The reason I post so many quotes from literature is to show that the desire to escape is neither uncommon nor certifiable.

On the contrary, it’s perfectly normal and has been with us since, oh, around the time of the industrial revolution. But I’m sure that’s just a coincidence.

Here are some diary entries from 1909, written when W. N. P. Barbellion was but 19 years old. He wanted to escape the career chosen for him by his father (“journalism,” which actually meant the transcribing of local council meetings) and to take up his ikigai of zoology.

June 2nd. I have been for ever cogitating, worrying, devising means of escape.

October 14th. Returned home from London. Felt horribly defeated in crossing the threshold. It was so obviously returning after an unsuccessful flight.

December 23rd. I nearly escaped into a seaside laboratory, and now suddenly to be flung back into the dirt and sweat … seems very hard, and it is very hard.

Self-adorbed? Well, it is a diary. On the other hand, H. G. Wells, writes in a preface to the published diaries:

An egotism, like an eggshell, is a thing from which to escape; the art of life is that escape.

He escaped in the end, by the way. To rockpools and countryside woods in the short term, then all the way to the British Museum.

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New Escapologist Issue 19 and the anniversary edition of Escape Everything! are both available now.

He drew charcoal portraits for extra money, but talent didn’t save him from [unpleasant work in] the tannery. After work, he would lie down in a corner of the shirt factory where some apprentices slept. He would hide beneath a sheet and try to ignore the rats as they scurried over his face. In sleep he honed his talent for escape.

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New Escapologist Issue 19 and the anniversary edition of Escape Everything! are both available now.

Reader A writes:

Hi Robert,

Firstly thanks for all you do for the escapologist movement, I’ve loved reading all your newsletters and magazines since I stumbled across a copy in a Hackney coffee shop.

It struck a chord. My girlfriend and I had been asking ourselves if this (corporate London etc etc) is really all there is. We were pondering our own escapes but we didn’t have the words to express these plans nor the knowledge that we were missing out on a whole community of escapologists that you’re smack in the centre of!

We’ve since quit our jobs, travelled for 6 months and are now trying to find work on our own terms, which is scary but thrilling in equal measure.

In our final weeks of travel I ordered Issue 19 from my hostel in Mexico to ensure I had the fresh copy waiting at home for my arrival.

Kind Regards,

A

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Wringham Wresponds:

And no matter what happens next, you have lived. You made the uncommon choice and actually lived.

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New Escapologist Issue 19 and the anniversary edition of Escape Everything! are both available now.

did it even make sense to compose an anti-technology manifesto on an internet-connected device? Would I be able to resist the pull of email, news, and “research” in a time of unbearable stress? No, I needed to write my book the old way. I needed to prove it was still possible.

The artist and writer August Lamm — who gave us a great interview in Issue 18 — lives and works without a computer or a smartphone.

That’s what her forthcoming book is about and, obviously (or perhaps not), it was written by hand.

She’s not the first to do this. Mark Boyle used to submit his Moneyless Man column to his newspaper each month, hand-written. And as August herself says, this was how all books were written prior to the 1980s, albeit not as a form of tech protest.

Doesn’t this take absolutely ages? No, so says. Because one of the advantages of writing long-hand, she says, was to rid herself of internetty distractions:

Distraction is not a new thing, of course, but I think we can all agree that there’s a difference between old-school distractions—looking out a window, flipping through a book, tidying the office, calling a friend—and modern ones.

I wouldn’t mind reading a book whose author compulsively snacked, or smoked, or paced the room after every page. I do mind reading a book whose author was inundated with the voices of a thousand other people, platforms, brands, algorithms.

It’s a good point. Let’s keep the algo out of our literature.

The book’s about an actor who must wear a black leather bag over his whole body (except for his feet) after precariat desperation leads him to take work as the subject of a psychological experiment.

Anyway, these quotes aren’t particularly representative of the book, but they’re nice as Escapological moments:

About a job (but not the black bag one):

I don’t want to do this forever … Too many people feel like they own a little bit of me — it’s like I accidentally sold 500 per cent of the shares in my soul. And I’m getting deeply sick of people and their bullshit. It’s not a good feeling.

And a retired man speaks:

Retirement feels rather like being expelled from a cult … Everything you measured your life by is proved to be utterly senseless and haphazard. You went along with a set of precepts because you had little choice in the matter once you’d signed up, and then it’s suddenly over and the prevailing feeling is, Well what was all that in aid of?

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New Escapologist Issue 19 and the anniversary edition of Escape Everything! are both available now.

This was a fiddly business and I probably made mistakes. If I’ve missed you out, misspelled your name, used the wrong link to your website, or listed you in the wrong section of the page, please grab me roughly by the collar and shout the correction into my face.

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New Escapologist Issue 19 and the anniversary edition of Escape Everything! are both available now.

On reading your June 19th email exploring the lives of back-to-back cruiseniks, I was reminded of these passages from “The Strange Last Voyage of Donald Crowhurst”, which elegantly combines Escapological ideas with the desire to live differently.

Moitessier — a contestant in the 1968 race to single-handedly circumnavigate the globe — writes in his logbook why he’s decided to give up the contest and remain at sea:

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New Escapologist Issue 19 and the anniversary edition of Escape Everything! are both available now.

Check out these pics taken by Heather. They make a decent case for it.

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New Escapologist Issue 19 and the anniversary edition of Escape Everything! are both available now.

Further to yesterday’s post, here’s Dickon Edwards (in his diaries) on work:

I’ve tried Normal Life on so many occasions. By which I mean, doing a job you utterly feel at odds with purely for the money. It seems to work for many people, and I admire them immensely. But for me it’s living a lie to the point of nausea. I feel a trespasser. A fraud.

The World Of Work doesn’t like me very much. It brings out all my most useless qualities, though they make for quite good reading in a diary. It’s my Borderline Autistic Buffoon side that is brought to the fore in such jobs. I have spilt soup in an old lady’s lap when working as a waiter, and have been sacked. On more than one occasion, I have accidentally deleted an entire firm’s computer records, in circumstances bordering on the poltergeist-esque, and have been sacked. I have broken the frame of a priceless gilt mirror and kept quiet about it, but decided it was best to leave the employment of the museum in question, before it happened again and I was sacked. I didn’t break the mirror itself, just a bit of the frame.

Actually, I wonder how that works with the superstition about seven years bad luck? Because this would have been seven years ago.

I have been sacked from your basic office admin job. Admittedly, this was because I kept phoning in sick and deciding instead to go to the cinema or the park. I don’t really blame them for sacking me. But on most days, the idea of going into that office per se made me feel sick, so I phoned in sick. I was merely being honest.

I’ve just remembered that this office job involved being the secretary to a lawyer. The weird thing is, although she’d been to university and I hadn’t, I had a much larger vocabulary than she had. She would ask me how to spell words, and what words meant.

She once asked me, “Dickon, what does the word “pretentious” mean?”

I resisted the temptation to reply, “You’re looking at a definition.”

I seemed over-qualified for the job, though I have no A Levels let alone a degree. To remedy this, I have considered Adult Education, and enrolled for an Evening Class last year. But all I learned was that I have trouble working in a class environment, that I really need help meeting deadlines and finding an incentive to write (hence the Angels). And when the teacher of the class in question turned out to be someone I knew, whose pyjama party I’d once attended, it was hard not to take a hint from the universe. I was always closer to the teachers than the pupils.

At the age of 35, I have learned beyond a reasonable doubt that the World Of Work is mutually incompatible with me. It makes me ill, or I break valuable things, or computers mysteriously crash in my presence. We are better off without each other. It’s a waste of time all round, just adding to the amount of sackings in the world.

I cannot convincingly play the role of a normal person in a class, or a normal person in a group workplace. But I can be Dickon Edwards. So if we’re all agreed about that, it’s just a question of developing a work ethic and treating Being Dickon Edwards like any other job. The only problem is how to earn money from it, and how to develop it so it produces something people might want. And want to pay for.

Though I know some people regard my entire existence as a form of sarcasm, I am serious about the Diary Angels scheme. I no longer view the diary as busking with words. From now on, this is Work With Sponsorship. I write to a regular body of readers and seek to provide an interesting and unusual read which they cannot get anywhere else. Tales of dipping in and out of worlds, of being a London Dandy, of oddness against the world, of being the unlikely connection between many diverse people and social scenes. I feel I don’t particularly belong anywhere. This is my greatest hindrance, but also my greatest asset.

This was all back in 2007. Dickon has since achieved a first-class degree and a PhD. from Birkbeck University. He remains, however, unemployed.

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New Escapologist Issue 19 and the anniversary edition of Escape Everything! are both available now. The fascinating Mr. Edwards is also interviewed in Issue 18.

A gem from Dickon Edwards’ diaries:

A frequently asked question: Why don’t you just get a job?

Answer: Because I’ve got too much else to do.

Answer: Because I’m too busy to get a job.

Answer: Being unemployed is a full-time job in itself, involving skills and time in order to survive. So I do have a job. It’s just atrociously paid.

Answer: Because I’ve never lasted in the many Wage Slave-type jobs I’ve had in the past. It’s only a matter of time before I’m dismissed, or have to leave to avoid collapsing in tears on a daily basis.

Answer: I _am_ trying to find something, it just has to be something I can do well, as opposed to pretend to do well.

Answer: I’m too far gone.

Answer: This _is_ my job. It’s a kind of busking with text. I just haven’t managed to earn money from it. Yet.

Answer: Don’t you know who I _am_?

Having said all that, of course, I do engage in a small amount of perfectly normal things for the Green Party: envelope stuffing, posting leaflets through hundreds of letterboxes, helping out here and there. It’s just that that’s all voluntary work.

It’s the view that some things matter to one, and some things don’t. We should be free to choose how we spend the time of our lives without threat of destitution.

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New Escapologist Issue 19 and the anniversary edition of Escape Everything! are both available now. The fascinating Mr. Edwards is also interviewed in Issue 18.