Exact Date. Every Day.

Adrian Edmondson‘s stuffy old schoolteacher dad (pictured above) was an Escapologist in his way:

For the last few years of his working life my abiding memory of Dad is of him spreading his paperwork out on the dining room table every evening. This isn’t marking homework or doing lesson plans, or anything to do with school, he’s trying to work out when he can retire.

he has various bits of pension entitlement from many different sources, and little bits of money squirrelled away, some of it in a bank in Jersey, which sounds dodgy. Some of it is obviously tied to interest rates, and in these days before computer spreadsheets, each evening he looks up the indices in the newspaper, adjusts various predictions, factors in inflation, dreams up possible variables, considers future interest rates, looks at his bank balance, tots it all up, and comes up with an exact date. Every day.

I suppose it’s a reminder that everyone — of all generations and temperaments — is running away from something.

What you’re trying to escape probably depends on which component of The Trap has got you down. In Ade’s case it was school, in his dad’s it was work. Which, oddly, was also school.

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New Escapologist Issue 18 is in the works and can be ordered today for November release.