Kicky-Kicky, Start-Start
New Escapologist is a small-press magazine about escape.
We do not dwell on short-term or commercial escapes like television or beach holidays: we’re far more interested in well-planned, longer-term escapes from the worker-consumer treadmill into lives of imaginative creativity.
Yes indeed, there’s a Kickstarter campaign running RIGHT NOW to bring back New Escapologist as a small press magazine.
Thanks to a speedy response from the readers of our newsletter, the campaign is going extremely well but every single backer counts. Even if we make the target, we still want as many readers as possible. We’re trying to build a culture more than a “product”.
Kickstarter is currently the only way to buy the new issue or to subscribe (print and digital versions both available), so please visit the Kickstarter page to read more and to consider helping us along with a pledge. Why not get in on the ground floor of this amazing new cultural force to be reckoned with?
Thank you to everyone who has backed the project so far and to everyone else currently thinking about it. Let’s go!
Tinkers Bubble
Founded in 1994, Tinkers Bubble is Englandâs leading off-grid woodland community: an experiment in rural living that provides low-impact dwellings and a land-based livelihood to a changing roster of 16 residents.
From The Guardian:
It is owned by a community benefit society, and the current residents, most of whom arrive as summer volunteers, are sustained by the income from a steam-powered sawmill, apple orchard and press (which produces a lively dry cider) and cottage food production, including heritage salad leaves. The communityâs 20 dwellings and outbuildings are dotted around a thatched communal roundhouse, all sitting amid the lofty firs.
And there’s a short documentary about it on YouTube:
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New Escapologist is returning to print. To bridge the gap, why not get a copy of I’m Out or The Good Life for Wage Slaves?
Twin Book Recomendations
This:
Perhaps to be coupled with this:
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And ideally throupled with this. đ
Letters to the Editor: Backyard Chickens Come Home to Roost
You know Hilaire Belloc, don’t you? He wrote Cautionary Tales for Children in which naughty children are joyously dispatched by fire, skewering, and devourment by lions.
But he also wrote The Servile State, a 1912 critique of Big Business and its relationship with the State. A problem with this relationship, Belloc writes, is that it builds a nation of grudging, demoralised Wage Slaves instead of engaged, independent-minded craftspeople. He was right, obviously.
And the solution he proposes for systemically ending Wage Slavery is… private property ownership.
I’m yet to decide if that’s an excitingly unconventional position or a drearily conventional one. Every Muggle in Britain today seeks to own property, but those who pursue it most fervently (those who become landlords for example) don’t generally want to end Wage Slavery. So. I’m interested.
“If we do not restore the Institution of Property,” he writes at the very top, “we cannot escape restoring the Institution of Slavery; there is no third course.”
Perhaps he’s saying that, once rent is out of the picture, a person approaches financial independence and can get on with something meaningful instead of toiling full-time. I wonder if Belloc (much like Keynes, who predicted we’d all be on a 15-hour work week by now) did not foresee the delinquent appetites of humans under capitalism. Plenty of people who pay off their mortgage but continue to toil, usually with some other thing in the balance — like a pension or even another mortgage for a bigger or second house.
I’ll say more about Belloc’s argument another time when I’ve come to firmer grips with it. Reader’s voice: what a cop out! It reminds me, however, that we’ve not said anything about the “renting versus owning” issue for a while.
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As many of you know, my partner and I recently bought our first apartment after decades of renting. We enjoyed renting and it was our preference: if you see your landlord not as a boss or superegoic parent figure but as a skivvy paid to keep you housed and to repair your washing machine when it breaks, it becomes a most amenable relationship.
Several rent hikes (or pay rises for our skiv), alas, made our continued tenancy unaffordable. Our rent doubled over six years.
The fun of renting is to aristocratically dismiss your worries about the future, but the cost expanded so exorbitantly that we found ourselves worried not just about the future but about the present. This doesn’t mean “ownership wins.” It means the UK rental situation is fucked up beyond measure.
When we bought the flat two years ago, I grumbled about it in the newsletter and got some email responses on the subject. So let’s run a themed edition of Letters to the Editor.
To send a letter to the editor, simply write in. You’ll get a reply and we’ll anonymise any blogged version.
Friend Ian’s email was amusingly useless:
Hi Rob,
Hope this finds you well. As a communist homeowner I have strong and conflicted views on this, which I meant to share with you following your first email about it, but, obviously, I never got round to it.
[I also wanted] to let you know that I might have clicked on the grieving face emoji in response to how I feel about your Kickstarter campaign. Rest assured this was in error: I intended to click on the happy face, but I’m in a bit of a vaccine fever at the moment, so not at my maximum competence.
Cheers,
Ian
PS: ‘grieving face emoji’ was an autocorrect typo; I meant to type ‘frowning face emoji’.
Ah, the vaccine. Heady days. Ian doesn’t go into detail about his conflicted feelings as a communist homeowner, but I imagine they are something like “property is theft but, since we’re economically bullied into committing theft, what are you going to do?”
Reader X wrote:
You may need to clarify – renting for 1000 quid vs. buying for 100 apiece?? Are house prices in Scotland that reasonable?! If so, sign me right up. I’ll draw on my escape fund and we can set up a nice escapological homestead littered with tinkering shops and garden space.
After the rent hikes, our old place was nearing ÂŁ1,000 a month to rent. It was the cheapest flat on a fairly posh street where rental prices are now around ÂŁ1,200. Our current mortgage repayments by comparison are ÂŁ180 a month each (ÂŁ360 total). I don’t know how typical this is: we wrestled a great deal out of the bastards at the bank. It’s a fixed-rate mortgage too, so we have not yet been hit by the inflation apocalypse.
Property prices in our city are more reasonable than in London though. All I can say is: don’t live in capital cities. Move north! I know the bright lights are exciting but (in my opinion) it’s better to live cheaply in a “workshop city” like Glasgow or Manchester or Liverpool where culture is produced rather than merely sold. To oligarchs.
Reader Q wrote:
As I start to get a bit older I am more in favour of buying. One can quarrel in the mind over the economics until your backyard chickens come to roost. But, you most likely can’t have backyard chickens when you’re a renter.
As renters, our equivalent of a backyard was a spare room. Readers of The Good Life for Wage Slaves will know the importance I place on having ample space for creative work and being able to accommodate friends. We could not afford to buy a place with a spare room though. We sacrifices the spare room to the reduced cost. And we still don’t have a garden. Not that we particularly want one.
and continued:
My current rented abode is filled with the half-finished intentions and tastes of another couple looking to make a few bucks after upgrading their digs. Sometimes I get a weird eerie feeling like I’m living in someone else’s past with their poor choice of cheap plastic jellyfish chandelier and thick purple wallpaper. But that’s the price of freedom, baby.
Now this I relate to. Our rental was supposedly “unfurnished” but it still came with the landlord’s filthy old roller blinds, lighting fixtures, and tasteless decorative curly things on the ends of the curtain rails. We unscrewed everything on Day One, stashing them away in the flat’s least-useful cupboard. For all we know, the former tenants did the same and these things go up and come down again with every tenant. See also the fireplace and the hole.
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For more on “rent versus ownership” and other thoughts about homelife, please buy The Good Life for Wage Slaves to help pay my mortgage.
Yellow Bellies
This is from a Twitter feed of interesting nuggets from science and history:
This photo from 1902 shows French knife grinders. They would work on their stomachs in order to save their backs from being hunched all day.
Finally an alternative to those ridiculous standing desks!
They were also encouraged to bring their dogs to work to keep them company and also act as mini heaters by having them rest on their owners’ legs.
So office doggos aren’t a new thing after all.
They were also called ventres jaunes (âyellow belliesâ in English) because of the yellow dust that would be released from the grinding wheel.
Better a yellow belly than a brown nose. Bring back the literal grind!
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An Escapologist’s Diary: Part 73. No Mood for Work.
We’re back from our holiday and, while my partner has leapt directly into her work, I am in NO MOOD FOR IT. I miss the sunshine and the food and the beer and the leisurely strolling. I could do some of that here in Glasgow, I suppose, but there’s work to be done and I do miss Montreal.
I’m still wearing the linen trousers and white cotton shirt with the sleeves rolled up that I bought there to keep cool, even though they should really go in the wash now. I’m keeping the vacation spirit if not alive then at least on life support.
I keep thinking “I must need my head examining for leaving Montreal in the first place” but then I remember the long winters and the difficulties I had making money there and our lack of friends in the city. Le sigh. It’s Glasgow or bust! Scotland is our ecological niche.
The printers proof of my novel was supposed to be waiting for me at home but, to my confusion, there was no sign of it. After some chasing it with the printer and the delivery company it was found by a nice man at a storage depot. At least it had not been returned to sender, but this was still an unnecessary nuisance. I had to wait another day for it to be redelivered. This book seems to be cursed.
Now that I have the proof, I’m not happy enough with it. It looks decidedly “print on demand” with too-white paper and too-narrow margins. The typeface, which looked excellent on the screen, looks weird and probably too big so I might have to reset the whole thing. I put a huge amount of thought into the typesetting and it looks great in PDF so I’m a bit confused and slightly crushed.
The point of a printers proof is to spot things you want to change before printing hundreds of copies so at least I can do something about these problems, but I wasn’t expecting the job to need so many changes. I’m finding this a tad dispiriting. The book is already over two years late and every time I say “now it’s finished” another problem crops up. It’s additionally upsetting given that the motivation (in part) for writing a novel is that it would be easier than writing non-fiction: no research or interviewees, few other parties to please, just me and my imagination in a quiet room. It didn’t turn out that way at all. I had to do two major rewrites after friends told me there were problems with it. Then I wasted two years trying to find a publisher. Then I had to produce it all myself. And now I finally have a copy in hand it still isn’t right.
Reasonably, I know that all I have to do is make a list of the required fixes and then to patiently work my way through the list. The actual changes will only take a few days. But my morale is unusually low today and I wish I was still on holiday. Oh why oh why can’t I still be on holiday?!
Don’t worry, I’ll be back on the horse tomorrow, I’m sure. Today I will read and drink coffee and wallow in my abysmal failures.
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“Warns Against”
The Guardian reports today that
office workers in central London are spending on average 2.3 days a week in the workplace, according to a report that warns against a wholesale switch to working from home.
The thinktank Centre for Cities carried out polling of office workers in the capital and found they were spending 59% of the time in their workplace compared with pre-Covid levels.
The finding of 2.3 days sounds about right. I’ve been hearing that some people work from home all the time now or that they visit the office once a week. Others are being forced back into the office full-time, so 2.3 days sounds like an approximately correct average.
The “warns against a wholesale switch to working from home” part is only conjecture though and probably reveals the motivations behind this study. After all, anyone can “warn against” something imaginary. The study offers no evidence that working from home leads to a decline in productivity (nor, seemingly, was it designed to detect it). In fact, evidence so far suggests the opposite:
Several studies over [2021] show productivity while working remotely from home is better than working in an office setting. On average, those who work from home spend 10 minutes less a day being unproductive, work one more day a week, and are 47% more productive.
As well as scientifically-collected evidence, doesn’t it also defy belief that tired workers, fresh from the morning commute, are likely to be productive? Especially in an environment of ringing telephones and fire drills and birthday parties and all the rest of it. How could city centre offices be more productive environments than our homes? As George Orwell put it: “imagination, like certain wild animals, will not breed in captivity.”
Moreover, productivity is but one way to assess how well work is working. What about the quality of output? What about impact on the natural world? What about contribution to human culture?
The name of the think tank, Centre for Cities, is another hint at the motivation behind the report. According to their website, their “mission is to help the UK’s largest cities and towns realise their economic potential,” which is fine I suppose, but their vision of how to achieve this is of a certain mindset. Clearly, they want people to return to city centres in bigger numbers than they have been, and they want those people to be workers. Just as Andrew Lloyd Webber wants to trap sensitive personalities in a pit, the people at this think tank want to see people in office attire with wristwatches and Bluetooth earpieces criss-crossing glass-fronted streets and spending digital money at rubbishy franchise sandwich shops. I guess that’s just some people’s aesthetic preference, which is permissible I suppose, but it’s not science and its not progressive.
Meanwhile, I just got back from Montreal where the city has a distinct feeling of thriving. Their solution seems to have been an increased pedestrianisation of downtown areas and the expansion of proper cycle lanes.
I walked on many streets closed to cars and bustling with well-dressed people on personal missions. They were buying records, walking to and from the mountain, meeting for arty chats, painting on little easels, learning to walk on stilts, doing yoga, quietly jamming with acoustic guitars, busking, cycling and smoking at the same time, reading real books. I’m not exaggerating: I saw all of this in a single afternoon on Avenue Mont-Royal in my old neighbourhood, now closed to cars for the summer.
Imagination to get beyond “BUSINESS” is all it takes really. What I saw in Montreal is still economic activity but it’s also human and inherently worthwhile and it doesn’t involve sweating in an office while your real creative projects and the people you’d rather like to spend time with are on the other side of a tinderblock wall.
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To celebrate the culture of imagination today, please take ÂŁ5 off a copy of The Good Life for Wage Slaves, my survival guide for a life of work. Use coupon code CITIES at checkout until June 15th.
Class Detention
I never once got detention in school. This wasnât because I was a goody-goody. I just always wanted to leave on time so I never did anything to warrant detention.
But there was that one time, wasn’t there? I was part of a âclass detentionâ where we were all kept back for one kidâs misbehaviour. I think the logic was to turn us against him, or maybe the teacher wasnât sure which of us had thrown the ball of paper or whatever it was.
Iâm not sure what reminded me of this today but when I remembered the incident I was surprised to still feel angry about it.
After all, why should we all be punished for someone elseâs crime? Why should my parents worry when I didnât arrive home on time? Most importantly, my personal record of not getting detention was 100% unblemished except for this one minor exception. I wouldn’t consciously count it as a detention, obviously, but it remains the one complication to stop me from standing up in a court of law to solemnly swear that I never got detention in high school. It’s the detail that might make a lie detector spike someday; a microscopic imperfection in my personal narrative that will be with me until I die. Where did that teacher get off?
What I should have done is put my exercise books away as usual, casually shouldered my school bag, and calmly made for the door. When the teacher inevitably said, âand where do you think youâre going, Wringham?â I could have said, âyou have no legal or moral reason to detain meâ and walked out. I should have gone home and watched Batman Forever on VHS.
It would have been an act of real Escapology. The door was unlocked and I could have opened it and walked out. Righteously. The audience would have cheered.
What would he have done? A teacher canât physically restrain a pupil. I daresay heâd have referred me to the head master to whom, the following day, I could have restated my position: âHe had no legal or moral reason to detain me.â Any further discussion would have been on school time instead of my own.
Man, that would have been delicious.
If youâre a kid in school and youâre ever in the same situation, do that. Avenge me!
See also: I’m Out: How to Make an Exit.
“Working Life” is an Oxymoron
Because of our material needs, work forces us to give up our freedoms. Our life is no more â if it ever were â a flourishing tree of possibilities. Work is destitute, the death of choice. Thus, if life is choice, as many seem to think, then “working life” is an oxymoron. The more we work, the less we get to live. This is the real reason why work is harmful. Even if isn’t physically or mentally taxing, work hurts us existentially. It restricts our freedom to be anything but bored.
Thanks to Reader Rad for directing our attention to a superb article about the realities of work and boredom by Andreas Elpidoru, a philosophy professor who writes whole books about boredom.
So how can we cope with it? Professor Elpidoru says there are three main ways. One, which most people do, is to simply accept boredom:
We can submissively accept it. The need to work isnât going away and not everybody can afford to quit their job or reach FIRE (Financial Independence, Retire Early). Work is many things. It is tiring, stressful, depressing, painful, and even dangerous. So what if it is also boring?
Another is try to make it bearable in a Good Life for Wage Slaves sort of way:
We can take breaks, change our routines, spice things up, or gamify our tasks. We can even demand distractions, entertainment, or a Google-like workspace with pool tables, bowling alleys, and other perks. Even if we can’t get rid of boredom altogether, we could at least try to experience it sparingly and between activities that are fun.
Or we can use Escapology:
The lack of satisfaction that is endemic to boredom is its greatest tool. We are pained by boredom and precisely because of that, we are pushed to undo its cause. Boredom, in other words, is a powerful motivator. Itâs a catalyst for change: an emotional force that propels us to pursue projects that could eventually relieve us from the absence of satisfactory cognitive engagement and the suffocating constraints that work imposes on us. This is no small feat, of course.
No indeed. But given the three options, is it not the most exceptional?
