New Escapologist : April 2024
Maybe don’t completely change your whole life after reading one book. Especially a cookbook.
Hello everyone,
Welcome to the April edition of New Escapologist, the free-and-easy newsletter spinning off from the magazine of the same name.
What’s up? Here at Escape Towers, I’m preparing (that’s writing, researching, editing, commissioning, typesetting) our sixteenth print issue, due for release in June.
It has a handsome cover showing the cobblestones of Lisbon, a city we’ll be discussing a little in the walking pages of our Reviews section. Yes, we review a walk in each issue. We also review old and new books, colourful corners of the Old Web, and (in a New Escapologist first) some recent films. This isn’t pop-cultural junk: everything we review is relevant to our core ideas of escape and Escapology: how people, including yourself, might try to escape the worker-consumer treadmill.
Issue 16 is available to pre-order in print and digital formats. So, you know, please do that. You won’t regret it: it’s dirt cheap and highly original.
Additionally, if you’d like to contribute a small piece of writing to the issue, we’re still on the hunt for workplace woes: pithy (and often pissy) tales of workplace misery, for which you can find some guidelines here.
But enough showboating: let’s get on with the Substack show. May include showboating.
Your friend and neighbour,
Robert Wringham
Editor, New Escapologist
117 Beds
Three years ago, I quit having a fixed place to live in, leaving my home for various locales across the UK and beyond. The notes in my phone reveal that, to date, I’ve slept in 117 beds, in locations ranging from the Scottish Highlands and coastal Dorset to Armenia’s capital, Yerevan, and the avant-garde Georgian capital of Tbilisi, all while holding down a full-time job.
Personally, I’d rather have no job and a single home base, but this is certainly a tempting way to live. Just think of the opportunity it would afford for adventure.
The writer Lydia Swinscoe has embraced minimalism and utterly challenged the Western ideals of permanence and security, ideals so ingrained that many people wouldn’t even think to question them. When the source of the modern malaise is so hard to put your finger on sometimes, why not question the big ones? The facts of life that are too big to see sometimes? Maybe living in one place instead of nomadically is where we’ve been going wrong.
In any event, she’s footloose and fancy-free: in London one minute and Tbilisi the next. Come on, that’s so cool.
Living nomadically, mostly out of a 65-litre backpack, I’ve become deeply aware of just how much “stuff” we collect but don’t need. Everywhere – on TV, online, pasted across billboards, on the sides of buses – we’re bombarded with materialistic messages luring us to buy the latest gadgets, kitchen appliances (read: air fryers), home furnishings, newest fashion trends and miracle beauty products. I’m convinced it’s a trap.
Nor Iron Bars a Cage
I was looking at Escape Everything! (my 2016 book) today and found myself feeling very happy and proud of it.
It’s really no bad book, you know. And it’s aged well.
This is a small thing, but I enjoyed the Houdini quotes at the top of each section and chapter. Each quote is appropriate for the words that follow.
I’m especially fond of “Here follows a long description of a machine” for the section about “The Trap.” And I like “Tear it into little bits” at the start of the Bureaucracy chapter since it’s taken from a book called Houdini’s Paper Magic (you know, because Bureaucracy is paperwork and I’m about to tell you to scorn it).
I remember poring over library books about Houdini and digital archive scans of his magic books, trying to find just the right quotes.
Earlier drafts mixed some non-Houdini quotes in with the Houdini ones and I’m glad I spotted the error of that: using Houdini quotes throughout the book reinforces the central “Escapology” metaphor and almost gives the impression that Houdini himself is guiding you through the book.
The illusion is only broken once. The introduction does not have a Houdini quote. Instead it has this:
Stone walls do not a prison make, Nor iron bars a cage — Richard Lovelace.
Rar! I’m annoyed by this. My draft attributes the quote to Houdini because I had a replica signed photograph on my fridge door on which The Master had scrawled those very words.
What I didn’t know at the time was that Houdini was quoting from a poem by Lovelace.
The fact checker at the publishing house sent a note about this, saying it would require correction. I considered an attribution along the lines of “Houdini, quoting James Lovelace” but it seemed a bit longwinded and, probably feeling the pressure of the deadline, I took the path of least resistance and gave the editors my nod of approval. I wish I hadn’t. The fixed version is artless shite.
(But never mind! The paperback version of Escape Everything! is called I’m Out and it’s once again available at our shop. 100% of the cover price will help to keep the lights on at Escape Towers. Order your copy here.)
Tiny Cowboys
Do I regret getting into the whole tiny-house nightmare? Of course not.
Thus says James Campbell in his candid account of tiny house life. He was ripped off by cowboy tiny house manufacturers who promised an out-of-the-box solution for £65,000.
There were so many problems. The house that was delivered was not the house in the brochure. We had ordered a pitched roof, so that solar panels would be pointed at the winter sun. The house that arrived had a pretty much flat roof.
There were dangerous and infuriating problems with the electrics and the plumbing. Rats soon moved into the walls. Inexpert technicians were repeatedly flown in from Lithuania, despite the company purporting to be UK-based and ecologically-minded.
We quickly got to the point where we asked them to take it away and give us our money back. They refused. We looked at suing them for mis-selling. Our solicitor reported they were in so much debt that if we did and won, they would go bankrupt and we would get nothing.
I mention Chris’s account as another example of how things can go wrong when fleeing the daily grind or trying to live alternatively. Nobody really thinks its going to be easy but James’ problems were quite extreme and unlike, say, Mark Boyle’s efforts to adapt to a life on the land, they’re hard to see as a worthy challenge when you’ve paid through the nose for a commercial solution. Chris didn’t go into the project looking for a challenge. It was just supposed to work.
Greenwashing is real and so, I suppose, is escapewashing. Capitalism is watching: it’s forever on the lookout for lifestyles to sell. Chris couldn’t have done much to avoid being ripped off, but there is at least one teachable moment:
One day I was given a copy of Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s first River Cottage Cookbook. I devoured it and swiftly realised my future would involve living in the countryside, doing my best to be self-sufficient.
Maybe don’t completely change your whole life after reading one book. Especially a cookbook. Especially a cookbook written by a wealthy person who stands to get even wealthier by it. By all means be inspired by watching Escape to the Country if you like, but read, read, read. Proper books. Case studies. Talk and listen to people who have done it.
Do your research. Downsize gradually (Chris writes that he purged 90% of his stuff quite quickly — and wastefully too, by taking it to charity shops or the tip). Pilot the new idea by testing it first (which, to be fair, Chris sort-of did by moving into a cheap caravan before buying the tiny home).
Or, y’know, just jump in. But do it with eyes open and ready to fail.
Click, Click, Swish, Click, Click
I’m researching an artist called Giacomo Patri.
When the school he worked for was shut down by the pressures of McCarthyism (it was closely associated with the labour movement), he turned to independent creative practice.
Patri took to crafting and printing a graphic memoir at home.
In the foreword to a 2016 commercial reprint, his sons remember the presence of a printing press in their home:
The whole process produced a memorable, rhythmic, ‘click, click, swish, click, click,’ against the background of the whirling sound of the electric motor and the smell of fresh printer’s ink throughout the house.
Isn’t this a lovely recollection? It reminds me that there is, as Tove Jansson put it, a right kind of work.
Yiddish
I’ve failed to find convincing attribution for this quote but it’s a goodie.
Aoyb di arbet iz geven azoy groys, volt di reykh es gehaltn far zikh.
or:
If work was so great, the rich would have kept it for themselves
We’re Sorry to See You Go: How to Escape Social Media Forever
I’ve been social media free for a few months now. The psychological benefit is greater than I ever imagined. It feels like real life is back. I don’t suffer the constant nagging drag of having a mind in two places. I highly recommend it.
You already know why you should delete your social media accounts. At best it’s a huge waste of your time. But maybe the threats to democracy and life and free will also get you down.
Here’s how to do it. The following links go to the official support pages for each platform, so hopefully these instructions will be valid in perpetuity.
This piece is intended to be my last word on social media: explaining why and how to leave is getting old. We all know about the “network effect” that keeps people tied to social media and the oft-cited “privilege” of “being able” to escape it. All I can say is that the exit door, as usual, is open and is neither locked nor bolted.
I know it’s difficult to escape social media, but this final “how to escape social media forever” piece is hopefully evergreen. Check it out. And share it with your friends.
Book Recommendation: How to Do Nothing
Look at all those stickies! How can a book with this title, in a field I have been reading and thinking about for twenty years, contain so much new information and perspective? Jenny Odell is amazing.
Incidentally, it’s not about “quitting Facebook.” It’s about everything.
I expect I’ll write a review of this book for the forthcoming Issue 16.
Letter to the Editor: A Pro-Rest Episode
To send a letter to the editor, simply write in. You’ll get a reply and we’ll anonymise any blogged version.
Reader G writes:
Dear Rob,
The world of work is trying to colonise our every waking moment, so it’s heartening to learn of ever more people (like yourself and those you write about) who are fighting back by running for the exit.
Someone once told me he admired me for jumping ship each time a job wasn’t for me, while he was too worried to leave his. I hadn’t realised how much of an Escapologist I was!
And it’s not just our waking moments they want. This week, BBC Sounds has a podcast about sleep. Capitalism is trying to monetise our sleep by selling us masks, calming apps and the rest of it.
But why do we need these things? What’s causing the difficulties of falling asleep? It’s the prospect of having to get up the next morning and earn some pennies to pay for the apps and masks!
Apparently in the mid 2000s some entrepreneur tried to encourage people to learn to lucid dream so that they could keep working on their PowerPoint presentations in their sleep! There really is no frontier past which capitalism/work will not tread. Luckily the podcast guests called this out too. It was a very pro-rest episode.
*
Hi G. That podcast was very interesting and informative, so thank you for drawing our attention to it. Imagine using your sleep to work, unremunerated, on PowerPoint presentations. That’s the saddest thing I’ve ever heard.
Awkwardly enough, I just ordered my first “soft headphones” designed for sleeping in. They were only a fiver from Vinted, so I shouldn’t have to give too many bus station hand jobs to make back my investment.
Personally, I’m not looking for commercial assistance with sleep: I just like to go to bed early to listen to podcasts sometimes. It’s pleasant. Unfortunately, I often fall asleep after ten minutes and the corded headphones (I have a bundle of them, stolen from airplanes in part so that imprisoned slaves don’t have to clean my ear wax out of them) end up wrapped around my neck. No more! I take the point though: sleep paraphernalia is another nonsense industry.
I was thinking recently how lucky I am to have never failed to fall asleep at night. Even brutally restless or party nights end with me conking at 5am. I stayed in a terrible hostel in Utrecht recently (see New Escapologist 15) where I was awake all night. Even then, I slept at 6am on the first train out of town.
Let’s keep work out of sleep, folks. As previously related in Escape Everything!, I once dreamed about stacking shopping baskets at my old retail job. What a rip off. This week I dreamed about reading beautifully-designed 1970s children’s encyclopaedias with my wife and looking at midcentury furniture in a department store with my friend Wentworth. Genuinely good dreams, those. The key, of course, is to work as little as possible in waking hours so that your unconscious mind doesn’t need to process the trauma at night.
That’s all for another newsletter. I hope you liked it. Thank you for your continued attention and support. Please remember to send me your workplace woes if you have them, and to pre-order the forthcoming Issue 16.
Much love,
Robert Wringham
www.newescapologist.co.uk