How to Be Free by Tom Hodgkinson

Author:Tom Hodgkinson
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780141901794
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2013-03-03T16:00:00+00:00

Make drudgery divine, as George Herbert had it. What we need is a poetry of domestic work, a new form, the ‘domestic pastoral’, something which raises the status of doing mundane chores. We need rock songs extolling its virtues: ‘Do the Dirty Dish’ by The Cramps, ‘I’ve Just Found the Sock I was Looking for’ by U2. Let’s make washing-up cool. I am planning a lifestyle article with my friend Nick Lezard. We invented a new demographic category, the Dobo, which stands for Domesticated Bohemian. The Dobo has a wild past but now has a family. He or she is still occasionally given, however, to a night of hedonism. The wildness is still in there. Hence the need for a literature celebrating domesticity.

An odd paradox is that it is possible, however strange it might seem, to find freedom in service – that is, in helping other people. Who is more free, the man with a million pounds and three servants or the man who serves him? Wooster or Jeeves? Gandhi had an ideal of public service but also had servants at different stages in his life. Some people, it seems, like being servants. George Harrison once said of Mal Evans, the Beatles’ roadie, that he embodied the eastern ideal of freedom through service. It was in helping others that he found himself.

If we were all taught to look after ourselves, Lawrence argued, then we could have a more diverse culture. Everyone could work, dress, eat and sleep in a way that suits them and not in a way which suits the industrial model of regularity: ‘Oh, if only people can learn to do as they like and to have what they like, instead of madly aspiring to do what everybody likes and to look as everybody would like to look.’ We must reject Puritan uniformity. Sew hearts on your sleeves, tie ribbons to your ankles!

Embrace your own self and you will start to act originally, that is, authentically and with your own style. When you have your own garden, for example, you can plant exactly what you like. So why do we all copy everyone else, and why do all suburban gardens look the same? Here is the redoubtable Violet Purton Biddle in her 1911 book Small Gardens and How to Make the Most of Them. Substitute the phrase: ‘human being’ for ‘amateur gardener’ and ‘life’ for ‘garden’, and Mrs Biddle’s words seem wise indeed:

‘Be original!’ is a motto that every amateur gardener should adopt. Far too few experiments are made by the average owner of a garden: he jogs along on the same old lines, without a thought of the delightful opportunities he misses. Each garden, however small, should possess an individuality of its own – some feature that stamps it as out of the common run.

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