Quote

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

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Tom Hodgkinson
Age: 56
Born: 1968
Born: January 1
Bookseller
Essayist
Journalist
Writer
Newcastle
Trying
Stand
Staring
Middle
Embrace
Downstairs
Came
Garden
Fingertips
Moving
Window
Drum
Around
Paper
Stare
Remember
Room
Bend
Look
Rooms
Papers
Looks
Move
Pace

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Alongside my no email policy, I resolve to make better use of the wonderful Royal Mail, and send letters and postcards to people. There is a huge pleasure in writing a letter, putting it in an envelope and sticking the stamp on it. And huge pleasure in receiving real letters, too.
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Truly, the bench is a boon to idlers. Whoever first came up with the idea is a genius: free public resting places where you can take time out from the bustle and brouhaha of the city, and simply sit and watch and reflect.
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When the going gets tough, the tough take a nap.
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Life has been reduced to a series of long periods of boredom in the office punctuated by high-octane experiences which you can rack up on your list of things to do before you die. That's not really living: that is slavery with the occasional circus thrown in.
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Bosses should sanction the nap rather than expect workers to power on all day without repose. They might even find that workers' happiness - or what management types refer to as employee satisfaction results - might improve.
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My idea of childcare at festivals is to sit at a trestle table with an ale while the kids run around and make up their own games.
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Being lazy does not mean that you do not create. In fact, lying around doing nothing is an important, nay crucial, part of the creative process. It is meaningless bustle that actually gets in the way of productivity. All we are really saying is, give peace a chance.
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One aspect of fast London life I have never understood, for example, is the custom of the gym. Why do people go to gyms?
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The accusation 'unprofessional' means 'You did not behave like a machine today.
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Part of this individualism is you feel this pressure that you alone have to conquer the world, and if you don't work all the hours God gives then you start feeling really guilty. If you can stop feeling guilty, then I think it's easier to start doing what you want to do.
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Doing something you enjoy at times of your own choosing and making a living from it: now tell me, is that work?
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Life is about recapturing lost freedoms.
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The best thing that can happen to anybody is to be sacked or made redundant because often that's when you think, I don't want to become one of the living dead. I haven't got anything to lose, now I can start to follow my own dreams.
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Punk was a protest against work and against boredom. It was a sign of life, a rant, a scream, a rejection of bourgeois morals. But have things improved since then? Arguably, they've got worse.
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We have become so obsessed by numbers and by bottom lines that beauty and truth has been knocked aside.
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I think it's good to look at how people lived before, and then take the best bits of that culture and try to mix it in with your own.
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It will soon be difficult to put up a shelf without a degree in shelf putting up.
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Often, the things that a lot of work has gone into have been incredibly bad because they're over-worked.
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