New Escapologist : December 2019 🎅
The End is Nigh!
The end of the year, that is. Which means, of course, that it's time for my traditional annual report to my imaginary shareholders. If you consider yourself one of their number (i.e. you're someone who feels in a small way invested in the continuing antics of one Robert Elizabeth Wringham) then please swivel your eyes thusways to read my year in review including a 2019 book list.
If you're not one of those people, well, never mind. There should still be plenty of interest to you in this eleventh-hour December edition of the fabulous New Escapologist newsletter, not least a nice interview with Paula and Scott Billups, recent inhabitants of a self-built Tiny House.
I hope that your 2019 was as pleasant as could be, that your festive period was all you hoped for and perhaps even involved some 1978 body snatchers (more of which at the end of this email), and that 2020 turns out to be a delectable year of freewheeling Escapological mischief.
Robert Wringham
New Escapologist
Tiny Home Interview
In July, New Escapologist contributor Paula Billups and her partner Scott moved into their brand-new tiny home in Western Massachusetts. They built it themselves with some help from friends. It has 384 square feet of living space with a basement and storage loft. Congrats, guys!
After watching loads of Tiny House videos online–which are usually success stories and often quite miraculous feats of resourcefulness–I wanted to hear about the challenges and expenses that I suspect would be encountered if you just wanted to build a Tiny Home right where you are. I mean, before even getting started, the land anywhere near where I live would cost so much money you’d be better off buying an apartment or continuing to rent one.
I asked Paula and Scott to be candid, not only about cost but about some of the Tiny House practicalities I’ve been curious about for a while. The interview happened in October. Hence the pumpkins you can see in that exterior photograph.
Read the interview here.
Property Guardianship
This perfectly nice person talks a lot of old shit, but burried in said jobbie lies an undigested diamond:
My niece told me about a friend who was a property guardian – someone who looks after an empty property in return for cheaper rent – and so I researched different organisations and used Dot Dot Dot, which offers affordable properties and in return asks guardians to commit to 16 hours of volunteering a month. I ended up with a little four-bedroom townhouse in Abbey Wood in London. It’s a lovely place with a garden, a balcony off the kitchen, a workshop and a music room. It costs £560 a month to live here. Bills are extra and come to about £200 a month. I really like the community aspect of being a property guardian. So far, I’ve run a mosaic course in a residential home and helped out with some gardening locally.
A £760 month with the potential to divide the cost by four? Sixteen hours a month of friendly volunteer work? Sounds like a gig for an Escapologist.
I first heard about property guardianship circa 2008 when someone suggested I move into the recently-abandoned BBC Scotland building (which lives on, quelle surprise, as luxury flats). It all seemed more trouble than it was worth. While my rent would have been just £200, I’d have to work as an unpaid night watchman.
I just couldn’t quite bring myself to pay money to live in a perpetual state of one-eye-on-the-door paranoid half-sleep, while also slipping around in the ectoplasm of Scottish Light Entertainment.
A decade on, however, there are arguably worse housing fates than this. Especially if it’s possible to find yourself in a “little” four-bedroom London townhouse.
Although it’s expected to be knocked down in the next couple of years, when I’m not working or volunteering, I spend my time doing the house up. […] I spend about £200 a month on materials and furniture for the house.
Just don’t enact this part of the plan and you’re golden.
Vocational Guidance Counsellor
Chartered accountancy is rather exciting isn’t it?
Exciting? No it’s not. It’s dull. Dull. Dull. My God it’s dull, it’s so desperately dull and tedious and stuffy and boring and des-per-ate-ly DULL.
Nothing New Under the Sun
Well this is something. A predecessor.
Remember when Homer finds that Japanese detergent box with his face on it? Well, I’m experiencing similar levels of uncanniness this morning.
No, I’m not talking about the chap from the YSL movie. I’m talking about THIS, which is from 1937:
Like all Englishmen […] I was trained from the cradle up to be an escapologist.
I would define an escapologist as a person who looks looks the facts of life in the back of the neck, or by sheer force of imagination conjures them out of existence, or runs away from them.
In all industrial countries functioning under the glorious profit motive system an increasing interest is being taken in the spot of escapology; but England is an old sport-loving country, escapology is a fine ripened tradition here, and we easily lead the world.
Isn’t that great? The book is called Away From It All: An Escapologist’s Notebook by Cedric Belfrage.
Belfrage was a film critic, a great believer in Liberalism and the arts, a Communist, and most likely a spy. The more I learn about him, the more interesting a character he appears to be. This book, however, was his first and seems to be essentially a travel book. Its worldview seems more “escapist” than what I call “Escapological” in that Befrage is seeking different forms of “dope” (his word) with which to temporarily escape reality. The first chapter is called “Portrait of a Man Seeking Hashish.”
I can’t wait to read further and to note the similarities and differences between his Escapology and ours.
My edition (pictured below) seems to have been abridged by the author for Penguin, but it’s still a sizable volume. I will report back when I have devoured it.
Body Snatchers
Yes indeed, as readers of the blog will know, the "classic festive film" of choice this year at Escape Towers was the 1978 version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
It turns out to be the perfect thing to consume along with one's Brussels sprouts. Not only do mid-century horror films give me the sort of warm inner snugness that Christmas once provided, but the film's stars are Leonard Nimoy, Donald Sutherland and Jeff Goldblum who seem to me to be practically family. Goldblum is the mommy.
What I didn't know when selecting this film was that it was originally released for Christmas weekend. I'm astonished by this. It was intended for Christmas. Such unlikely serendipity probably won't happen next year when we watch, say, Village of the Damned.
That's all for this issue. Season's Greetings, one and all.
We'll be back at the end of January with some thoughts on Cedric Belfrage's book, a new Patreon essay, and all of the usual Escapological news that's fit to print. Well, not "print" anymore exactly, but you know what I mean.
Ho-Ho-Ho!
Robert Wringham x
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