“Therefore, the idle parent who wants to stop the whining needs to stop whining himself, and one way is to resist the call to work ever longer and harder hours. Throw your BlackBerry into the river. Unslave yourself. Hard work will not lead to health and happiness. Just ask yourself: would you rather spend your child's first few years playing with them or working for the mega-corp in order to make them profits and you money to buy ribbish you don't need in order to dull the pain of overwork?”

“Therefore, the idle parent who wants to stop the whining needs to stop whining himself, and one way is to resist the call to work ever longer and harder hours. Throw your BlackBerry into the river. Unslave yourself. Hard work will not lead to health and happiness. Just ask yourself: would you rather spend your child's first few years playing with them or working for the mega-corp in order to make them profits and you money to buy ribbish you don't need in order to dull the pain of overwork?”

“Long weekends at festivals, short weeks at home, all summer long: now that is surely preferable to the immense cost and headache of the nuclear family holiday in the sun?”

“Poetry, being supremely useless, by its very existence represents a protest against the so-called 'real world' of busy-ness and moneymaking, so we must embrace, salute and support our poets.”

“All of our technology is completely unnecessary to a happy life.”

“We have to wonder whether digital technology, rather than making it easier to communicate, is actually doing the opposite. We now sit alone at a keyboard, firing off zeros and ones into the ether. Offices are silent.”

“Beauty, pleasure, freedom and plenty of sleep: these are the hallmarks of a successful idler's break. Travel should not be hard work.”

“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.”

“We no longer sing and dance. We don't know how to. Instead, we watch other people sing and dance on the television screen. Christmas, which was once a festival of active enjoyment, has turned into a binge of purely passive pleasures.”

“Computers tend to separate us from each other - Mum's on the laptop, Dad's on the iPad, teenagers are on Facebook, toddlers are on the DS, and so on.”

“Sensible people advise against drinking on an empty stomach, but to my mind it is the best sort of drinking.”

“Labour-saving devices just make us try to cram more pointless activities into each day, rather than doing the important thing, which is to enjoy our life.”