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" I love the 19th-century idea of the flaneur, the poet wandering through the streets. "
Tom Hodgkinson
Love
Poet
Streets
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" The terrible thing about the Internet and Amazon is that they take the magic and happy chaos out of book shopping. The Internet might give you what you want, but it won't give you what you need. "
Tom Hodgkinson
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" Laziness works. And the simple way to incorporate its health benefits into your life is simply to take a nap. "
Tom Hodgkinson
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" The siesta provides a delightful detour from the working day and it also has a practical value as far as productivity is concerned. Winston Churchill had a good long siesta every day during the Second World War, and he said it was the thing that enabled him to cope with the pressure. "
Tom Hodgkinson
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" In both word and deed, one of the greatest idlers of all time was John Lennon. In his songs we see repeated defences of simply lying around doing nothing. "
Tom Hodgkinson
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Word
" Now I'm no biologist, but it seems to make a lot of sense that slow lives, as well as being enjoyable, are long lives. One only has to think of the example of the tortoise for proof of this theory from the animal world. "
Tom Hodgkinson
World
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Think
" Deleting 200 spams a day is a drag. And I was checking my email constantly, rather than getting on with my real work, which is reading and writing. Email was becoming a distraction, a burden rather than a liberation. "
Tom Hodgkinson
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Day
Reading
" Management gurus in general are, I think, best avoided. All too often they reduce your working life to a list of rules to be followed. Targets are aimed at. Goals kicked at. You then break the rules or forget them and, hey presto, you start beating yourself up. "
Tom Hodgkinson
Life
Yourself
Best
" Indolence, of course, is an absolutely crucial part of the creative process: you do not find poets sitting in rows in cavernous word factories, staring at screens. They are rather to be found lolling on the sofa or strolling through the groves, nursing their melancholic temperaments and losing themselves in extended reveries. "
Tom Hodgkinson
Process
You
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" If your work is done on the phone, then surely you can set up some kind of wireless system. If your work involves reading or writing reports, then this too could be done outside. "
Tom Hodgkinson
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Reading
Work
" Embrace the faff. Stare out of the window. Bend paperclips. Stand in the middle of the room trying to remember what you came downstairs for. Pace. Drum your fingertips. Move papers around. Hum. Look at the garden. "
Tom Hodgkinson
You
Window
Stand
" All poets are idlers, even if all idlers are not poets. "
Tom Hodgkinson
Poets
Idlers
Even
" We think we have to work because the advertising industry has elevated wants into needs. The newspapers and the television batter us incessantly with the latest 'must-haves', whether that's shoes, videogames or patio heaters. As a result, mums think they 'have' to work at Tesco in order to buy expensive trainers. "
Tom Hodgkinson
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" Once you explore life outside of work, it becomes addictive. The less you work, the less you want to work. At first, the odd afternoon off seems like a fantastic luxury. Before long, you are opting for a four-day week. Then a four-day week becomes an intolerable demand on your time, so you find a way of moving to a three-day week. "
Tom Hodgkinson
Time
Work
Moving
" I'm not sure if I could bear to go on an aeroplane again. It's not my concern for the welfare of the planet. It's not even the long check-in times and queuing. No, it's the humiliation of the security process that has finally done it for me. "
Tom Hodgkinson
Security
Me
Bear
" I could happily lean on a gate all the livelong day, chatting to passers-by about the wind and the rain. I do a lot of gate-leaning while I am supposed to be gardening; instead of hoeing, I lean on the gate, stare at the vegetable beds and ponder. "
Tom Hodgkinson
Gate
Day
I Am
" Facebook is not ideologically neutral. In fact, it emerges from a very particular world view which we can trace back to Hobbes. I discovered this by examining the profile of Zuckerberg's fellow board members who, unlike him, are a very interesting bunch and, I suspect, the real power behind the poster boy. "
Tom Hodgkinson
Boy
Power
World
" We have to wonder whether digital technology, rather than making it easier to communicate, is actually doing the opposite. We now sit alone at a keyboard, firing off zeros and ones into the ether. Offices are silent. "
Tom Hodgkinson
Doing
Silent
Technology
" As the son of a feminist mother, I grew up with the idea that work was a sort of salvation for women as it would give them freedom from the domestic grind. Now it seems work is a form of slavery, undertaken out of apparent compulsion rather than choice. "
Tom Hodgkinson
Son
Grind
Mother
" I suddenly realised, hey, I'm not a lazy idiot, I'm an idler! It's something to aspire to, it's part of the creative process! That's fantastic! "
Tom Hodgkinson
Process
Aspire
Creative
" If you can find a way to make a living doing something you enjoy, or a range of things that you enjoy, then it can scarcely be called work. "
Tom Hodgkinson
Living
You
Work
" I originally welcomed the mobile phone, as it seemed to me that it would enable you to work from anywhere. On the mobile, who was to know if you were sitting on the branch of a tree or sitting in an office? But it instead had the opposite effect: instead of freeing us from the office, it allowed the office to take away our freedom. "
Tom Hodgkinson
Me
Work
Tree
" It takes a while to master the art of hammock-lounging. At first I could only manage five minutes or so before I thought I ought to get out and go and help a child learn how to swim or something. But after observing the Mexicans' capability for staring into space for hours on end, I decided to put in some proper practice. "
Tom Hodgkinson
Thought
Art
Child
" Faffing is completely harmless, whereas its opposite - dynamic, purposeful activity - is often very harmful. Faffers do not tend to kill people or make them work 12-hour days or sell them shoddy merchandise or lend them vast sums of money that they cannot pay back. "
Tom Hodgkinson
Pay
People
Work
" Travelling fills me with dread. "
Tom Hodgkinson
Fills
Travelling
Me
" When stuck years ago in a job I hated, my only friend was the public bench. As the tedious mornings dragged on, how I would long for the lunch hour, when I would be able to escape the torture of the office and stroll over to the churchyard and into the comforting wooden embrace of one of its benches. "
Tom Hodgkinson
Lunch
Escape
Friend
" Faffing is good. It is an important part of life. Faffing is when we disconnect from the matrix and idle for a while, like a car. Our body and spirit know deep down that human beings were not made for constant toil so subconsciously creates space through the mechanism of faffing. "
Tom Hodgkinson
Life
Deep
Car
" To me there is no more depressing sight than a five-year-old staring at a screen, unsmiling, mouse in hand. Besides whatever dreadful things this prolonged exposure to screens is doing to their brains, computer games tend to be solitary affairs, and produce little laughter. "
Tom Hodgkinson
More
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" In this age of getting what you want and getting it now, the simple pleasure of browsing is often forgotten. "
Tom Hodgkinson
Age
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Simple
" Festivals are fun for kids, fun for parents and offer a welcome break from the stresses of the nuclear family. The sheer quantities of people make life easier: loads of adults for the adults to talk to and loads of kids for the kids to play with. "
Tom Hodgkinson
Life
Family
Parents
" When walking, you see things that you miss in a motor car or on the train. You give your mind space to ponder. "
Tom Hodgkinson
You
Train
Car