Despite making a career out of being idle, Tom Hodgkinson has to be one of the most hard working chaps in the in the philosophical world.

He writes, plays the ukulele, manages a smallholding and has raised a young family – although he confesses to still not knowing how to harness the idleness of a teenage boy for good. But despite this he still manages to find the time to ponder some of life's big questions and explore ideas in his mind.

On Friday night he brought calm to the Arts Centre as part of the Swindon Festival of Literature where he took the audience on a two-and-a-half thousand year journey through the philosophical, from Ancient Greece right up to a retired lady in the audience who confessed she spends far too much of her time on Candy Crush for her own good.

The founder of The Idler magazine argued the case for creative thought, and stood up for the art of day dreaming, revealing that we had not always been a nation of punctual, industrious slaves to the working day.

Indeed, we have the Puritans to thank for that with their disapproval of such leisurely pastimes as dancing, sex and Christmas. “People still celebrated Christmas illegally,” he said. “It was like an illegal rave because people wanted to hold on to this idea of doing absolutely nothing but feasting for 12 days.

“When Charles II came back the Puritans sailed off and found another country. They found America.”

That’s not to say that being an idler means a lack of productivity, with Hodgkinson not only founding the magazine but also running a number of classes on everything from breadmaking to book keeping. And it is the purpose of that class that really shows his work ethic.

“If you want to be a responsible human being you have to grow up and learn to use spreadsheets because you have to learn to look after yourself,” he said, revealing his belief that taking the plunge and being a freelancer is one of the keys to happiness.

“I love work, it gives me a huge pleasure if it is something I have chosen,” he said. “Stacking logs is incredibly rewarding, but I would hate to have to do it under the control of a master 12 hours a day. Somehow if it is on your own terms and you have chosen to do it it is not so bad, it is when you’re constrained to it by a force outside of your control that it feels slave-like and you don't enjoy your work.”

But despite the industrial revolution drilling a serious work ethic into working man that largely remains to this day, Tom believes that those with a real creative flair still break the rules and don’t conform. Indeed, children who spend a large part of the school day staring out of the classroom window will become tomorrow’s creative innovators.

Although he did point out to one parent in the audience – a self-confessed daydreamer, whose child regularly finds themselves being told off in class for not concentrating on the task at hand – that this shouldn’t lead to the encouragement of daydreaming or even the authorisation of daydreaming periods.

“Often the daydreamer is also a romantic who later in life become artists, writers or creative thinkers because they are dreaming of something better. You can’t really ask teachers to encourage it or have lessons in it because the whole point is that you’re doing it inspire of the lesson.

"As soon as it is permitted it doesn’t become exciting.”