With its mixture of pub talk, local knowledge, inappropriate humour and the frankly ridiculous characters we call friends, our first book, Today South London, Tomorrow South London, has been a big hit with like-minded slackers like you.
Our second book, Shirk, Rest and Play (And Live Happily Ever After), reflects the other side of Deserter – our philosophy. You will, however, find the themes familiar; avoiding work, messing about, daydreams, lovely pints and opportunistic naps. Plus the wisdom of such sages as Half-life, Roxy, Dirty and the Raider. Along with stars of the Deserter Pubcast, the Corporate Deserter and Spider. So we hope you will consider backing it for publication by pledging for a copy in advance, along with other fine rewards (beer, art, everything).
As ambassadors for the South London lifestyle, this book is born of our concern that lives are being wasted, frittered away under dark clouds of work, responsibility and stress, when you could be doing something else, like staring out of the window for a bit. The world is changing. Governments can give you money. You can shirk from home. Parks are pubs. And this book will be your guide to a new life, a new you.
Among the optimism and devotion to the positive life, there is a fear, dear reader. A fear that no one will teach the children the way of the Deserter. Sure, they’ll be shown how 16+ years of schooling can secure a sufficient income to be comfortable – provided it’s followed by a further 40 years of diligent service. But who will show them how to get paid the maximum for doing the minimum? To get things for free? That napping is a sacred right? About the noble tradition of bunking off? Will the lecture halls of conventional academia teach your children how to do fuck all? Well, will they?
The Bible says, ‘It is harder for a rich man to enter the kingdom of Heaven, than a camel pass through the eye of a needle.’ Wise, perhaps, but no one really has camels any more, so difficult to understand. We say, ‘Is the millionaire truly rich, if he is still in the office at 3.55 on a Friday afternoon?’ And, ‘Hath not the woman who carried on straight from lunch and now poureth bubbles already entered the fucking kingdom of Heaven?’
That’s our philosophy. And now it’s over to you to help this book take its place on the bookshelves alongside Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason and Hume’s A Treatise on Human Nature, but funnier and with pictures.
If you have already backed the new book, we thank you from the bottom of our glasses for your support. But we must get it over the line to make it happen, so do please bore your friends and family about it, just as we, perhaps, have bored you. Or even consider upgrading your pledge to include some of the new offerings available.
So join do please join us, support this new bible and get to heaven early doors.
A version of this article was published by Sabotage Times in December, 2013.
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