Little things like making clothes, baking bread, cooking, even useless things like bird-watching, sketching flowers, playing guitar in the home - that sort of time is gone. And the time we have? We're so exhausted, we want to let ourselves get sucked in to the escape world of TV. I'm speaking from experience; I'm not above all this.

These days we seem more bound to our bosses than ever before. We even identify our own selves with the jobs we do: "What do you do?" is the first question we ask each other at parties, as if a job title could express a fundamental truth about our personality.

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.

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!

Laziness works. And the simple way to incorporate its health benefits into your life is simply to take a nap.

Beauty feeds us. Anarchy is beauty. We are against the grey people. We want to decorate, like those fantastic Indian lorries which are covered with flowers. Beauty must conquer the lust for order; order is ugliness.

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.