For the second day on the trot I have been unable to find a copy of The Times in the small part of Victoria I inhabit during the day. I’m sure that I could find one if I ventured further afield1, but frankly I don’t need a newspaper that badly. It’s just something to peruse during lunchtime and to keep me abreast of major developments in world events. I rarely read it fully and mostly just the odd interesting article. I could, probably, live quite easily without a paper.
That said, the absence of my paper of choice, combined with the fact that I am not quite ready yet to do without something from Fleet Street2 while I eat my sandwiches has had me casting around for an alternative.
Yesterday I tried The Independent. It was okay, but I didn’t enjoy it overly much. It was fine for a couple of months after it was founded in the 1980s when all the journalists from The Times quit en masse when Murdoch bought the old Thunderer, but then they were all discretely hired back after a decent interval and the Indie hasn’t been quite the same since. It’s not a bad paper, but it’s still in partial shell shock, a bit like the stalwart old war veteran who, despite being in all other respects normal, still dives under a hedge every time a propeller-driven aeroplane flies by.
Today, largely on account of the Carter-Ruck attempted gag on it, I bought The Guardian. I still don’t like the Grauniad (no, really, who does deep down?); less so since they bought a spelchekr and it no longer even lives up to its nickname. I find and have always found the Grauniad to be too smug for words in its trendy leftie, champagne socialist, superior attitude. On the other hand, there’s a fine piece in it today sticking twigs in MPs over the continued expenses scandal and the fact that they still don’t get it. The piece on the Carter-Ruck gag (which has collapsed, by the way – witness the power of social networking) was exceptionally well-written, too.
No, I like my news to be crusty and with a hint of Empire about it, so I still buy The Times. It tries hard to be modern – there is colour, it’s gone ‘compact’ (that’s posh tabloid to you, Squire) and carries the occasional bit about rock music – which it always labels pop and has reviews, almost uniformly negative, about the latest blockbusters – but not-so-deep-down, it knows it’s the oldest daily paper in the country and that it was the paper of choice for 200 years in all the best places. There is something faintly patrician about it in the gentlest way, which the Daily Telegraph simply doesn’t have, The Torygraph is just a little too obvious in its bias despite having the indefinable prestige that comes with being the last daily paper obstinately to remain a broadsheet. Treasure it for that, if nothing else. People who can stand on packed commuter trains and fold a broadsheet in one hand are becoming an endangered species; it is an altogether different skill to read and fold a compact with one hand. You need muscles for that, not nimble dexterity.
As to the other papers, well we’ll just draw a discreet veil over those, shall we? The Daily Mail and the Daily Express are just penny dreadfuls in their Sunday best. The red top tabloids are, well, comics for people who have grown out of cartoon books.
1I am rather surprised and vaguely annoyed that the Word spell checker does not recognise the word, “afield”.
2By which I mean of course, Docklands, if not necessarily Wapping
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