New Escapologist : June 2024
You can still, after everything, walk away
Fellow Escapologists,
Good news. Issue 16 is here! It’s a really good-looking edition and I’ve been shipping subscriber copies and pre-sales all day long.
Please buy a copy if you haven’t already. The print edition is available while stocks last. The digital edition will be available indefinitely.
We’re doing a miniature launch event for Issue 16 in Glasgow on Tuesday 25th June from 7pm. Why not come along if you’re nearby? Details here. Hooray!
About Issue 16
The new issue is subtitled Footloose and Fancy-Free. It looks at mobility, travel, movement, being fleet of foot. Important Escapological concepts, I’m sure you’ll agree.
It features an interview with eccentric art pop legend Momus (pictured below) who seems to live wherever he likes (Tokyo, Berlin, Paris, Osaka, Edinburgh, Montreal, London, New York, Athens) without concern for those practicalities that trouble regular mortals. Our other interview (we like to do two) is with journalist Lydia Swinscoe who lives semi-nomadically, moving from home to home and city to city quite spontaneously. When we spoke she was in Sri Lanka and her next stop… who knows?
There’s Escapological writings on travel and internationalism, loads of stuff from me, and columns from McKinley Valentine, Tom Hodgkinson, Apala Chowdhury, David Cain and more. Tom’s column is a particularly good one, telling the story of his walking club with his old schoolfriends, which I’m not sure he’s written about anywhere before.
There are Escapological film reviews for the first time, a particularly amusing Workplace Woe, a great letter from a financially irresponsible Escapologist, deep reviews of new and old books (including Jenny Odell’s incredible How to do Nothing), musings on the Old [pre-social media] Web, and our unusual “review of a walk,” this time by Canada’s Tom Gibbs from his honeymoon in Lisbon. That cover image is from Lisbon too, actually, but those are my feet and boots, not Gibbs’.
Anyway, it’s a very strong issue and here’s where to bag your treasure.
So You Want to Be a Nomad
So you want to be a nomad. Or maybe you’re already a nomad but interested in trying out a different transient lifestyle. There are lots of different ways to live a nomad life these days, from workcamping to sailing, but if you’re trying to decide how you want to travel full-time, it can be hard to decide which style will suit you best.
Two of the most popular full-time travel styles for Americans are international backpacking (traveling from country to country, staying in short-term accommodations or rentals à la digital nomads) or RVing (in a wide variety of vehicles) across North America.
From my own personal experiences of backpacking over many years and full-time RVing in the U.S for over two years, both offer unique experiences and cater to different preferences. Let’s break it down: the perks and quirks of each option!
This is from a lovely website called The Dirtbag Dao by Heather Delaney. As a city slicker, I don’t write much about backpacking or RVing but no view of Escapology would be remotely complete without them. They’re both highly valid and and worthwhile means of seeing the world, of living cheaply, of living free.
I remember wistful feelings on my walk to work (in the bad old days) when a couple of American backpackers, hand-in-hand and looking like something from an idealistic travel agency poster, emerged from the mouth of a railway station.
Their energy was so different to mine: they were strolling and marvelling while I was literally trudging. Their movements were free and unfettered while I was being pulled along, under duress, by an invisible tether.
I didn’t need to learn the lesson because I already knew what freedom felt like but, baby, I wished I could trade places.
We’ll publish more about backpacking and RVing in future issues of the mag but, in the meantime, you could do worse than read this article and enjoy a leisurely poke around the Dirtbag Dao site.
Heather also has a list of books and websites for more information, including Rolf Potts’ excellent book about long-term travel, Vagabonding.
Fickle
Speaking of which, Vagabonding is an Escapological classic. I’ve quoted before the bit about how anyone could raise the cash required to travel across China by motorbike by cleaning toilets for a few months. These things don’t have to be “impossible” dreams. You can do them.
Rolf Potts’ book is full of curious (and often quite niche) wisdom. He quotes, for instance, a mid-century naturalist called Edwin Way Teale:
Freedom … seems more rare, more difficult to attain, more remote with each new generation.
Which sounds nice enough but Potts goes on to say that:
Teale’s lament for the deterioration of personal freedom was just as hollow a generalization in 1956 as it is now. As John Muir was well aware, vagabonding has never been regulated by the fickle public definition of lifestyle. Rather, it has always been a private choice within a society that is constantly urging us to do otherwise.
Reluctant as I am to completely divorce the individual from society in my writing, I rarely say anything as untempered or full-frontal as that.
Potts is right. It’s elementary Escapology and it must not be forgotten. The world might demand that we go to work, own or rent some bricks and mortar, perform certain banal duties, behave in destructive ways. But we don’t have to do any of it. We can’t be controlled to that extent.
You can still, after everything, walk away.
Tiny Man
This guy gets it.
How Tiny Living Drastically Changed My Work Life I Surviving On a Minimal Income
We Are The 85%
Remember the “we are the 99%!” mantra of the Occupy movement? Maybe we should borrow (okay, scav) this.
85% of us hate our jobs according to a 2022 Gallup poll. This is an increase on the 80% I reported in my book, Escape Everything!, in 2016.
At the time, many people found my figure dubious or fanciful. It wasn’t. It came from research. And now, similar research suggests the figure has increased.
Another way of putting it is that only 15% of people actually like their jobs. Who are these people? These will be those who work (and do well enough to survive or are already independently wealthy) in gentle and unhurried arts or crafts, those who work hard and make a genuine difference in direct social services, evil CEO types at the top of the tree who do whatever they like because life is just a joyride to them, and (I would say) a handful of idiots in denial.
Anyway, I don’t have a job (so I’m in the 5% or something) but Escapologists who still work against their will could start saying:
“WE ARE THE 85%”
Put it on your protest signs. Wear it on a badge. Print it on the coffee cup you drink from in the office.
When people ask what it means, tell them.
Tell them about our magazine is you like. But mainly tell them what it means to be in the 85%. That you go to work not because you love it but because you have to.
Parakeets!
I like parakeets. Perhaps its because green is my favourite colour. Or because they look a little bit exotic here in Scotland. Or perhaps it’s because they’re Escapologists.
I assumed their being so far north was a symptom of climate change. They look like hot weather birds after all. But apparently the Himalayas is their natural habitat and they’ve been in the UK since at least the 1970s.
A naturalist writes:
Over the years, I’ve heard many myths about how they got here in the first place. “They were released by a stoned Jimi Hendrix, who let them out in London’s Carnaby Street…”; “They escaped from the film set of The African Queen…”; “They made a bid for freedom when their cage broke during the Great Storm of 1987…”
And the truth?
the parakeets’ presence here is rather a letdown: as popular cagebirds, it was inevitable some would escape.
That’s not a letdown at all! Either way, they’re Escapologists. Godspeed, parakeets.
The Narcotic Tingle of Possibility
Here’s another relevant quote from Vagabonding. Rolf Potts on escape planning:
The question of how and when to start vagabonding is not really a question at all. Vagabonding starts now. Even if the practical reality of travel is still months or years away, vagabonding begins the moment you stop making excuses, start saving money, and begin to look at maps with the narcotic tingle of possibility.
Letter to the Editor: Searching for Chameleons
To send a letter to the editor, simply write in. You’ll get a reply and we’ll anonymise any blogged version.
Dear Robert,
I recently found out I began my Escapology career quite early.
My father came across a letter he wrote home from Kenya where I grew up: "...C has been clearing off from her nursery school on the farm and turns up at home at all hours. She doesn't seem to have got the right idea about school yet. She is more interested in her cat, which is now nearly fully grown."
I continued this pattern throughout my school life, preferring making dens, having water fights or searching for chameleons to sitting at a desk endlessly looking out of the window and wondering why I was there.
Reader C, Perthshire
That’s all for another month. How much more do you want? Honestly, you’re insatiable. There’s a whole new print edition to be getting on with for goodness sake. :)
See you in Glasgow if you happen to be nearby. Do come along. It will be fun and easy. Not a trap.
Much love,
Robert Wringham
www.newescapologist.co.uk