Download and print your own version of the freedom manifesto by clicking here.
This Little Piggie Stayed at Home
2 July 2008
THE CROWS HAVE been irritating me. The sound they make is deeply unpleasant, a kind of mocking croaking, as if they are laughing at you. They attack smaller birds and do damage to the vegetable patch. So I have been trying to shoot them. But they are crafty: there they all are, in [...]
THE ALAN METHOD for successful chicken keeping has been a great success. Since moving the feed bins out of the henhouse, and locking them in till one o’clock, and disturbing any other stray nests, we have been averaging six eggs a day. Arthur is already salivating at the extra income this could give him. If [...]
WE CAME HOME the other day to find that Milly the cat had brought home a little wild bunny. Presumably she intended to kill it and eat, but when we arrived, she was doing a bit of laid back torturing and tormenting prior to moving in for the kill. The bunny was perfectly alive. It [...]
I’VE JUST read a diary entry I wrote for 15th March, but never posted. It makes for rather depressing reading: “Sometimes I wonder why I bother. Children and wives wreck everything… the pony is just an expense and a hassle, and now we’ve got this new puppy. Do the children look after it and feed [...]
THIS MORNING I ate a triumphant breakfast: toast from home-baked bread, bacon from home-killed and home-cured pig, and egg from our own hens. Needless to say, the taste was far superior to anything you could buy in the supermarket, and the fact that all the products were from our own home gave the meal an [...]
A Country Diary 74
13 March 2008
ALL IS NOT well with the chickens. First two of them lay down and died. We think they might have suffered from the cold. Then, after four or five days, they simply stopped laying. That’s right: thirteen hens and not one single egg. It’s the same every day. We lock [...]
27 February 2008
LAST WEEK we brought home fifteen chickens. We want to get serious about egg production. Victoria had gone to get them from a big organic farm, for only one pound each. Organic they may have been, but elegant they were not, and rarely have you seen such a raggle-taggle band of scrawny brown [...]
WELL, you try and do something good and you only get hassle. Yesterday morning we had a knock at the door from our local environmental health officer. He had come round to tell us that according to a law that was brought in two years ago, what we had done with our pigs—that is to [...]
Monday 7 January 2008
OF ALL THE animals we’ve had here, by far the most useless, costly, time-consuming, toilsome and stressful has been the pony. What an absurd indulgence. We have to rent its field, feed it, give it hay, take it in and out every day. It wears expensive coats and needs a visit from [...]
THE PIGS ARE DEAD. The night before killing day, Sunday, Victoria and I sat with our John Seymour and Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall books and read about blood puddings, offal, quartering heads, brawn, chorizo, scalding the skin, butchering, salting and all the rest of it and found the whole thing mightily daunting. Because we haven’t got a [...]
30 October 2007
DISASTER WITH THE pigs. Over half term we went away for a week to visit relatives, and we left the pigs in the charge of our neighbours. When we returned there was a rather stern note on the kitchen table from one neighbour telling us that the pigs had undermined the foundations of [...]
THERE’S BEEN more death on the farm. The fox came back and took all the hens, leaving only the young cockerel, who now wanders around lone and forlorn, with only pigs, a rabbit and the cats for company. Often I see him hanging around by the gate to the pigs’ enclosure, as if chatting to [...]
SOME DAYS ARE GOOD, some days are bad. Sunday was a bad one. Well, the evening was, anyway. First Victoria and I had been arguing about cleaning. I suggested that maybe she’d like to clean up her pony’s shit from the yard occasionally and she screamed that she did her best and if I didn’t [...]
WELL, IT’S been three long months since the last instalment, during which time I have done very little work, been to four festivals, drunk a huge amount of beer and wine, and watched weeds completely cover the vegetable patch. One weekend we left the pigs in the care of Divorcing Dad. During their time in [...]
I SHOT A RAT yesterday. Just to see it die. No, what really happened was that a rat got stuck in the pig feed bin. Victoria found it. It was leaping up in the air, but couldn’t get quite high enough to escape from the bin, and so kept slipping down the plastic sides. Great, [...]
THE MOST EXCITING event of the past month has been the arrival on Monday this week of two pigs. They are weaners, a cross between Saddleback and Devon Black. They are mainly black and cost thirty quid each. We plan to slaughter them in November in order to have a larder full of meat for [...]
Country Diary
24 April 2007
AS EVER, there have been both triumphs and disasters in the garden. Mainly disasters. A little Scottie puppie has been visiting us and savaged the new bunny, Georgina. She lived but had two bloody ears and sat in shock for 24 hours. Georgina was allowed to play in the front garden, but [...]
I’M WRITING THIS week’s diary by hand as I’ve been getting increasingly fed up with computers. With pen and paper, nothing much can go wrong and also there is no outside force to come between you and the writing. The ink flows almost directly from your hand. Pen and paper also has the distinct advantages [...]
THE WOOD-BURNING stove has been ripping through the logs in this cold weather. This speed of burning has led to me to reconsider our fuel system. In the past I have bought huge £100 loads from the local National Trust house, but over the last six months they have not been offering this service. Having [...]
10 January 2007
MY FRIEND Oli Claridge came down just before Christmas to build us a treehouse. We were lucky weatherwise: the three days he was here came just after a period of non-stop rain and just before a period of bitter cold. We spent about fifty pounds on materials, the basic beams, the screws and [...]
The Idler joins forces with the men from QI for a celebration of curiosity and an attack on boredom, with plenty of William Morris
READ MORE …
A sumptuous compendium of one hundred pleasures, each lovingly described and illustrated.
READ MORE …
The US version of How To Be Free: "A work of crafty scholarship and
radical intent" - Michael Agger, Slate
READ MORE …
"Packed with wit, anecdotes and ideas ..." Word Magazine
READ MORE …
Take control of your life and reclaim your right to be idle.
READ MORE …
"Very funny...should be at the top of Tony Blair's reading
list." The Times
READ MORE …
Recommended to anyone interested in either angling or doing nothing.
READ MORE …
"Read this eye-opening and amusingly written book" Daily Mail
READ MORE …
The Idler is a bi-annual, book-shaped magazine that campaigns against the work ethic. It was founded in 1993 by Tom Hodgkinson and his friend Gavin Pretor-Pinney. The intention of the magazine is to return dignity to the art of loafing, to make idling into something to aspire towards rather than reject. As well as providing a radical and thought-provoking read, the Idler is also very funny. MORE …
"The answer to how to live is to stop thinking about it. And just to live. But you're doing that anyway. However you intellectualise it, you still just live." Damien Hirst: Idler 10
Designed by Noble Savage | © 1993 - 2008 The Idler