As close as I'll ever come to lit crit;

You'd want to take me to a desert island, I can clean and gut fish, pluck and clean birds and then I can cook them so they taste really nice. I know how to shear a sheep and milk a cow, and I've even butchered a sheep so you wouldn't starve. And although any shelter would be a bit jerry built, the vegetable garden would be good and everywhere would be tidy....in short I'm a fan of self reliance. If you can cook you can cook what you like, my gran who was a tailoress could make herself a suit that she had seen in a picture in Vogue overnight. Skill = independence. Which is, when you think of it, why the Prince of Wales cuts such a pathetic figure, the skill less man, requiring a servant to clean his boots and squeeze his toothpaste.

So I should agree with the thesis in the book, "How to be Free" which puts forward the same proposition at length. But I can't, I seethe with irritation as I read. Well for a start anyone who proposes Keith Allen as any sort of a role model has to be a few prawns short of a barbie. And the proposal of disengagement from the world, of ignoring it I just can't swallow. If you fail to engage with the world someone else will do it for you - and are they making a better job?

I agree that small scale endeavour can work brilliantly. I shared a taxi from Euston to the City with a lady who had given up research on tropical diseases in order to promote African music. African people needed to stop looking useless and in need of help to westerners she said, and one way to do it was to show the world their art and music. Fantastic I thought - that's small endeavour, but that's not disengaging from the world, that's taking the world on on your own terms. Very different, very different indeed.