Notes from Overground
“Man is born free and is everywhere in trains.”
I’d like to recommend a twenty-year-old book called Notes from Overground by Tiresias.
It was probably my favourite read of 2013. Strangely enough, the Guardian mentioned it recently too, so maybe it’s time for a Tiresias renaissance.
The book should be held dear by any Escapologist. Treasure it. Keep it in your breast pocket, close to your heart. (If nothing else it might intercept a bullet during a particularly exciting post-employment misadventure).
It contains no practical information on how to escape the 9-5, but it’s a beautiful plaintive cry on behalf of commuters everywhere.
As it happens, the author Tiresias (real name Roger Green) eventually escaped. He went to live on the Greek island of Hydra to continue his life as a poet.
But before escaping, he commuted daily between Oxford and Paddington for twenty years. In Notes from Overground, he gives us extremely witty and highly-literate musings about life as an intelligent person relegated to white-collar purgatory. Do read it if you can find a copy.
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An Escapologist’s Diary. Part 38. Solvitur Ambulando.
This post is dedicated to Escapologist of distinction Lentus who is walking the Camino Santiago. He taught me the term Solvitur Ambulando, which means “it is solved by walking”.
For almost three months, I’ve been prevented from walking everywhere by the ferocious Quebec winter. If that sounds sissy or uncommitted, you should know that we’re talking about snow up to the knees, torrents of slippery grey slush, pavements like frosted glass, and temperatures as low as -40°C (though -15 is more typical). Here’s the view from my balcony.
It’s not impossible to walk through this and it can be fun to do so on occasion, but when your daily routine includes two 45-minute walks, such oppressive conditions cease to be entertaining very quickly.
So I started travelling by bus. It will come as no surprise to anyone that I’m not hugely fond of a rush hour bus. It may offer protection from the elements, but it’s crowded and lurching and it frequently smells like farts.
For a fortnight now, the bus has been particularly bad. Several times, it has simply failed to arrive at all and I’ve resorted to splitting taxi cabs with other commuters after waiting in the cold for half an hour. Did I mention it’s -15°C on a good day?
So I’ve taken matters into my own hands this week and started walking again in spite of the winter. It’s no picnic, but at least I can stay relatively warm when walking, compared to standing still at a bus stop.
It’s also an opportunity to try some black-belt Stoicism. I just try to remember that my internal self cannot be pelted with ice. Only my outer shell is vulnerable.
The return to regular walking has been tough but rewarding. I feel strong and vital! The physical exercise doubtless helps, but it’s also the solitude and the time to think and the sense of being connected to the world instead of just crammed into the same cattle truck again and again, never really seeing anything.
Try it yourself. Damn the elements. Go for a walk. Solvitur Ambulando.
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Consider the Sloth
From a nice New York Times article about the humble sloth. Leave it to an animal fable to say it all.
[The three-toed sloth is] not a sluggard because it’s lazy. Rather, it has carved out a remarkably ingenious mode of life in the treetops, but one that imposes certain constraints on its speed and energy level.
O.K., back to your harried, fast-paced schedules. But remember the sloth, which has solved all its problems by living in the slow lane.
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Young and Jobless
I enjoyed this article by Erica Buist, author of How to be Jobless. It’s a response to UK employment minister Esther McVey’s offensive suggestion that the 941,000 unemployed youths of Britain “start at the bottom” and “get a job at Costa [Coffee]”.
We already started at the bottom. Our parents and teachers asked what we wanted to be when we grew up, and held it to ransom. We spent countless hours in meaningless exams: GCSEs, AS-levels, A-levels, BAs, MAs, even PhDs; not forgetting the unpaid internships (yet another barrier between us and employment) – because these were sold as tickets to where we wanted to go.
And now we’re snobs for wishing those miserable years had paid off. At this juncture, the only honest thing a politician could say about youth unemployment is: “We messed up the economy, you will not be getting what we promised you’d get in exchange for the years spent becoming educated, qualified and willing.”
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Platitudes
I’m in Seattle. Arrive to find this poster hanging in my AirBNB room. A bit mawkish but can’t really argue with it! Tidy version here.
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An Escapologist’s Diary: Part 37. 2013 Review.
Dear Imaginary Shareholders,
It’s been a weird year. For starters, I took a job. Not something I generally recommend, as you know.
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A New Year’s Podcast
Happy 2014!
I point you to this little podcast for your Jan 1st enjoyment.
This time last year, Neil Scott’s ill-fated resolution was to record and post a weekly interview with one of his friends. Since I was staying at his house on New Year’s Eve, I would be Episode 1.
For some reason, we weren’t particularly happy with the result and Neil never posted it. But digging it out of the archives today, it’s hard to know what we didn’t like. It’s just a nice little chat between two friends.
I’m surprised by how articulate I am. I remember feeling pointlessly anxious about nothing and hungover from the previous evening’s revelry.
Anyway, it’s a nice little podcast. Have a listen. We talk about New Escapologist a lot, especially the practice of Escapology. Jacob Lund Fisker gets a mention, as do Tom Hodgkinson, Momus, Richard Herring, Matt Caulfield, Leo Babauta, Nicolette Stewart and other heroes of Escapology
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The Absurdity of Work
This question paves the way perfectly for our upcoming Absurdity issue. I giggled all the way down the comments thread. The question lets the madness in.
Would you do a completely pointless job?
In particular, we’re talking about the acts of digging holes and filling them up again, or writing the words “I am working” over and over before binning your efforts.
The comments left by the ERE readers fall into four main camps:
1. No, I’d never do it because my freedom is too important;
2. No, I’d never do it because my work must be personally satisfying or socially worthwhile;
3. Yes, I’d do it if the money was right;
4. Yes, because it’s no more absurd than my current job.
The latter is the whole point. The work we do is all too often not necessary or doesn’t really need to be worked on for so many hours. So many of us are in an absurd Touch-the-Truck situation in which we’re basically paid for physical presence.
The Escapologist, of course, recognises this Sisyphean torment for what it is and tries to escape it.
Most people, sadly, will inevitably pick up the shovel–largely against their will–in exchange for £10 or £20 or £40 per hour. For forty years.
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The Effort of Idling
Tom Hodgkinson of the Idler writes entertainingly in the Standard about his return to London after twelve years of self-sufficiency in the English countryside:
Country life is beset by disasters. Chickens get eaten by the fox. Home-grown lettuces get eaten by slugs. The cabbages get eaten by the pony when it breaks into the vegetable patch. Pipes freeze. The bees die. Homemade bread gets burned. The bore hole pump goes and you have no water for three days. The neighbours complain because you organised a gig in the village hall with Alabama 3 as the headliners. The authorities investigated us when we had our pigs illegally killed at home. Ten years of sipping martinis in the Groucho Club does not, sadly, prepare you for the self-sufficient life.
I’ve loved Tom’s epistles from the countryside in his Country Diary blog at the Idler website. It was precisely the kinds of disaster mentioned above which made it so entertaining. You’re on his side throughout, but it’s the comical floundering of an idealist townie that made it such a pleasure to read.
Such predictable disasters are why I try to avoid the countryside wherever I can. Too much hard work for my liking. Just daily, it’s always a chore to chisel the mud off one’s Oxfords and to get the smell of dung out of one’s three-piece suit.
The proffered alternative — running a trendy shop in a capital city — doesn’t do much for me either. Hobnobbing with Michael Palin and Rhys Ifans looks like a hoot, but the organisational woes would be far too much hassle for this idle gent.
My advice, Escapologists, is to keep things simple. Rent a nice little apartment in a non-capital city and live on a part-time paycheque or — ideally — on the fruit of your independent labours.
Perhaps the most important lesson in Tom’s latest move is that the idle life does not have to be engineered with big, showy lifestyle changes. Total relocation is rather drastic. If you want to work less and to shrug off the mind-forg’d manacles, you’re better off looking for smaller ways to shift your current lifestyle gradually into a idle-friendly way of being.
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Throwing in the Towel
I’m seriously considering resigning without a job to go to. I have enough savings to survive for several years. I have a number of projects outside work that I’m not getting on with (writing a biography; renovating the house; I’m on the committee of a motor club). I’m letting people down, people who are far more important to me than my employers. Mainly, though, I feel ground down, without even the energy to make a good job of looking for another job.
I’m a bit obsessed with the work and careers advice column in the Guardian. I find it interesting to read about the specifics of people’s job dissatisfaction and to try and spot trends.
Perhaps most revealing is that the advice-seekers aren’t usually complaining about individual things (power-tripping boss, negligent colleague) but a more general dissatisfaction with their job or the work system at large.
Over the past year or so, there’s been a tendency toward people wanting in various ways to throw in the towel, and so they write in to the newspaper to try and find encouragement or a ‘voice of reason’ that will talk them out of it.
It’s worth poking through the archives if you’re interested in people’s quit-or-stay dilemma or want to see the advice given by the expert and the readers in the comments thread.
I sometimes fancy that these people might be readers of New Escapologist, spurred into action by our silly pages. More likely, however, is that we live in a culture of dissatisfaction: where the kind of work offered by most jobs is not really required by Planet Earth in any real way and are only done to pay the rent. Often, you might as well be peddling on a stationary bike, generating electricity for the grid, than what you’re doing.
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