Tom Hodgkinson invites you to join the idle rebellion – no heads will roll but minds may be expanded

Yesterday was press day here at the Idler. Our March/April issue will soon be rolling off the presses and will arrive on doormats, bookstalls and electronic devices across the country (and the world) towards the end of this month.

You’ll read Rowan Williams on the power of anger, and my hilarious chat with Giles and Mary from Gogglebox, with pics by Chris Floyd. As Cosmo Landesman put it in Spectator World magazine this month:

The Idler is a small, brilliant but perfectly formed magazine that celebrates loafing about and learning the art of living. It is the voice of England at its lazy and laconic best — eccentric, kind, curious, convivial and radical without being hectoring.

If you still haven’t subscribed, you can join our merry band from £29.95 a year – that’s a mere £2.50 a month or 58p a week (the BBC licence fee is a whopping £160 per year and “standard” Netflix costs £132 per year). You also get free entry to 25 “Drink with the Idler” events each year (worth £187.50), a free copy of An Idler’s Manual in digital form, paywall access and – if you sign up for the print edition – a free tote bag featuring Ged Wells’ snail design.

Click here to join the idle revolution.

Yesterday evening on “A Drink with the Idler” we talked about a more violent revolution. Liberty, equality and fraternity are powerful and attractive goals and in 1789, more than 17,000 French people lost their lives as the revolutionaries attempted to usher in a world of brotherly love, while also parading the severed heads of hated officials on a pike. If you wanted to apply utilitarian calculus, you could argue that the death toll was fairly low when you consider what a titanic upheaval the French Revolution was.

As last night’s “Drink with the Idler” guest, the historian Robert Darnton, comments in his brilliant new book on the subject: “It was a total revolution, which aimed to transform the world.”

Everything changed: the names of days, street names, children’s names, modes of address, the system of weights and measures, the language, dress, haircuts (goodbye wigs), family life… state supplanted Church, primogeniture was abolished and France became a united nation (and pretty much invented “nationalism”).

Revolutionary fervour spread across the Channel: the young poets Coleridge, Wordsworth and Thelwall called each other “citizen” and talked about a new world of equality while walking the Quantocks and staring at rivers. The Home Office, terrified of a people’s uprising in Blighty, suspected them of plotting and sent a spy to report back.

As Dickens famously put it in A Tale of Two Cities:

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.”

Live well,
Citizen Tom

Our January/February 2024 issue is available in Waitrose, Waterstones, Smiths Travel outlets, select Smiths high street branches and around 100 indie stores. Click here for your nearest stockist.