Robert Wringham – Page 5 – Robert Wringham // Writer-Comedian

Ill Communication

Originally published in Idler 66.

The occasional bout of illness can be a friend to the idle because it means we can stay in bed all day, responsibilities waived, surfing colourful cough-syrup dreams.

Fun though this can be, I’m forced to admit that there’s no substitute for good health. Not sort of health that comes from being a carb-dodging, 10k-running übermensch, I hasten to add, but at least the sort of healthfulness that means you can walk to the library without collapsing into a rubbery, wheezing heap. It’s also nice to go about your days without a Vicks Vapo-Stick hanging out of your nose. Besides, the proud idler needs no excuse to spend a day in bed. It is our god-given right and perhaps even a duty. I’m doing it right now, as it happens. And I’m wearing a fez.

It occurs to me that I haven’t been ill for ages, touch wood. The only explanation I can think of for this period of fine health is that I no longer go to work. Quit your job, fellow idlers, on health grounds. A job is like a gym class: a waste of effort, escaped with a note.

If the tyranny of what they call “practicality” means you’re unable to quit your job, perhaps you can still enjoy the health benefits enjoyed by quitters without actually requesting a P45. After all, you can benefit from the Mediterranean diet without moving to Florence. So let’s do it. Here’s my basic health programme for idlers, even those who have been cattle-prodded into work.

Take lunch. Taking an actual, proper lunch break affords you some privacy, a change of pace, a stretch, vital nutrition, and an hour away from the fluorescent lights, flickering screens and hot-desk bickering. Lunch is in decline, of course, today’s workers either too slavish or too frightened to take the full hour, even to leave the building and risk being late back to the desk. Idlers must reverse this trend. No more sad al desko sandwiches while gawping at social media (or, worse, continuing to work). Instead, go out for a stroll, eat good food, take the air, and reconnect with nature in small way by taking time to observe the antics of birds and ants. Short of feeding your head into a threshing machine, wilfully opting out of your enshrined-in-law daily lunch break is about the worst thing you can do for your health.

Walk to work. The sedentary nature of office work is perhaps the clearest way that it affects your health. Office managers are beginning to wake up to this and now offer “varidesks” (desks that can be adjusted to standing height) and “walking meetings” that serve to make everyone feel silly and unable to take notes. It’s too little too late and merely admits to the fact that office life is killing us. Workers need to seize opportunities to move, and a good way to do this is by walking to and from work. It’s a good way to escape the tedious Hell of a conventional commute (see this column in Idler 65) too. Walking to work can’t really count as flaneurism because the pre-planned destination deprives you of the dérive, but it’s the next best thing when you’re a time-starved drudge. It reconnects you with the streets and provides basic stretching of the leggies.

Say no to instant coffee. I’ve often felt that making coffee so readily available to a workforce resembles something from Aldous Huxley or a dystopian science fiction film. You can imagine a machine that vends little green hockey pucks of “phood,” which contain a productivity-enhancing drug and is welcomed by the workers as a cost-free perk despite it’s being an obvious measure to keep you down and toiling. Same thing, innit? There’s no way so much instant coffee can be good for you. Anything that purports to metamorphose into a consumable beverage from the state of industrial powder is almost certainly going to give you cancer. How can it not? It’s as far from nature as a CGI anvil.

Say no to office snacks. When I worked in an office, there were sugary snacks at every corner, which felt like compensation at the time but ultimately contributed to my depression and my pot belly. People would bring them in: souvenirs from Wage Slaves’ holidays, radially-sliced chocolate birthday cake, tubs of M&S rocky road, cookies and cupcakes from charitable bake sales. My theory is that workers bring snacks in such abundance as an inarticulate offer of friendship. Professionalism prevents you from saying “I love you,” which is also bad for your health.

Wear a micro-filter mask. When you pack a hundred white-collar workers, each from a different neighbourhood and each with their own families (who in turn work in other places or attend different schools), you’ve got yourself a mixing palette for GERMS. Some offices even add circular a air conditioning system to further guarantee that everyone breathes and re-breathes everyone else’s air. If you can’t work from home to escape such a plague pit, I suggest wearing a mask like a paranoid Howard Hughes type. Even if it doesn’t actually work as a pestilence barrier, it will serve as a visual protest to unhealthy office culture. It could be one of those dainty white surgical masks that Japanese tourists wear when visiting polluted Britain, or perhaps a full-head respirator thing like Darth Vader. Such a device would allow you to shut out some of the stressful office noise as well.

Oh, it’s hopeless isn’t it? Forget it. You can’t have good health if you work in an office. The anxiety, the sedentariness, the spine-contorting ergonomic swivel chairs, the viruses rattling through the ducts, the noise, the sugar, the screentime, the separation from anything that matters. It’s impossible. The open-plan office was clearly designed by an android ignorant of human biological needs, or else quite deliberately as a machine to wipe out a few of us. Just quit your job, I say! Idling is the only known cure.

★

If this resonated with you, you’re probably already doomed so you might as well buy my books Escape Everything! and The Good Life for Wage Slaves for additional wisdom from the goblin king.

Escape Housework

Originally published in Idler 59.

If, like me, you’re not overly fond of lifting fingers and – even worse – wrapping them around the handle of a mop, you’ll have considered hiring a cleaner. I’ve never made good on this idea but it crosses my mind whenever I have have to clean the toilet (yes, every single year). Goodness knows I’ve tried to find pleasure in vanquishing the residual cack from beneath the rim, but it’s just not something I’m into.

I’ve long suspected, however, that hiring a cleaner is one of those throw-some-money-at-it solutions that’s more trouble than it’s worth and best avoided by the truly idle. Not only would you have to pay this person with money just as easily spent on beer, but you’d have to organise their tasks in some way, check that they’ve been completed satisfactorily and, of course, remember when the cleaner is due to come over. Anticipating that visit would be a source of constant anxiety to me: the bandwidth of remembering the appointment would either take over my life or I’d simply forget. Routinely, I fear, our cleaner would walk in on a horizontal Wringham, collapsed on the chaise in nothing but a fez, dozing stomach littered with pistachio shells.

Aside from these practical doubts, the moral idler wants to reduce the amount of grunt work in the world and hiring a cleaner is the antithesis of this. If you want to escape undignified toil, you probably shouldn’t generate it for others. Imagine the shame of your cleaner grassing you up in a future volume of Crap Jobs!

No, the net dignity and idle benefits of doing your own housework are perhaps greater than paying someone else to do it. Besides, how hard can it possibly be? I think I might have cracked it, so here are my solutions to escaping the ardours of house work without appointing a scrubber.

Small is beautiful. We’ve discussed the glory of minimalism before, notably in Idler 55, but it’s relevant in reducing housework. The less you own, the less you’ll have to dust or tidy or wash or otherwise maintain. Simplicity wins every time. Likewise, the smaller your home, the less space you’re responsible for. Instead of living like a bankrupt aristo — rattling around, alone, in an unmanageable stately home — live like Major Tom in a capsule, neat as a pin.

Don’t bother. Quentin Crisp lived in a small, rented apartment even after making his millions from The Naked Civil Servant. He also, reputedly, never troubled himself with housework. “After the first four years the dirt doesn’t get any worse,” he famously wrote. It’s a matter of having courage enough to stare down the advancing dust without giving in. Crisp, apparently, would jump into his trousers “to avoid their trailing in the dust.”

Know that most housework doesn’t need doing at all. Even if you don’t go for “the full Quentin,” there’s all manner of shortcut to take. Your parents’ military standards need not be yours. A low-maintenance dandy, I’ve not ironed a shirt in about six years: if you hang a good-quality shirt immediately after washing, the wrinkles fall out on their own. I’ve not polished a shoe for a long time either; just wipe away any visible dirt with spit and a tissue. I’ve certainly not done anything as arduous as flipping a mattress recently, as you can easily buy one these days designed not to be flipped. The idea that bed linen should be washed weekly is absurd and washing trousers or jeans after just one wear is rather silly. While it’s nice to have a relatively tidy life, there’s no point inventing work for the sake of it.

Use housework to get out of other, worse things. If you need an incentive to clean just a little, you can at least trade it off against something even worse. “Sorry, I can’t come to your dreadful poetry night,” you can say, “only I’ve got a pile of laundry the size of the Matterhorn.” Personally, I use it as a reason to never, ever, go to the gym: if you use old-fashioned methods instead of technological ones (a brush instead of a vacuum cleaner) it’s tantamount to exercise anyway. I realise this isn’t strictly an “escape from housework”, but you can at least reduce strife elsewhere — like carbon offsetting.

Find someone who really likes cleaning. Everything is sexy to someone. Why not advertise in The Amorist or some kinky newspaper for an unpaid cleaner? You can sit back and bark commands through a megaphone while this poor, grateful, doubtlessly bald fellow scrubs your tiles. A helpful expression in this circumstance is “I want to see my face in it — not yours.” You might need to mop up one small stain at the end of all this yourself, unless you also happen to find someone who’s into that and before you know it you’ve got a fully-automated, housekeeping machine fuelled by deviancy.

Invite the kids do it. If you’re rueing your vain decision to help perpetuate the species, there might be a silver lining after all. Tom Hodgkinson writes in The Idle Parent, that it’s not difficult to enlist offspring in housekeeping efforts. Doing so will teach them responsibility while you rediscover Sambuca.

Don’t be messy. Instead of allowing the horror of housework to accumulate into the kind of super-chore necessitating a hazmat suit, it’s wiser to tidy as you go, or simply not generate dirt or untidiness to begin with. I realise this sounds a bit Mother Hennish but it’s the way to go. If you spill some sauce while cooking, wipe it up straight away. I haven’t “cleaned the kitchen” for years, I just keep it clean in this incremental, barely-noticeable way. If you couple this system with minimalism (having little to clean in the first place) and the rejection of less-purposeful cleaning tasks (giving bourgeois standards the cold shoulder) then it’s even easier. Take the garbage out when you’re on your way out to the pub. When you come back, hang your coat on its hook instead of tossing it on the bed. Put books back in the bookcase instead of leaving them lying around. There’s no need to hire a cleaner to do these things or even take off your fez.

★

If this resonated with you, you’re probably already doomed so you might as well buy my books Escape Everything! and The Good Life for Wage Slaves for additional wisdom from the goblin king.

Impatience

I just closed a browser tab containing a Radio 3 interview with composer Janet Beat.

I’d been at concert that involved some of her work on the weekend and thought “I’d like to learn more about her, how interesting!”

But today, when opening my laptop to do a bit of writing, I callously swiped it away as if dramatically clearing a table of clutter to make sweet lurve on it, sending cutlery clattering to the tiles and apples bouncing away down the lane.

“It is Wednesday,” I thought, “the weekend was ages ago. Snap out of it, buster.”

This is something I’ve noticed about getting a little bit older. Impatience. I’ve found myself thinking “come on, come on, come on” while waiting for train doors to open.

Closing that tab today was an act of slightly manic prioritising. Prioritising used to be about doing my best now and later. Now, it comes from a sense of low-level background terror that maybe there really isn’t enough time left to do everything.

Christ, I’m only 39!

No More Moths

I know that some of you are interested in hearing an end to the Moth Man Chronicles.

To those not in the know, we had a moth problem here at Castle Wringham, which led to trousers falling and eyeballs being attacked as well as just a ticklish feeling of being outnumbered. I once opened an umbrella only to have a moth flutter out of it. And on another occasion, a moth flew out of my wallet as I went to pay for some drinks, prompting the bartender to say not “hey big spender” like you might imagine but rather “I’ve never seen that happen in real life before.”

In the end, we did the only thing we could. We moved house.

Without us being there to constantly squish them, the old place must be triumphant with moths now and they probably think they won. Which I suppose they did. It’s probably VM Day back there now, the air alive with the beating of wings and a million tiny larvae rejoicing (“hooray! hooray!”) between dusty floorboards. If you walk past there at night, I bet you can hear this music playing.

As we unpacked our things in the new place, I remained vigilant. After barely escaping with our sanity, it wouldn’t do to have brought the fuckers with us. But more than anything, I was being vigilant purely because I have become vigilant. The war (yes, the war) has turned me into a flinching flibbertigibbet forever ready to strike. People talking to me are probably aware that one of my eyes forever roves like that of a chameleon, searching the room for silk-munching bastards.

As each of our possessions came out of its box, I checked it over thoroughly and sometimes actually found a moth. A lethargic one had hitched a ride in the tread of a shoe and another, improbably, was inside my satchel. We placed as many woolen items as possible in the freezer for a couple of weeks to destroy any eggs, right there next to the calippos.

Three months later, my eye no longer roves but we have still seen the very occasional moth. We have seen perhaps fifteen moths in this time, but in the old place we used to see fifteen a day. Even so, it’s troubling to spot even one of their number because, while it may just be that they are native to our town generally, the thought that we might have brought them with us from the old place like something from an Alien sequel, essentially taking us from modest horror story to an unending and unasked-for saga, gives me a shudder.

Will my teddy bear ever be able to take off his hazmat suit? Will I ever be able, truly, to relax and no longer to feel as if I have moths tickling the underside of my eyelids or running up and down my spinal cord to the sound of a xylophone?

Today, I found a likely source of the few moths we had seen. One of the sealed storage bags in which we keep spare bed linen had been breached. It was as maggotty as the People’s Princess.

Without unsealing it, I dumped the atrocity into a neighbour’s wheelie bin faster than an unexpected father’s day card. I then pored over the remaining bed linens for further mothy evidence. There was none. I carefully vacuumed the shelves of the storage closet with the attentiveness of a serial killer whose name we’ll never learn, emptying the dust bag a mile from home, returning only to sanctify the area with enough essence-of-cloves to crumble a vampire who just happened to be passing by and minding his own business. Folks… I think we might be good.

It makes sense that the maggotty bag was the source of the occasional moth we had seen. So, say it quietly, the saga is over. I no longer feel like I’m subletting from Buffalo Bill.

What, you think there should be one final “jump scare” with a winged monster bursting out of my rib cage? Grow up.

Yeeeaaaaaarghh! etc.

Coming Attractions

I’m working on two new books: a second miscellany and a first novel. Their titles are Stern Plastic Owl and Rub-a-Dub-Dub.

Update: Stern Plastic Owl has landed. Rub-a-Dub-Dub is still in the works.

Dash

I dashed down the street as fast as my Jack Skellington legs could carry me. Why had I left it so late? It was almost 11am. Tricky things to get out of, beds.

I was going to the library to borrow a book about mushrooms.

Honestly, Rob, you’re turning into a real Spengler, said a little voice in my head, Nobody else cares about the book about mushrooms. There’s no hurry.

But it’s not just any old book about mushrooms. This one looks really good and it’s brand new. I wanted to beat the rush.

It would be just my luck to reach the library at 11:05, only to be confronted by an even more Spenglerish bloke in the act of borrowing it. He’d be doing it in a smug way, probably. And wearing a hat with “I love mushrooms” sewn across it.

“Oh Sid,” the librarian would be saying with fluttering eyelashes, “You and your fungus.”

“Nice hat,” I’d say, grouchily.

“It’s a cap, actually,” he’d say. “Think about it.”*

(*Mushrooms have caps).

Well, how dare he? I surged at the thought of such a character pipping me to the good-looking mushroom book. And remember that none of this had even happened. There was no such person so far as I knew and I wasn’t even at the library yet. Maybe spending so much of the pandemic indoors was starting to affect me.

I stepped it out, faster, faster, determined to be the first person through the library door, perhaps sliding along the freshly-mopped floor of the tiled entryway for extra speed, beneath the granite gaze of the statue of the patron saint of shushing.

I zoomed around the other pavement hogs, passing each one like a pedestrian Ayrton Senna, wondering if they would have been the one to beat me to the book and, if so, should I flip them the bird? No. That would risk giving the game away.

I scanned each face in an act of wholly uncertified drive-by physiognomy for signs of mycophilia. Could she be one? How about her? That one? No.

Nobody’s interested, Rob, said the little voice again, it’s a book about mushrooms for goodness sake. It’s the moss incident all over again. You didn’t have to stay up so late that night. Nobody else was going to bid on it.

“Shut up!” I said out loud, much to the consternation of an old man walking a greyhound. I zipped around them. Yes, I overtook even a greyhound, the fastest hound in all of science, so intense was my need for speed.

I wondered what I would do if a friend saw me and came over for a chat. There was no time for such fripperies. I had to beat the “I love mushrooms” man, even if he was imaginary. But what would I say to them? Could I say “can’t stop! COVID!” and point to my mask?

But if we’re going that far, why not go all the way? “Can’t stop! AIDS!” People are a bit sensitive these days though, so it’s probably time I retired that particular Get Out of Jail Free card. Goodbye, old friend.

Zoom, zoom, zoom. Stride, stride, stride. Step, step, step. I must have that book. Must, must, must. (That’s what mushrooms like, by the way. The must.).

Soon, the library hove into view. Yes. Hove! Like Brighton but less so.

I dashed up to the gate. Gate? I’d never noticed a gate here before. Or a padlock for that matter. Locked. Closed? Closed.

The library was closed. PLEASE NOTE OUR NEW OPENING HOURS. TUE: 2pm-7pm.

The whole world was laughing at me and not in a good way. Well, maybe not the whole world. But two punters on a stopped bus had seen the less-than-casual way I’d goggled at that padlock. “Ho,” I could tell they were saying, “He probably wants that mushroom book.”

I slouched home, out of breath and vowing to get more exercise so that I wouldn’t feel so knackered next time a new mushroom/moss/spores/mildew book came into the library.

And then it happened. As I gnashed my teeth, there formed the most Spenglerish thought of all:

“Bloody library. Don’t think my blog won’t hear about this.”

A Hurried Weetabix and a Mandatory Descent into Commuter Train Hell

The following is an excerpt from The Good Life for Wage Slaves by Robert Wringham, published by P+H Books in 2020.

Things hadn’t gone according to plan.

It had been seven years since my Great Escape and I’d managed to avoid having a proper job ever since. What’s more, I hadn’t imagined that I’d ever have a proper job again, save perhaps something honorary or in a sort of “consulting detective” capacity like Sherlock Holmes in which people come to me and ask that I mull over their “little problem.” But that’s imagination for you.

I’d been tremendously cocky. Not only had I managed to escape the safe and respectable lower middle-class destiny that had been so gently laid out for me, I’d also made some rather disrespectful gestures while moonwalking out of the building. I’d ditched my job and abandoned my planned career after, well, let’s say “finding it wanting,” and then looked directly into the camera to tell the people at home how I’d never, ever, be coming back. The words “smell you later,” may or may not have been uttered but there’s really no point dwelling on details after all this time, is there?

To help fill the time between “death” and “now”—a period of time I have always assumed to be considerable and have yet to be persuaded otherwise—I would set up as a writer. It was a compromise and a climb down from my childhood ambition of being a balls-out song-and-dance man, but it felt accessible to me as a creative art and one that wouldn’t involve any expensive new shoes. I also liked the idea of keeping things small, of hanging out the proverbial shingle, and living off the fat of my own brain with nobody to tell me what to do. So this is what I did. It was so lovely a life that I’d recommend it to anyone of a similar nature. It was my idea of the good life and I actually had it.

My days involved joyful writing, peaceful flâneur-like walks around the neighbourhood, occasional travel, plenty of beer, and the much-loved natural light from the windows of our Montreal apartment. The nights were spent with my love monkey (“wife” seems so undignified), either at home or at friendly parties. Through frugality, creativity and careful planning, I’d destroyed my addiction to the monthly paycheque. It was lovely, lovely, lovely.

But suddenly I was back in an office. It had cubicles and everything, just like in The Matrix. I was listening to shrill, ringing telephones, the back-and-forth zub-zub of photocopiers, and the chap-chap-chap of Prince Chunk, a co-worker (who, on balance, I liked but bloody hell) eating his Tesco cheese and onion sandwiches with his goddamn fucking mouth open again.

No, things hadn’t gone according to plan.

What is the good life? I will tell you. After scratching my head over contradictory philosophy and social psychology books, after reading the diaries of the terminally ill (see Escape Everything! for that sad story), and after paying attention while living in the alternate modes of Wage Slave and Free Radical, I can reveal that these are the keys (if not the very substance) of the good life: health, friendship, love, lots of free time, purposeful or purposeless intellectual fulfillment, sensual pleasure, an appreciation of our existing surroundings (as opposed to working hard to achieve a better situation), a satisfying creative output in which we can take personal pride, a clean and dignified place to live.

That’s it. I thought I’d better get it out of the way towards the front of the book. If I’d put it at the end as if it were a conclusion, you’d have been furious and thrown the book across the room. I didn’t want to make you work so hard for an in-plain-sight Holy Grail succinct enough that it could be printed in a reasonably large typeface on the back of a pornographic playing card.

It shouldn’t be too hard to achieve those things, should it? Out of the nine points, at least six of them are achieved by many zoo animals. You can do it too! Fling that poop!

“The good life” is a concept from ancient philosophy. It’s about how to live well when given the gift of life. The Good Life also happens to be the name of a 1970s television sitcom, the opening titles of which show an adorable little cartoon bird skirting around the edge of a flower, but that’s not what we’re talking about today.

In the ancient world it came to prominence with Aristotle who called it “eudaemonia” and continued with Seneca and Epicurus, both of whom, despite fundamental differences over how to achieve this state, advocated a life free from suffering and rich in simple pleasure. The case for the good life has been reopened at various points in later Western history, notably with the Bloomsbury Group in the 1930s and various intentional living projects of the 1960s and ’70s.

The concept is old but it’s also topical. It is still with us, perhaps more prominently than ever now that people have more potential (if not always actual) wiggle room when it comes to time and how to spend it. The COVID-19 lockdowns of 2020 led to many people re-evaluating their life priorities but even in normal times, most of us think about the good life every day; first thing in the morning and last thing at night. It concerns our status as people, our identity, our ideas of success, and what constitutes time well-spent or time wasted. It is present in magazines and weekend supplements about “work-life balance” and “self care;” in workplace negotiations around annual leave, parental leave, or the length of the working week; and among academics and activists planning for a future increasingly likely to be characterised by machine automation.

The defining requirements of the good life, we can see, are exceptionally obvious and yet oddly elusive. They are obvious in that we know them from Hollywood romcoms and Disney movies, but elusive in that we consistently fail to observe them. Sometimes this is because of truly mitigating circumstances, but often it’s because they’re so obvious that we end up ignoring them. It’s too easy to say “yes, of course friendship is an important thing, it goes without saying but…” and to put it on the back burner while zooming around, doing less-important but seemingly urgent things. “There’s some devil in us that drives us to and fro on everlasting idiocies,” wrote Orwell, “There’s time for everything except the things worth doing.”

The good life is a positive vision of the sort of life we could lead as high-functioning primates with countless options and a civilisation to have fun with. It’s about getting a meaningful and worthwhile experience from our time on Earth, or of making the most meaningful and worthwhile contribution. Some go-getters work to propel themselves towards this vision, dedicating significant time and resources to the task. Others wistfully pine for it. Many believe the good life to be too far away to be worth the effort of striving for it, while others believe it to be largely a state of mind and available immediately through positive thinking.

The good life is subjective in that everyone has their own vision of what it might consist of. Some people are humble while others are ambitious; some solitary, others social. “It would be a boring world,” my mum once said, possibly in an act of diplomacy intended to stop my sister and I from murdering each other, “if we were all the same.” But strangely, most people’s visions with regards to the good life are remarkably similar once we blow away the specifics. A person-specific statement like “I want to live in the countryside with Steve and raise three beautiful children together and to never again wear a formal shirt” or “I want to live on a boat with Irma and a cat called Mr. Pickles with lots of scatter cushions around” can be simmered down to “I want to spend the bulk of my time in a place that suits my taste, with the close company of people I love and with minimal discomfort.”

Something I like about the phrase “the good life” is that good is so pleasingly unambitious. Not great or best but good. Not all, but enough. Good is so mild and decent and ungreedy. It runs counter to the “winner takes it all,” “getting ahead” mentality. I daresay that the practices of the Type A personality—all the dashing around and post-it notes and high-fives—are necessary if you want to live the so-called best life and to squeeze out every last drop of potential like a miser dehydrating a penny of potential value but we don’t have to aim so joylessly high. The good life is enough, and far less manic and obsessive. Aim not low, but lower than high, is part of my message. We can’t all take over the world.

Competition, striving with others to be the absolute best, is a waste and likely impossible anyway. There’s limited space at the top. But who needs the top? What’s the point in expending so much energy fighting and struggling to reach the so-called top, when happiness and comfort are so easily achieved when we think in terms of the good life. We should look for a happy niche somewhere in the middle instead of elbowing everyone out of our way in a harebrained stampede to the top. Besides, the consequence of reaching the top is that nobody likes you anymore. Best is, when all is said and done, a bit silly. Good we can manage.

Friendship. Sensual pleasure. Intellectual fulfillment. Time. It can all be gained relatively directly without the need for a wide run-around, accumulating money and possessions as if life were some sort of zany board game and realising too late that none of this was important at all.

Until recently, my instinct has been to say that a Wage Slave cannot have the good life almost by definition. This is because the sheer amount of time, energy and willpower sacrificed to a full-time job is an obstruction to the nine tenets set out above.

Wage Slavery–an urgent need to pay the rent with only one’s labour (or increasingly, time) to exchange for the necessary dosh–eclipses the good life and what would ideally be a support system to the good life becomes the main project and the main stuff of life. The good life, no matter what your design for it, is unlikely to involve being woken at an unholy hour by a loudly-beeping electronic device followed shortly by a hurried Weetabix and a mandatory descent into commuter train Hell.

I now believe it to be possible for a Wage Slave to experience the good life, though it is uncommon to witness. The reason it is uncommon is because we don’t generally know–and are not encouraged to know–how it is done. As a correspondent to the letters page of a magazine recently put it: “If all you know is work during the day and the couch in the evening, it’s hard to engage in the good life once you get the chance.” So true.

I now believe it is possible after all because I was forced to find out how to do it. I refused to let a two-and-a-half-year sentence to mandatory Wage Slavery (we’ll come to the specifics of the mandatory nature of this “sentence” in a moment) take away the calm state of mind I had enjoyed while travelling and writing and while living in Montreal. Not permanently anyway.

The standard attempts to bring the good life into the workplace fail because (a) we have a poor understanding of the good life thanks to our thorough hoodwinking by consumer culture; and (b) the prevailing culture in the West is a slavish devotion to work and a prejudice against simple, apparently-unproductive pleasure. Most attempts to bring the good life into work are doomed to failure. And yet, I believe, there is hope. As we know, there are people who are no longer (or never were) Wage Slaves but still fail to live the good life. And there are people who live the good life but also have jobs. Both groups are minorities but where we cannot join them directly, perhaps we can learn from them. Let us educate ourselves about the good life, what it is and how to have it. Let us, when doomed to be Wage Slaves, work out how to bring the good life in.

This book is an investigation into the good life from the perspective of a sleepy vegetarian on an ergonomic swivel chair in a noisy office to the side of a congested sliproad in an overlooked city at a northernmost point of a winding-down capitalist Empire.

But first… this!

But first what, eh? Read the rest in deluxe paperback or as an digital format from P+H Books.

Get It Here

Tomato Plant

We were visiting Alan at his allotment a couple of weeks ago and he asked if we’d like to take a tomato plant from his greenhouse.

I don’t remember saying yes but I was carrying a tomato plant in my hands as we walked home, so I suppose I must have.

A few days later, Samara suggested that we replant it into a bigger pot.

“Do we have to?” I protested. I wasn’t sure the effort was necessary. It was fine as it was. I called Alan to find out.

“Oh yes,” he said as if it were the most obvious thing in the world, “it will need repotting.”

“How will I do that?” I asked, and I could hear him thinking me an idiot down the line.

We live in a city, miles away from anything like a garden centre, not that I’d be seen dead in one anyway. Plant pots and soil just aren’t a part of my life.

The last time I needed a plant pot for something, I had to buy it on Amazon. It had cost £3 and took three days to arrive and two entirely different “I’m sorry you were out” cards. I didn’t want to go through all that again.

“Come back to the allotment,” he said, “and I’ll find you a pot.”

“Okay,” I said, “Tuesday?”

“Tuesday,” he said.

On Tuesday, Alan called to tell me to meet him at his lock-up instead of his allotment. “Sure,” I said. I didn’t mind because the lock-up is closer to my flat than the allotment. Unfortunately, some heavy rain the night before meant that the lane in which the lock-up lives was a brown river of mud.

“Why did you wear those shoes?” asked Alan, looking at my mud-engulfed brogues.

“Well, it was these or my slippers.”

“Don’t you have any Wellies?”

“No,” I said. I thought of that bit in Seinfeld when Kramer asks Jerry if he’s got any black paint. Jerry says, “Yeah, in my toolshed, next to the riding mower.”

As we stood in the rain, up to our ankles in mud, we chatted about this and that and finally, he pulled two plant pots from his car’s back seat.

“Two?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said, “One for now and another for in a couple of weeks.”

I hadn’t thought this was going to be such a project. I hadn’t consented, so far as I could remember, to any of it. And now there was mud in my shoes and rainwater in my socks and I was being handed two plant pots, some instructions for the future, and apparently a need get some serious outdoor boots if I wanted to get ahead in life.

“Okay,” I said in a sort of coma.

A rat the size of a guinea pig but as fast as a cat suddenly struck out into the lane. I decided to go home.

“Don’t forget your pots,” said Alan.

I did not forget my pots.

We repotted the tomato plant. When Alan came over tonight, he saw how much the tomato plant had grown and how healthy-looking, and he seemed to be impressed. Maybe even surprised. He nodded approvingly.

As he was leaving, I asked if he’d take the third pot back with him. “It’s really too big,” I said, “I don’t want such a big bucket of soil in my living room.”

“Just keep it for now,” he said.

He was going home on his bike and the pot would be too big to carry.

“And it’s up to you,” he said, “but you’ll need a bigger pot if you want to get any tomatoes.”

And then he was gone.

If I want to get any tomatoes? I had never considered that any of this had been about the tomatoes. I suppose I thought it was about the extra greenery or something.

Do I want to harvest my own tomatoes? Not especially. So long as civilisation stands, I am content to buy my tomatoes in the shops, rarely, on a whim, for 40p. And after civilisation, I probably won’t be worried about tomatoes. Wellington boots maybe.

How long do I have to keep this plant alive for? I suppose I’d been carrying a general assumption around that tomato plants die in the autumn. But what do I know? Do I need to update my will?

Tomatoes. Why would anyone want to grow tomatoes?

Pandemic Moments

There’s a small park near to our flat. It contains only four trees, but they’re quite large and their intermingled leaf canopy teems with life. Pausing there today, with no car noise thanks to the lockdown, it feels like being in a real wood.

We hear birds tweeting above us and twigs snap softly underfoot. The sun shines through the branches, casting patterns onto the earth. I feel a brief, welcome connection to nature. I could live in the woods, I think, insanely.

Suddenly a piece of dust violently blows into my eyeball even though there isn’t any wind. As I’m trying to extract it, a sharp piece of tree bark falls from above and hits the back of my neck. “Ow!” I say, when it surprisingly stings.

Nature. They should cordon the whole thing off.

Our through-the-wall neighbours, whom we never meet and do not know, are very excitable. They sometimes burst into blissful hysterics that can only be attached to some wonderful near miss. It’s probably a computer game or something, but I like to imagine they’re training a dog to catch treats thrown from zany angles.

Samara unintentionally reveals at breakfast that she thinks the song, “Popcorn,” is called “Greensleeves.”

I don’t tease her because I’ve made similar mistakes myself, and to illustrate what “Popcorn” is, I sing it: “pip-pap-pap-pip-pippy-pap / pip-pap-pap-pip-pippy-pap / pip-pap-pip-pop-pipperty, pip-pop-pipperty-pip-pip-pip-pap-pop.”

“Oh,” she says, “What’s Greensleeves then?”

“Does the phrase ‘Hey Nonny Nonny’ mean anything to a Canadian?” I ask.

“No,” she says.

“Well,” I say, “it’s like something Tom Hodgkinson would play on a lute. I think it’s Medieval or something. It makes me think of minstrels trying to see who can play it the longest before the king finally snaps and orders their hands lopped off.”

I hum it for her.

“I’ve heard that on Call Waiting,” she says.

“That’s the one.”

Culture in lockdown, since the pubs and cafes are still closed, happens in take-out queues. Today I talk to a man two metres away about my renewed enthusiasm for Reggae.

I like how residential areas are more happening places now that everyone stays close to home. A common sight in our neighborhood is that of bare feet sticking out of windows, wriggling in the sun.

Our living room is bathed in sunshine in the mornings, while our neighbours across the street get theirs in the late afternoon. Sometimes, I’ll be crashed out on the chaise with a book or something when I get a sense of being watched.

Invariably, it’s Deep Roy, an older woman who lives opposite and makes a point of opening her window to fully bask in this 4pm light. I think it’s her daily mindfulness moment or something.

Her eyes are closed in peaceful contemplation whenever I look, but she faces squarely into our flat and it’s a little disconcerting when you’re concentrating on the fourth level of your precariously-balanced playing card tower or putting some science into getting your porn site search terms just right.

Yes, Deep Roy is my name for her. She’s not a little person in case you’re wondering. She just looks like Deep Roy. What’s wrong with that? I like Deep Roy.

On a walk this afternoon, I pass the small local cinema I used to go to pre-lockdown. All closed up now, it was my sometimes treat to attend the £7 matinee of whatever’s on, a great way to avoid doing anything useful.

It’s not a very good cinema. It’s too small to enjoy anything Star Wars-y and once, when I saw It, it smelled like wee.

It crosses my mind today though, that it’s such a small cinema, the bosses might be amenable to my calling up and asking for a private screening. Just me, eating popcorn (not greensleeves), in the centre seat of the otherwise empty auditorium. That wouldn’t contravene lockdown rules, would it?

“What would you like to see, sir?” a solicitous manager would ask on my theatrical fanning out of a hundred quid in notes.

“Just put something violent on and leave me alone,” I’d say.

I do wish I had some money.

I read somewhere that a certain sign of dehydration is “if your urine has a bit of colour to it.”

It’s one of those lines that will change a life forever if you’re not careful. I spend the rest of the day systematically drinking water and monitoring the tinge of my whizz.

My urine always “has a bit of colour to it.” Doesn’t everyone’s? That colour is yellow. Everyone knows that urine is yellow. Don’t they? Isn’t it?

Idea for a project. Piss Diary. Or, The Yellow Book.

Another life-changing phrase entered my lug hole 242 days ago (you’ll see in a moment how I know this).

It was Laura, in a bar one night, when she bragged about reaching “enlightened” status in the productivity app we both use.

“I am enlightened,” she said, dementedly.

I was impressed. To reach enlightened status–the very last status after passing through the ranks of “guru” and “genius” and so on–she must have completed something like 100,000 tasks.

I hadn’t ever cared about my productivity status but that was because I’d never thought it possible to end it. And here was Laura, claiming to have done so. “I am enlightened.” It wasn’t her fault, but she’d sewn a seed of madness in me.

The productivity app allows you to set a goal of a daily number of tasks. I set mine to a modest three tasks, a task being something in the scale of “mention Deep Roy in your blog” or “buy more tea.”

Doing three things of that ilk did not seem to be troublesome or overly ambitious, but I still ended up somewhat in thrall to the streak. Before going to bed each night, if I hadn’t done three proper things, I’d try to remember if I’d done something unscheduled, add it to the app, and cross it off immediately to make up the shortcoming. Occasionally, I’d cheat outright and put “skive” on it and tick that off.

Yesterday, I forgot do a third task and the app was kind enough to point it out to me this morning. “You have completed your goal ZERO days in a row,” it said. “Your longest streak is 241 days: 12 October 2019-June 9 2020.”

The dream is over. It’s like the end of a game of Jenga. I feel oddly at ease.

When I mention this on Twitter, Todd replies that streaks are bad for him and make him anxious.

I realise now that it’s the same for me and that I’d been waiting ages for an accident like yesterday to happen. Free at last.

It rained quite heavily last night. We live on the top floor and a drip has made itself known in the spare room.

This is going to be a lockdown saga, of course, but I’m glad the problem is in the spare room and not dripping onto my actual sleeping head like last time.

I email the letting agency for directions and I put a “drip” emoji in the subject line, just to show that I’m a friendly guy and that I’m not angry with them.

Career? What a Scam!

Originally published in Idler 48.

With this column, editor Tom has asked me to share my escape plans and tips for breaking free of wage slavery and consumerism. I don’t mind sharing them: I want as many people as possible to escape the systems that ensnare us and juice us for our life blood. Besides, I have no shortage of escape plans. I collect them. I create my own. I dream them up in the night.

Over the coming months we’ll speak of exciting job replacement schemes, anti-consumerist wheezes, cautious half-measures, and philosophical internal adjustments. We can escape into an idle paradise of our own devising if we want to. I say “we” because I believe we’re all in the same boat, but you don’t need much social backup in order to escape: just do it yourself.

As an idler you’ll already have come to the conclusion that career is the single most obvious scam ever devised. And yet, it can be awfully tempting to get mixed up with it. If you haven’t already, I implore you to put the whole silly idea out of your head this very minute. Abandoning the idea of career altogether is the single most practical thing you can do today and here are my tips for doing it.

1. Know that it’s a scam. You know it intuitively, but you must place this knowledge at the very top of your consciousness and act upon it. Much like motorcars, wristwatches and fancy hats, career is sold to us a way to distinguish ourselves. It’s a product designed to appeal to our need for identity but ultimately to pump our energies off to wealthy folk at the top. It’s really a kind of pyramid scheme and no matter how clever you are it’s quite impossible to beat the system. Seeing work as identity instead of the soul-crushing waste of time it clearly is might be a good deal for those born into political or showbiz dynasties, but a poor one for the majority doomed to be salespeople, quantity surveyors, or (shudder) “co-directors of digital innovation.” So know it truly, reject it, and tell others: career is a scam.

2. Understand that it’s socially irresponsible. We’re encouraged to get onto a career path as soon as possible, told that thoughtfully selecting our GCSE subjects at the age of 14 will give us an advantage. But even if this were true (and it isn’t) what is meant by this advantage? That upstreaming your peers is somehow good or noble or right? Only a sociopath would believe that. Once you understand that career requires you to clamber over the corpses of your friends, it will hopefully be less appealing.

3. Choose to live in the present. Career requires us to live in the future by instilling a constant need for progression, and ultimately to live in the past with its promise that we’ll one day look back on a glorious toil narrative from an armchair somewhere. Bugger that. Get yourself an armchair today instead. Sit in it, take a nap, and gradually come up with more exciting ideas than ogling the ever-advancing next rung of the ladder or some distant retirement vision. You can’t win at careerism, so my advice is to stop trying before it’s too late.

4. Put career into perspective. If you want to put your mind off the siren song of career, it helps to embrace the full glory of reality by recalling that no action matters very much. We’ll all be dead one day and that’s fine. Put your feet up. You’ve got a hundred years at best and you’re already a good way through them. And imagine dying in pursuit of a career, cracking your nut on a shelf edge or choking on something unspeakable in a staff canteen. It’s better to enjoy the gentle ride down the river on your own terms.

5. Revel in the vagaries. To be successful in a career you must have a goal and scramble towards it with single-minded vigour. Instead, be vague about your ambitions and enjoy life. Thus spake Oscar Wilde: “If you want to be a grocer, or a general, or a politician, or a judge, you will invariably become it; that is your punishment. If you never know what you want to be, if you live what some might call the dynamic life but what I will call the artistic life, if each day you are unsure of who you are and what you know you will never become anything, and that is your reward.”

When you see career as a scam, that it encourages you to act in ways contrary to your interests and even those of society (which needs compassion, not careerism), it will be less tempting to involve yourself and far easier to escape for good. Career: just walk away.

🐌

If this resonated with you, you’re probably already doomed so you might as well buy my books Escape Everything! and The Good Life for Wage Slaves for additional wisdom from the goblin king.

Escape Rustout

Originally published in Idler 61.

Thanks to my tenuous association with workplace psychology, I was invited to attend a managerial conference in a corporate hotel on the sunkissed banks of the M8. It was always going to be dreadful, but I attended out of anthropological interest and also because I thought there might be some free wine to be had. There was no wine, only orange juice, but I found the strength not to tear the place to pieces.

My souvenir of the day (or my “take-home” as these managerial types strangely say) was a single word: “rustout”. In contrast to the more familiar “burnout,” when a wage slave’s head pops from having too much to do, “rustout” is when he or she simply decays, physically and spiritually, because of boredom.

At first, it looks like just another pro-work idea. It makes me think of a Thomas the Tank Engine character who, not one for pulling carriages all day long, stays in the engine shed and falls to rust. “It’s train cancer, Percy,” says the Fat Controller, “and wholly deserved.” That is surely the intended implication of this “rustout” and apparently the word comes from a German expression that “he who rests, rusts.”

But what caught my attention is the distinction between burnout and rustout, partly in its own right as an observation of the two ways a job might destroy the soul, but also the that the managerial creed know about this, its headmen perceiving two diagnosable workplace conditions.

Unfortunately, the treatments they’re currently peddling leave a much to be desired. The working theory is that while burnout comes from too much stress, rustout comes from too little. Give the rusting worker more to do, they say.

My own experience tells me that office rustout comes not from being unstressed but from not valuing the mission of work full stop. It comes from knowing that no matter how you slice it, the whole thing is ultimately a waste of human life and you’re only there because there’s rent to pay. Boredom springs from the fact that office life doesn’t — can’t — provide spiritual rewards for a moist, creative, human brain. It’s not even supposed to. It’s an economic arrangement.

Under these conditions, even when you’re challenged by quantity or quality of your tasks, the challenge only exists within the meaningless confines of the Holodeck of the workplace. So how can one really escape rustout?

Don’t go to work in the first place. There are many ways to avoid reporting to a job every day, some of which have been covered in previous editions of this column. Avoid jobs wherever you can as, in the modern age, they are uniformly unsatisfying. Never accept a job and you’ll never experience rustout. With so much to do and experience, rustout does not happen in the real world.

If you must go to work, use your time at the desk to plot your escape. Instead of fantasising about a lottery win or a distant pension like other wage slaves, actively plot your escape. Consider self-employment, creative practice, reducing expenses and saving the difference to bring retirement radically forward; plot the steps you’d take to get such a project of the ground. A sitting position with the access to the Internet and a notepad to hand is no bad starting point for an escape attempt. The very act of finding moments at work in which to do this without the knowledge of one’s supervisors will keep things interesting and help to avoid oxidation.

Work part-time. Find a way (see this column in Idler 53) to reduce your employment to three days instead of five. Embrace minimalism and the anti-consumerist mindset so that you can afford the reduction in income. A three-day work week is not so bad: you have the novelty of a first day in the office after a long weekend, the relief of a hump day, and then the Friday Feeling before another long weekend. The diversity of feeling along your three days and the reduction in resentment about the work’s infringement upon one’s life will help you to avoid becoming a rusting shed engine.

Lead a good life outside work. Harry Hill once said a bizarre thing to a heckler, a retort now famous among comedians. He said “You say that to me now, but I know that when I get home, there’s a nice roast chicken in the oven.” What he meant is that he’s got other stuff going on, a private treat waiting for him outside his rather silly job. It’s easy to fall into a cycle of returning from work at 6pm to nothing but television and some utilitarian cookery before the desperate need to sleep. This is a considerably rust-promoting pattern and it’s a life your managers and employers are perfectly happy for you to lead, regardless of any noise they like to make at conferences about reducing rustout. Defy them.

Despite learning of the condition they’ve dubbed “rustout,” the solution proffered by office managers is to pile more work onto the bored wage slave, to find a balance between explosion and implosion. What kind of a world is that? Escape it.

★

If this resonated with you, you’re probably already doomed so you might as well buy my books Escape Everything! and The Good Life for Wage Slaves for additional wisdom from the goblin king.

Escape the Hot New Thing

Originally published in Idler 62.

Patience, at the risk of sounding like an aunty, is a virtue. It really is. Patience keeps you sane when you’re waiting for a bus and, more vitally, is the key to escaping The Hot New Thing.

The Hot New Thing is a kind of curse. It leaves you forever dissatisfied, slurps the money from your wallet, shatters your sense of perspective, and wastes your time. It is fuelled rather negatively by what the kids on social media call “FOMO,” the Fear of Missing Out. It requires a lot of undignified chasing and “keeping up,” two things that are inherently anti-idle.

The Hot New Thing is also anti-idle in that it requires you to act! You have to tune in at a particular time, get yourself down to a certain place before it all runs out, gobble it up before the world moves on. Meanwhile, what we might call The Good Old Stuff doesn’t require anything of you at all. It’ll just float into your lap when you need it. You’ll be browsing the shelves of a library or flipping through the sale rack, and there it will be.

The Hot New Thing is expensive, not because it’s good but because it’s hot. It’ll be cheaper later on when it’s cooled down. In fact, it will probably be free later because the world won’t care about it anymore, and supply and demand will have relieved it of a price tag.

The Hot New Thing is rude. It jumps the queue. There you are, in your idler’s deckchair, minding your own business and savouring a lovely old Penguin, when suddenly The Hot New Thing pops up and demands attention. Well, I’m sorry but it can wait. You’re not obliged to pick up the telephone just because it’s ringing. Culture is not a whack-a-mole, to be anticipated in a state of urgent readiness and then seized upon and savaged. Life is not about rolling as much claptrap through your system as possible and getting it all safely into the outbox.

Worship of The Hot New Thing would have the world in a state of perpetual dissatisfaction. Even as it’s happening, what professed to be The Hot New Thing is cooling and The All-New Hot New Thing is on its way. In the cinema, they show trailers for movies due for release in a month’s time or “next summer” or “in the fall,” and you think “Jesus, I’ve only just sat down to watch this one.” The film industry wants you excited for dinner before you’ve even had your breakfast.

The cultural filter that comes to your rescue when you escape The Hot New Thing is remarkable. When you live perpetually five years behind everyone else, only the finest things reach you because history has already had its way. This week I watched two good movies — Birdman and Nightcrawler — because their reputation as films worth watching has remained intact for five years, not through marketing but through evolution. The most popular films of the same year were called Transformers: Age of Extinction, The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies, and Maleficent. Who cares about any of that lot now? What a load of junk! And yet at the time, they were The Hot New Thing. If you’d gone to see Maleficent on its opening weekend like a good little consumer you’d have wasted your time and money. You could have been enjoying the very best of 2009 instead and then, five years later, watching Nightcrawler and Birdman for 50p from a Glasgow Cancer Research shop, bypassing Maleficent, whatever that might have been, entirely.

And that’s just the five-year filter. I recently saw Network (1976) and Some Like it Hot (1962) for the first time. I read Patrick Hamilton’s Hangover Square (1941) — as recommended by John Newlands in the Idler letter pages — and Orwell’s Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936). These were joyful and surely among the finer fruits of the twentieth century, and yet cost not a penny thanks to the public library and a little patience. Good things remain fresh almost forever or are, better yet, timeless. A Beano from five years ago (5p on eBay or free in a dentist’s waiting room) is basically the same thing as this week’s Beano (£2.75). Good things come (there’s my aunty again) to those who wait.

Older books or films or records are too often seen as landfill or yesterday’s news. Worse still, anything with a whiff of “classic” about it might be consumed as some sort of wholesome moral roughage — that terrible feeling of “I really should have read Of Mice and Men by now.” Something old and whose reputation has survived is not necessarily high-minded or highbrow though. Think of Gremlins (1984) or Stephen King’s first five books (1974-1978) or Sherlock Holmes (1887-1927).

Speaking of Holmes, I broke my ethic of patience in 2010 to watch Sherlock on the BBC iPlayer as soon as it came out. I didn’t care for it. Cumberbatch is acceptable as Shirley but at least half the enjoyment of Holmes is the escape from modern life and onto the frosted flagstones of 19th-Century Baker Street, so a modernisation would need to add something extraordinary to make up for all those dreary, managerial skyline shots of the Oligarchs’ London, gherkins and all. Andrew Scott’s portrayal of Moriarty is almost as cringeworthy as everyone’s pretending to like it. Today, Sherlock, The Hot New Thing of 2010, is barely remembered and nobody seems to like Cumberbatch anymore at all. It never became The Good Old Stuff. I should have trusted my rule and waited.

You can enjoy The Good Old Stuff in peace without being cast asunder in The Big Conversation. Nobody’s interested in your thoughts about a movie from six or sixty years ago. Unless they are, of course, in which case you’ve got a friend worth keeping.

The wise idler allows things to age a little — to congeal and marinate in time — before letting them in. The wise idler is patient.

★

If this resonated with you, you’re probably already doomed so you might as well buy my books Escape Everything! and The Good Life for Wage Slaves for additional wisdom from the goblin king.

Outdoors In

Originally published in New Escapologist Issue Eight.

Fresh air is overrated. If it’s not carbon monoxide, my city-slicker lungs refuse to breathe it. A born urbanite, I prefer the human-made and the artificial to the natural. I’m perfectly happy for the natural world to continue unspoiled: I’d just prefer not to be in it.

People say that our built environment will be the death of us–the asbestos, the chemicals, the GM food and all that–but do you think nature wouldn’t kill us unthinkingly as soon as we give it chance? There are mountains that would collapse upon us without a moment’s consideration; oceans that would engulf us; tiny insects that would crawl up our piss pipes and lay their thousands of tiny eggs in the unnamed cavity within. All for no reason whatsoever!

There’s a book of mawkish animal photography called With Nature and a Camera. You know what I call it? With Nietzsche and a Camera. The natural world–the sublime, as artists call it–is as bleakly nihilistic as it gets. Nietzsche said “when you look into the abyss, the abyss looks into you.” Not in my experience. Looking out at the the sea, to me, is like looking into the unseeing glass eye of a taxidermied stoat.

Give me the indoors. Give me the city. Give me a bong and a box set of The Wire and fuck off with your natural world.

My experience of it is minimal. The last time I slept in a tent was at a music festival festival (as far from civilisation as I’m ever willing to stray) at which a fourteen-year-old twatofaboob started a barbecue mere inches from my head and almost kebabbed me in my sleep.

I once went “munro bagging” with some ignoramus colleagues. Far from being an attempt to seduce a waitress from a 1950s theme diner like I thought, it was actually a testosterone-fuelled clamber up a Scottish mountain high enough to have snow on the bastarding top. Needless to say, none of the things I brought with me were of any help whatsoever. It’s the last place on Earth you’d need to be wearing a New York Yankees costume. The headlines the morning after twelve librarians were airlifted from a mountain are not worth looking up.

And yet, Harmony With Nature is all too often cited as a key to the good life, a way to reconnect with our primal selves or something. Personally, I tend to reconnect with my primal self whenever I take a day off from work: I let my beard grow and roam around bellowing in my pants. But Tom Hodgkinson and his friends would have us “till the soil” and he seems happy. Journalist Richard Touv points out that a lack of nature in one’s life can lead to attention deficit disorder, depression, and obesity; and I’m living proof of that. So here’s a number of ways in which urbanite slackers such as myself might be able to merge safely with nature without it unthinkingly killing you in the process.

1. A fish tank

Short of a pet rock, an aquarium fish must be the least inspiring house animal of all time. They’re less of a domesticated friend than an aquatic prisoner. They don’t know who you are, don’t know how to relate to you, and I’ not even sure they’re aware of being in a tank. Fuck. They’re the Big Brother contestants of the natural world, forgetfully re-exploring the eight literal corners of their world, occasionally interacting with each other in the most perfunctory of ways, and living for the moment that the lid opens and they can suck up their tetra flakes, pinched onto the meniscus as if by the hand of God.

The great thing about a fish tank though, is that a whole ecosystem can be represented there: as well as fish, you can have plant life, algae, filth-gobbling snails. It’s a perfectly safe cuboid of nature in your own home. I like their long stringy turds too. Beats watching golf.

2. Cabinet of curiosities

If you’re a seasoned traveller or have friends who are seasoned travellers or have access to eBay, a cabinet of curiosities is a great way of allowing a sample of the outside in. River-polished stones; prehistoric fossils; paper-light small animal skulls; dried leaves and flowers; snake skins; anthropological pilferings: all objects you could add to your Victorian case of scavenged talking points. Not much of a joke is it, this one? I rather like the idea.

3. Pet Man

I used to have a pet man. He didn’t know he was my pet man, but the fish didn’t know they were my pet fish either. A glance out of my living room window afforded me a view through the curtainless bay window of one of nature’s most wretched specimens: a bachelor. He would sit, watching television, in his pants all day long. Around midnight, he’d fold his couch out into a bed, upon which he would sleep from midnight to noon. The effect from my perspective was of having a pet man, his one-room home a kind of human-being-itarium. “How’s your pet man?” people would ask me on the phone. A quick look out the window would qualify me to say, “He’s watching the television.” “Great!” they’d say.

4. Snow globe

The snow globe is nature safely contained in a glass blister. Terry Pratchett, in one of his books, calls them City Eggs, the idea being that a snow globe is the ovoid state of a living city: the landmarks of Paris or London or Cairo surrounded by glittery albumen. I love this idea. In the event that you ever have to go out into real nature, away from civilised society, take one of these City Eggs along with you as an emergency measure. Gawp into it and pine for home, remember the romantic smells of kebab shops and the sound of teenagers puking in the streets. When at home, as everyone in their right mind will be, give the snow globe a shake and imagine what it might be like to be in some weather.

5. One of those framed pictures of a woodland grove complete with trickling waterfall that you sometimes get in Indian restaurants

To complete the illusion of being in a woodland grove, why not buy one of those magic tree air fresheners from a car accessories store and waft it under your nose? Ah, fresh pine.

8. Christmas Tree

If you want to be able to smell real fresh pine, why not get yourself a Christmas tree? The best time to get one is when everyone else has thrown theirs unceremoniously out of the window on New Year’s Day. If your house is big enough, you could bring an entire discarded post-yuletide pine forest indoors and pretend you’re Tom Bombadil from Lord of the Rings. When somebody rings your doorbell, peek at them through the letterbox and, crouching in your indoor forest, quote from Tolkien’s best ever writing: “Hey dol! merry dol! ring a dong dillo! Ring a dong! hop along! fal lal the willow! Tom Bom, jolly Tom, Tom Bombadillo!”

7. A vivarium

Entombing living creatures in a glass menagerie? Why stop at fish? Spiders, stick insects, small amphibians, chipmunks, gerbils, mice, rats, earwigs, the unwittingly cloned homunculi of your human enemies. A whole world of small animals are eagerly waiting to be incarcerated in one of your artificially-regulated dioramas.

8. Bonsai

Even safer than a brick of fish is a miniature forest on your own desktop. To the Western agoraphobe, the Japanese art of bonsai might be the most interesting natural microcosm of them all. A stunted tree is a great way to observe nature in miniature. You won’t be expected to climb the tree–wheezing fatly and scuffing up your converse–nor will it burst a root through your living room floor in a hundred years time. Best of all, there’s probably a Japanese Hikikomori type out there somewhere, admiring a miniature English oak from the comfort of their closet. In a way, the two of you are married.

9. Yoghurt

The oldest empire on the Earth. Bacteria! Open a Yakult and look at it for a while. Ask it a question. You are at one with microscopic nature.

10. A David Attenborough DVD

Ah, safety. Watching a David Attenborough DVD is like a return the womb. Except that you’re probably not surrounded by amniotic fluid. If you find that you’re surrounded by amniotic fluid, you should probably see someone about that, as you may unknowingly be some kind of really awful serial killer. Aside from that fact, watching a David Attenborough DVD is like a return to the womb. If the womb was anything like a living room with a DVD player in it. Which it’s not. Womb.

11. Your own self-confirming prejudices

Unless you really want to go outside, why not take a stroll through the primitive Holodeck of your own imagination? Slap on an eye mask, and take a walk in the exotic wilderness of your brain. Try and imagine what nature might look like, feel like, smell like. Don’t worry if it’s too smelly: you can imagine up a thermostat-like dial and turn the pong down. If you find yourself involuntarily fantasising yourself crushed by an avalanche or impregnated by a parasitoid wasp whose larvae devour you from the inside out, you should probably either see a psychiatrist or simply not use your imagination again. Board up the windows and place an advert in the Exchange & Mart and be done with it.

Nature. It’s what’s for dinner.

🌲

If you enjoyed this story, (a) shame on you, and (b) please consider buying my books A Loose Egg and Stern Plastic Owl for countless other flights of fancy.

Escape the Snip-Snip Tyranny of the Barber

Originally published as “Cut Back” in Idler 64.

Hairdressing? What a scam! Just because hair growth itself is inescapable–advancing like the undead, imperceptibly but inevitably–the barbers think they’re inescapable too, that we’ll come crawling back in six weeks’ time for more of the same abuse. Well, I’m calling them out. You think you’re so special with your handlebar mustaches and your oh-so-hilarious “cock grease,” but it’s just a pair of scissors, mate! Anyone can do it.

Samara and I have been cutting each other’s hair. It hasn’t even made us look insane and it categorically has not involved a pudding basin. Once every couple of weeks, we put a beach towel down on the floor, position a chair on top of it, and once the sitter sits, we get stuck into our loved one’s head.

I was nervous at first. I didn’t want to give my favourite person a wonky haircut and for her to have to go out the next day looking like Jim Carrey in Dumb and Dumber. Worse still, I was afraid I might hurt her. I didn’t want to sneeze and then to look down and see my beloved’s ear floating in a cup of tea.

But fear is worth fighting–and so is the world of barbering–so the experiment was worth a shot. It would feel good to learn something new after so many years of unlearning things while sitting in barbers’ chairs, staring mindlessly into the purple parallel universe reflected in the barbicide. “I’ll do it,” I said, and we invested in a pair of cordless hair clippers. Here’s what we found:

1. You save money

Our journey into skull topiary began when Samara was charged £30 at a women’s hairdressers for a cursory trim. She’d recently had her hair cut into the rather fetching pixie style, and while £30 always seemed pricey in the past, it was now downright ridiculous.

This has been a longstanding inequality, hasn’t it? That women should pay so heavily for the haircut a man would get for a fistful of bollock-warmed pocket change including various expired coins and a small plastic washer. Women with short hair could conceivably go to a men’s barbershop, but they’re often refused and frankly, even I with my humongous penis don’t feel comfortable in the hyper-masculine world of the barbershop with its football and “banter” and somethings-for-the-weekendses. My girlfriend’s desired Mr Spock haircut can be achieved in about five minutes, so such a high fee is illogical, Captain.

2. Never talk to a hairdresser again

I wish I could agree with friend of the Idler Bill Drummond that barbers are worthy of being interviewed for an art project. I’m sure they’re as interesting as anyone else if you get to know them properly, but in the fifteen-minute intervals I’ve spent with them on a strictly economic arrangement, they usually expose themselves as, well, somewhere on the reactionary side of normative and, in any case, incapable of following instructions. I’m absolutely certain they’re not all like this but my last hairdresser, after muttering something appalling in response a radio news item about Israel, scratched my ear with the scissors, drawing a spectacular geezer of blood. Being able to say “if you prick us, do we not bleed?” was almost, but not entirely, worth it. Also, my unasked-for Playmobile haircut looked like it was on sideways. So yah-boo to the lot of ’em, all the way to wherever it is hairdressers go when they die. Hell. That’s the one.

3. Stay sharp

Thanks to the frugality and convenience of home barbering, you can do it whenever you like and, as such, stay perpetually sharp. It becomes regular maintenance like shaving or trimming your toenails. You never have to endure periods of having slightly-too-short hair or hair that is overdue for a cut. You can do it on a whim, whenever you like. We now cut each other’s hair every couple of weeks, a regularity that would have been too expensive before.

4. It’s easy and fun to learn

There is something in the region of seven million styling tutorials available, for free, on YouTube, and the people who present them tend to me funny and adorable. It also suggests that removing one’s own surplus fur in the interests of creativity and self-sufficiency is on the rise among young people, which is a heartening thing.

5. Creativity

I like how hairstyling is a bit arty, a way to bring some creative sauce to everyday life. We can take inspiration, bring ideas into life with ease, follow up on styles we’ve seen about town or in films. I’m currently working towards a David Lynch look myself–that is, the hairstyle of David Lynch himself, not a hairstyle inspired by the general ambiance of Twin Peaks. That’s too creative.

6. It’s a nice way to give each other attention

As a way to spend time together, it’s a nicer and more engaging activity than watching the latest platter of twaddle served up by Netflix. If you do each other in the same evening, it serves as a little bonding exercise, like a couple of monkeys grooming each other. I like to luxuriate in combing her hair and generally paying tribute to her through this small act of personal service. It’s nothing short of a way to show love.

It makes me think of my Grandad whose hair was trimmed weekly by my Nan. We all found this very, very funny at the time (why didn’t the tightwad just go to the barber like anyone else?) but the decision to bring this particular service in-house now strikes me as wise, loving, and frankly, a little bit punk rock.

You don’t have to have a partner to bring hairdressing in-house. Your hairdressing technique can be completely self-sustained so long as you’re happy with a simple style. Some Japanese monks shave their heads themselves, every morning according to writerly monk Shoukei Matsumoto. You can even buy a special gizmo for a fiver on eBay that lets the monastically-inclined make quick work of a one-man crewcut.

6. Bring it in-house

Cutting your own hair or that of your partner is part of a broader parable about ceasing to outsource important duties. Duties like cleaning, repairing, gardening, cooking and childcare can be outsourced to professionals in various ways, but these are precisely the things we should do for ourselves if we seek to bond with our immediate environment (as a flaneur does), to live mindfully, to live beyond commercial or consumer concerns, and to live the truly idle life. It was always a paradox of idling that we take personal responsibility–the DIY ethic of punks–to live more freely in the long run.

So give it a go, I say. You’ve nothing to lose: in an absolute worst case scenario, you’ll need to shave your head down the wood. But you’re unlikely to trepan anyone. If you have a significant other, cut their hair (if they want you to — and not in their sleep — or yours) and ask them to cut yours. It’s a lovely night in, saves money, lets you be a bit creative, and gives you an enshrined-in-law right to chuck a brick through any barbershop window*.

*it does no such thing — Ed.

★

If this resonated with you, you’re probably already doomed so you might as well buy my books Escape Everything! and The Good Life for Wage Slaves for additional wisdom from the goblin king.

The Sex Life of H. G. Wells

H. G. Wells was a very sexual being. He wanted you to know this.

“Let’s get it on,” he would say, “and this time let’s put some stank on it.”

Yes, H. G. Wells–professorial chubbychops, writer of Mr. Britling Sees It Through, and all-round Proper Old Chap–secretly wrote a book, which I am reading, about his career as “the Don Juan of the intelligentsia,” or, to update the parlance, his life as an absolute shagger.

Wells sealed the manuscript into a box, using goodness knows what adhesive, leaving stern instructions for it to be published only after his death, when he could be fairly sure they couldn’t catch him.

Don’t worry, I’m not here to gleefully reveal H. G. Wells as problemattic–“Not Wells!”–but rather the contrary. I’m actually a bit miffed at the book’s lack of sauce. I’m afraid I made up the line about putting some stank on it.

I’d been hoping for descriptions of a frisky H. G. Wells squirming among the velour cushions of his ornate and brass-knobbed time machine, plucking a candlestick telephone receiver from the gilded dash and bellowing into it, “get the poppers out, Maura, IT’S NAUGHTY TIME,” before zipping promptly home to put some hot breath on a butt plug.

“Maura, I have returned and I’m partial for it!” I hoped he’d call up the stairs, before compressing an unlikely wall panel to reveal a hidden doorway, a golden glow cast upon him from the brassy domes of The Latest Devices within.

“The steam-driven rump padeller,” I wanted him to say, his eyes twinkling over a cityscape of potential intrusions, “the gentleman’s personal gentleman… and, ah yes… Mrs. Beaton’s Christmas Special.”

And then Maura would appear, dressed as an Eloi.

And then an Eloi would appear, dressed as Maura.

But no.

I am, I should say, only half way through the book, so there’s still hope we’ll be treated to such beautiful scenes, but there’s been an unexpected lack of imaginative rumpy-pumpy so far.

He never propositioned a chimneysweep, never asked for time alone with the Mechanical Turk, never ordered a zoo animal to his rooms under the pretense of science, never telegraphed Houdini in a state of panic (“MY DEAR DISCRETE ERIC. STOP. REQUIRE KEY FOR A SCOTLAND YARD STANDARD ISSUE BRACELET No. 12. STOP. ASKING FOR A FRIEND. STOP.”), and never bored a hole in a melon.

“I have never,” Wells implies with his silence on the matter, “taken a neckful of hot Victorian chod.”

Look. I’m not saying people should try such things if they’re not completely into them, but he describes himself over and over in this here book as a libertine. It’s libertine this and libertine that, but so far as I’m able to tell, he only has about six notches in his bedpost and it never once crossed his mind that he could lower himself onto it.

And that’s fine! But it’s normal, not libertine. It’s like saying, “I’m mad for ice-cream, me” and confessing you’ve only ever tried strawberry. One word, H. G.: Choconut.

One might almost say his life was chaste when you remember he was a celebrity, loved by all. In fact, it was probably the law in 1910 that anyone crossing paths with “The Marvellous Mr. Wells” must take their trousers off and await his instructions.

“Tell us a story about your day, Grandpapa.”

“Ee, well, it were a right honor to be asked to serve as an on-street toast rack to the great futurist, Mr. H. G. Wells…”

I realise it’s a bit strange that I’m getting bent out of shape about things that didn’t happen a hundred years ago. I just think it’s a shame is all. Entering that mouth, I’m sure you’ll agree, would have been like going through a car wash, sudsy bristles rubbing along the roof. And all the while, you’d be thinking, “I can’t believe it. The tip of my dingus is but inches from the brain that gave us Kipps!. Two inches, now three inches, two inches, three inches…”

Still, despite his dissapointing lack of imagination in the bonking department, he was no stuffed shirt and it’s nice to think of an elderly H. G. Wells finishing a bowl of soup and then harumphing off to write his sex memoir.

Fine. I accept it. H. G. Wells was a sexual fellow. Vanilla perhaps, but sexual.

And now at least we know where the inspiration came from for those tripods.

🍆

If you enjoyed this story, (a) shame on you, and (b) please consider buying my books A Loose Egg and Stern Plastic Owl for countless other flights of fancy.

Good Morning

Oh my God, what a night.

I woke at 4:30 from a terrifying dream. It was just like in the films. I sat bolt upright, panting and confused, not entirely certain of where I was.

As I tried to shrug it off and go back to sleep, I found myself sliding into the clutches of the nightmare again (oh no!) so I decided to rinse my brain by putting a podcast on.

Adam Buxton was interviewing Charlotte Gainsbourg and, for several minutes, all was right with the world again.

Just I was drifting off, the podcast was interrupted by an unfamiliar twinkly-bleepy noise. I ignored it because, although I’d not heard such a thing before, we do have slightly spotty Internet that occasionally interrupts streaming videos and the likes. Besides, I was already falling asleep.

The podcast returned. And then failed again. Returned and failed again. I was in the process of sleepily concluding that I should pluck the bud from my ear and ignore whatever technological shenanigans were going on, but I’m extremely glad I didn’t because of what would happen next.

“I’m a comedy writer,” said Charlotte Gainsbourg, “but I don’t just go for the lols.”

What? Even in my state of half-sleep, I realised that the voice in my ear had ceased to be Charlotte Gainsbourg and that the phone must have inexplicably skipped to a different interview.

Then the the twinkly-bleepy noise happened again, followed by a robot voice saying “this selection is unavailable.”

But!, my sleepy brain struggled to object, I’m not trying to select anything. What is at work here? Did that Thing escape from my dream?

The twinkly-bleepy happened again and then the robot voice said, “Now Calling… Wentworth.”

What?

Beat.

Oh my God!

I scrambled for the handset and, sure enough, “WENTWORTH. CALLING….” was displayed on the screen and I was thankfully able to think quickly enough through the sleepfug to terminate the call before connection.

What the fuck was going on? Why was my phone trying to call my friend at 4:30 in the morning without my say-so?

It was a crazily narrow escape. It would have been embarrassing to have to explain to my older, wiser pal that I’d had a scary dream and that my phone was acting independently and I was not yet certain if the two things were related.

If I’d have plucked the ear bud–or already fallen fast asleep–and not heard the “Now calling…” warning, the call would have connected. And if the ghost in the machine hadn’t chosen Wentworth, it could even have dialled the number of, say, my agent or a publisher or a local news station.

I still don’t really know what happened but, short of paranormal phenomena, I’m guessing this has something to do with the pound-shop hands-free kit I’ve been using to listen to podcasts.

There’s a microphone on it, so perhaps it interpreted my senseless nocturnal mouth noises as “skip” and “call Wentworth.”

Which is crazy. I don’t, to my knowledge, have a voice activation system installed. Can this have happened? Is it possible? Am I a clueless grandpa now, completely alienated by technology? Are ghosts real? And if they are, why are they fucking with my smartphone? And who am I talking to right now? Are you real? Am I?

You know, I think I’ll go back to bed for a bit.

Apologies in advance if I call you.

Coin Slot

A cut passage (a murdered darling) from my manuscript:

I put my palm on the trepanned head of a plastic guide dog to steady myself. As I regarded its coin slot, it seemed to sing that I should pop my door key inside it.

It had to go because it required too much explanation. Not everyone, especially overseas, knows what these guide dogs are, and to explain it would kill it.

I’m also not sure how recognisable these mad thoughts are to ~~normies~~ the hinged.

Parasitic Wasps

Friend Kristin has read my moth diary and she’s keen to tell me about a “natural” solution involving parasitic wasps.

Apparently you release the wasps at home and then seek out any unhatched moth eggs, feasting on them as the world’s grossest caviar.

Unleashing some wasps is immensely appealing, but I can’t help wonder if the situation wouldn’t get out of control. What, prey tell, will eat the wasps? Before you know it, you’ve entered an “old woman who swallowed a fly” situation and you now have a rather impractical horse infestation and you’re spending your evenings filling out the import forms on various apex predators. Your little West End flat becomes known as the spot where passersby are routinely plucked off the street by tentacles. We’d never get post again.

As it happens, the pheromone trap is doing rather well, our ten-moths-a-day murder count now reduced to one or even fewer. The trap now resembles a luscious moth-wing carpet, which I now plan to use to repair the various holes they’ve made in an act of mortal irony.

You Come Home From Work

You come home from work and you turn the television on. Something’s wrong. Inspector Morse is on every single channel.

You thump the top of the set in a caveman bid to escape John Thaw’s stern face but your hand passes through the set with a sickening tear. The television set is made of paper!

The knobs and dials are paper, the remote control is paper, the set-top aerial is a triangle made from paper.

And that’s how you discover YOU’RE IN THE ARMANDO IANNUCCI SHOW. It’s 2001 again and you’ll have to come home the long way.

You’re On Holiday

You’re on holiday in California, admiring the view at Big Sur, when you approach a local to ask for directions.

The man panics. “It’s no good!” he shrieks, looking around helplessly, “I can’t do it!” and then he leaps into the canyon.

Only the canyon’s not a canyon. The Californian passes through it with a sickening tear and runs on and on into an impossible white distance.

And that’s how you discover YOU’RE IN THE TRUMAN SHOW. It is Season 3 and the ratings are in the toilet.

After the Storm

It’s been an atypically social week, something friendly lined for every single night and three of the days.

So many pint glasses and ticket stubs has meant putting my Street Fighter health bar into the red and storming the treasury in a way not strictly compatible with the lifestyle of a twenty-first-century person of letters.

My idle self feels happy to have blown a week off so decadently, but as I look at the week’s spoils, it’s hard not to feel a pinch of dismay. Was fun had? Yes. Was your heart or mind opened even a crack? Oh yes. How’s your manuscript coming along? Quiet, you.

Climate Change Does Not Spark Joy

To the Glasgow contingent of the International Climate Strike where I march with thousands of truant schoolchildren, shouting “Fuck You, Boris Johnson!”

Look, they started it.

Among their midget ranks I loom like a benevolent periscope, admiring the sights from high above their heads and providing a convenient landmark for other marchers to orientate themselves. “Yes, Mum, I’m between the green flag and the geek.”

There are loads of great placards including “Earth is More Important Than Homework” and “Too Cool for School? Not In This Climate.”

The best one though (or at least the cutest) is a placard that shows Marie Kondo saying “Climate Change Does Not Spark Joy.”

This One’s Fine

I am afraid of spiders but delighted by ants. I always want to know more about ants–about their culture, the ways they communicate, what sort of music they’re into–but I don’t want to know anything about spiders. Even a picture of a spider lifts my intestines up into my chest as if I am in free-fall.

One day, in Montreal, Samara comes with me to the Bibliothèque Nationales, so that she can vet a big photographic book of ants for me in case there are any pictures of spiders.

I hide behind my hands and listen to her turning the pages one by one.

“That one’s fine,” she says, “that one’s fine, this one’s fine, oh this one’s adorable.”

“Thank you for doing this, honey,” I say, still hiding, and I wonder if she finds this charming or if it’s finally dawning on her what she’s got herself into.

“This one’s fine,” she says, “this one’s fine, this one’s… oh my GOD.”

“A spider?” I ask.

“Yuh-huh.”

“Are they eating it?”

“They’re eating parts of it,” she says, “And parts of it are eating them.”

“I don’t want to see it!,” I say, tightening the gaps in my fingers, “And I don’t want to hear any more about it!”

“Shh!” someone says, “Tabarwet…”

I listen to Samara close the book and put it back on the shelf. I hear it slide tightly and firmly, safe between the other entomological quartos.

Sometimes, at night, I think of that book and the horror I know it contains, on the other side of the ocean, existing.

Stevedor

Samara asks what a tiny home ghost story would be like.

“Smol,” I say.

Once l’esprit de l’escalier has kicked in, I realise that, since the story would be set in a converted shipping container, it would have to be about the ghost of a stevedore stranded deep inland with a couple of earnest hipsters.

The ghost and the hipsters would have different points of view on, like, everything.