REVOLUTION IN YOUR TED

Sir: Brought up in a family of Marxists, who I feel were drawn in more by the suburban communist parties than the ideology, this teddy bear [above, pictured during a talk at the Idler Academy] was bought for me a few weeks before I was born.  As a child, I always tried to get away from the almost painful boredom of shopping and the John Lewis haberdashery department which apparently was so innovative it required weekly, lengthy visits.  This would entail either running off down to the computer department to write quick programs that displayed rude words or my observations of staff that would run in infinite loops on all the screens, or better still I disappeared into the cavernous book emporium nearby.  One day there, I was nine years old, I picked up a thin pamphlet – Mutual Aid. It wasn’t a book as you have in stock, just a few small pages stapled together in one corner with a pale green cover. What I read was truly a revelation and I read most of it standing up there and then and asked the bookseller to tell me more about him, before buying the pamphlet for 12p.  I re-read and finished it at home that day, walked into the living room and announced my rejection of Marxism to the family, declared myself an Anarchist, and renamed my teddy bear Kropotkin.

Keep up the excellent work at the Idler.  We must all keep our childlike curiosity about the world and nourish it in all manner of wonderful, wandering ways.

Deborah

ATTENTION DEFICIT

Sir: The Tory slacker Nigel Mills [see “Idler of the Week: Nigel Mills MP”] was actually increasing his level of attention by playing “Candy Crush Saga” because listening to a discussion on pension reform without engaging in a secondary activity would be so crushingly boring that his (or any) mind would be in danger of going into total shut down. Playing “Candy Crush Saga” would actually result in Mr. Mills being able to remember far more of the proceedings that any of his co-reformists.

The same tactic is used by people who work at mind numbingly boring factory jobs like assembling the same six components to form some part of some device or other for eight hours a day. These workers, usually women, employ the tactic of nattering endlessly for the whole eight hours. This increases their productivity no end.

I know all this because I used to be an industrial engineering technician, which means that I was paid to watch other people working and find ways to get them to increase whatever needed to be increased. I gave it up in the end.

Edmund Punch, Freiburg im Breisgau, deep in the Black Forest, Germany

TROUBLES WITH TORIES

Sir: Praising a Tory [see Hodgkinson’s Register, “We praise Tory slacker”] in these circumstances reminds me of the quote I read last week from Aneurin Bevan: “No attempt at ethical or social seduction can eradicate from my heart a deep burning hatred for the Tory Party. So far as I am concerned they are lower than vermin”. Do we know if the pension reform under discussion was one that might hurt people, as so many government reforms do? There’s a disregard for that possibility in your comment which really troubles me, despite all the excellent things you say and do.

Mark, www.hedgemustard.org