Rejoice, for our printing problems are over. Outstanding orders will be shipped on Monday. You’re a very patient bunch. Thanks for not sending us mailbombs or reporting us to Ofcom.
New orders for Issues One and Two can now be placed via the magazine shop without fear.
My podcast partner excitedly reports that he’s ordered a new iMac. Perhaps tellingly, I struggled to remember what an iMac even is. My first thought was that it was one of those total-immersion cinemas (an IMAX) but knew that my friend couldn’t possibly have bought one of those.
It’s a symbollic triumph that the iMac had drifted so far from my consciousness. Back when I started out as an Escapologist, I would periodically visit the Apple Shop in Glasgow to test whether I could be seduced by these sophisticated pieces of technology. If I could remain unseduced by a tablet computer or a slick handheld book-reading thing, I knew I could withstand most of what consumer culture could throw at me. Tom Hodgkinson told me he does the same thing with the Argos home-shopping catalogue. I recommend this practice to anyone: allow the salesmen in, refuse everything and build up those muscles of resistance.
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The indefatigable Laura Gonzalez has uploaded a very fine collection of photographs of “The Great Escape”. The event – a talk and singalong – took place at the Glasgow Social Centre on 7th October 2009, hosted by Neil Scott and featuring Tom Hodgkinson (The Idler, How to Be Free) and Robert Wringham (New Escapologist).
Neil Scott and Tom Hodgkinson lead the acoustic singalong.
Neil Scott and Robert Wringham enjoying a pre-show beer.
My escape has taken me from Montreal, Quebec City, Ottawa, through New York, to Birmingham, Glasgow and Dudley. As I clean up cat sick in Dudley, I think “I saw the Statue of Liberty the other day”. Such is life when you defeat Bad Faith.
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David Cameron’s plans for Britain are, in his words, “big, bold and radical”. Or so I read in the Guardian this morning. Actually what he is advocating isn’t radical at all, but a return to a carefully undefined golden era. (He probably could not get away with a call to a return to the 1950s. Yet.) But what the ‘Broken Britain’ catchphrase barely disguises is a bizarre fantasy of a saccharine era when women were cheery, well-behaved mothers, men were manly fathers who knew how to discipline their kids, foreigners still lived where they belonged, in other countries, and everyone uncomplainingly knew their place and loved their Queen. Obviously, this era has never truly existed. Yet the popularity of the Broken Britain idea would suggest that an awful lot of people have bought into this fantasy.
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