled unpatronisingly toward a comedy-literate audience. This is a good place to catch newer acts. Speaking of which, don’t be put off by the idea of a ‘new acts’ night. A person who has the guts to work a comedy room for the first time will have honed a very tight and intelligent ten minutes: beginners are too nervous to go out there with a half-baked set. Another great opportunity to see newer acts is to try The Stand’s Tuesday night cabaret of new acts, Red Raw.

If the beery atmosphere of a comedy club is not your bag, it’s worth keeping an eye on the programmes of arts centres such as The Arches beneath Central Station and the Centre for Contemporary Arts (CCA) on Sauchihall Street. Ian Macpherson’s “DiScomBoBuLaTe” is a monthly cabaret of comedians and writers, currently based at The Arches and previously at the CCA. You’ll not get any drunken heckling at this sort of event and you’ll get to see some of the country’s top writer-performers: past guests have included Alasdair Gray, Liz Lochead, A. L. Kennedy and Arnold Brown to name but a few. Further west, look out for the infrequent but excellent OMG! night at Gibson Street’s Offshore coffee shop at which a combo of seasoned performers and ‘real people’ read from their teenage diaries. Earnest performances and, instead of beer, you can have a nice cup of tea.

If you want to see a mainstream giant such as Peter Kay, The Mighty Boosh or Glasgow’s own Frankie Boyle, you’re most likely to catch them at the nearby SECC, a capacious venue famous for having the shape of a giant Dasypodidae. You can also try BBC Scotland where they film comedy pilots and require a studio audience. This often means free tickets to see very famous comedians and their less-famous but often talented warm-up acts.

The Glasgow Comedy Festival, though very fledgling compared to other comedy festivals, is an annual crossing of comedy leylines and a great opportunity to catch big names like Stewart Lee, Simon Munnery and Jerry Sadowitz, himself a Glaswegian whose act leaves you feeling as though you’ve had your brain snogged during open-skull surgery (a good thing). While some comedians trade on the mostly imagined rivalry between Glasgow and Edinburgh, the two cities can be of mutual benefit to one another as far as comedy is concerned: during the internationally renowned Edinburgh Festival, many London acts will take advantage of their being so far north and will also perform at Glasgow, especially at The Stand, for a mere sheckle.

It would be a shame to leave Glasgow without taking advantage of the diverse and brilliant standup it has to offer. Go and see Michael Redmond at The Stand on a Sunday evening and take it from there.