In Praise of the Printed Page, Magazines

Because of the relatively cheap costs of printing and the ubiquity of decent editing software, there is now more or less a magazine for every interest however obscure, more than that, there is a plurality of magazines for obscure interests that have never been on offer before.

And I’m not talking about weird sexual stuff either.  Well, mainly not.  I’m talking about stuff like traction engines.  Now, I love traction engines, you love traction engines, everyone loves traction engines, except those stuck behind one on the road on the way to or from a steam rally, or somebody who wears loose clothing around one.  But until recently, there was only one traction engine magazine, and you had to get that mail order.  Essentially, people who built their own sex dungeons or had to get their hot tubs professionally sterilised after parties at their place were better catered for when it came to magazines covering their interests than the sort of people who enjoyed mechanised threshing in an outdoor setting.

No doubt there have been cases where a magazine has become magazines because of editorial disputes, and God knows that the world of hobbycraft can be a divisive one, one need only consider the Great Quilting Feud of ’06 and the Homebrew Wars of ’82 to ’87 to know that that’s true, but what the printing revolution has meant is that if somebody on the editorial board of doll collecting monthly does not like the direction that the publication is going in, with recent decisions not to exclusively cover dolls which are really creepy and are collected by adults that should be on some sort of watch list, then they can start up their own publication to cater for the creepy doll collector market.  Niche indeed.

G&P eulogises on a regular basis about fanzines, the privately produced publications of the 80s that were usually mail order and usually just one step up from a John Bull printing set or indeed a potato when it came to printing sophistication.  Now of course the internet allows lots of people with similar interests to get together and share hot tub cleaning tips and so on, but there’s nothing like a magazine to give a hobby legitimacy, and people love to read them.

I think a lot of it is fantasy.  I used to read ‘Canal and Riverboat’ because I like canal boats and can tolerate river boats.  Why not ‘Waterways World’?  Because that publication was a bit too racy for me.  I will never own a canal boat and indeed in reality have no real desire to own a canal boat.  But I like to read about them.  Which is bloody odd when you think about it, why would somebody who fantasises about owning a boat not buy ‘Superyacht Monthly’?  I stand about as much chance of ever owning a yacht with a helicopter landing pad on it as I do owning the sort of thing Rosie and Jim would live on.

I think that most magazines cater for the specialist mundane.  There are many magazines about modelling, not the top shelf kind, the scale kind.  There are magazines about all sorts of hobbies.  There are probably nearly as many magazines about knitting as there are about music.

And all of this while the internet offers endless free information about all sorts of hobbies.

Hobby magazines are supremely successful for a couple of reasons.  The first is that they address their congregation, they are produced for an enthusiastic and knowledgeable tribe who greatly enjoy learning obscure stuff about something they love.

The other reason is that a printed magazine about a subject lends that subject legitimacy.  This is the ultimate triumph of the printed word.  Anyone with the means can epublish, but getting something on a shelf requires talent and effort and is the result of hard work leading to success.

That’s why when browsing for magazines, I usually walk past the endless lifestyle mags all trying to look different and all looking the same, with a matte cover and understated font, and pick up something with a glossy front cover that has a colourful photograph of somebody looking truly ecstatic on a tractor.

Bottling It

Let’s be clear, I am not some sort of rabid anti-capitalist.  I don’t much like Tesco because, well, need I go on? and I don’t really like the idea of the exploitation of children manufacturing garments, because in the age of the sewing machine, you don’t need tiny hands to sew small stitches and, if you do, hire some fucking elves.

Indeed I like shops.

I like my local greengrocer.  Obviously I don’t buy my groceries there, because Waitrose is more convenient and, frankly, I find his purple sprouting broccoli a mite intimidating. But I certainly buy my Christmas tree there, and last year hauled it home myself.  This turned out to be slightly more effort than I had anticipated.  It took fully twenty minutes for a) feeling to return to my fingers and b) my opinions on child labour to self-right; if I had seen a couple of kids on the way home, I’d of bribed them with Haribo to cart the bloody thing to my door.

One of my favourite shops is the petrol station I gas up at prior to coming home from visiting family.  It’s the last stop before the motorway and so obviously the place where I load up on diesel and wine gums and, if I’m feeling flush, a Costa from the machine.  (Fuck Nespresso, when I win the lottery I am having the ultimate bean to cup machine, a full sized Costa vending machine in the hall.  Where else?  The kitchen?  You need a vended coffee when leaving the house.  If I want a coffee in the house, I’ll get the model I’ve had re-trained as a barrista to make it.  In this fantasy, I’ve won the lottery, remember?)

It’s a fairly interesting place.  As well as dispensing much needed four star or whatever to local white van men drink, it does a roaring trade in those other staples of white van man life, porn and sandwiches (a sandwich being a lunch you can conveniently eat one handed in a secluded layby).

Below the porn though, are an interesting selection of magazines.  How many petrol stations stock ‘Horse and Hound’?  I suspect what we have here is a corner shop with pumps.

This would explain why whenever I’m in the queue, the people ahead of me are greeted by name, and why they are buying booze, and why they walk off the forecourt rather than drive.

Obviously, I buy my bottled water there and obviously, I try to avoid that filthy French stuff, meaning I go for the own brand, ‘Spar’ mineral water.

Putting aside for one moment the delicious irony of a shop called ‘Spar’ selling water, let’s settle the whole bottled water thing.

I was pretty much convinced it was a sign of the end of days when I saw that you could buy mineral water from Fiji in the supermarket.  Now, I don’t know much about Fiji, but I didn’t think fresh water was something they had in abundance enough to export.  I may be wrong.

Certainly, there are those that bang on about the health benefits of mineral water.  I’m not so sure, especially when it comes to that glacial water stuff made from, well, glacier ice that is supposed to have formed before the industrial revolution and various exploding volcanoes made the atmosphere as dirty as a Yewtree suspect’s past, as it may also contain traces of stuff our ancestors were immune to, but we’re not, like smallpox or racist remarks at the dinner table.

The virtue of the mineral water bottle is that you buy it, and then refill the bastard from the tap for the next year.  I have been doing this for a while now and really must remember to give my bottle a good clean, the rim has probably got more culture than BBC4 on it.

But I love my Spar bottle of tap water.  It says ‘Man of the people’.  And ‘hydrated’.

It also makes me feel somewhat smug when I see the tribe that have gone one better than the mineral water carriers; the people who make their own mineral water.  Have you seen them?  They have a bottle that looks far too much like a Tommee Tippee toddler drinking cup for my liking, which has a filter in it.  This is, presumably, to strain out the worst of the pigeon essence that is an essential, accepted part of any water tank in an office building.  They are also ruinously expensive.

The one thing I’ve learned about filters is that you have to change them.  And in this case, it’s pointless.  It’s turning water into…water.  What the fuck is the filter actually trapping anyway?  Unless the water company are putting plutonium in the supply, how worried should we be?

So, until they invent the Jesus filter, that turns H2O into ViNo, I’ll stick with my water, direct from the Spa(r).

e publishing

It’s called a Kindle because it’s the next best thing to burning books!  Centuries of traditional type and publishing have given us everything from the Bible to Penguins – the books, not the bird or the biscuit.  Ten minutes with electronic publishing has given us fifty fucking shades of fucking grey and fucking fan-fucking-fic.  Time was when you wanted to read filth discreetly you wrapped a copy of the Times around your Razzle and the only thing fans produced were scary shrines and purple-printed fanzines advertised for sale in the back of the NME. 

And what of the second-hand bookshop?  These are among the greatest places on Earth, what will happen to them without any second-hand books?  And what about the smell, slightly musty, slightly academic, wholly bookish?  What about the proprietors of these magical places?  Do you know how hard it is to find a job in retail that enables you to open and close when you want to and to wear carpet slippers on the job? And what about their smell, slightly musty, slightly academic, wholly bookish?  Do you know why so many wannabe writers complain that they could paper their walls with rejection letters from publishers?  I’ll give you a clue, it’s not because editors, agents and publishers are all sadists.  Time was when self publishing was rightly described as vanity publishing and was the only way the otherwise unprintable memoirs of retired men with forthright views about foreigners saw the light of day.  Now, any idiot with an iPad and a few hours to waste can publish their ‘original’ moody bloody vampire novella.

As for digital magazine downloads, what a shocking idea.  Every edition of the ‘People’s Friend’ had a free rain-hood stuck to the front cover. Try giving away free essential old-lady apparel as a digital bloody download.

The Field

Right!  This is it!  I’m serious this time.  I am absolutely not going to buy any more new books until I have read the ones I have bought but not read yet.  

That includes the ones that I purchased because I was going to read them on holiday.  In 2011.  Not only do I have a variety of books lying unopened and unread that I am looking forward to reading, I have also received books for Christmas from generous family.  I need to institute a strict reading programme and not get distracted by going into bookshops, coming over a bit giddy at the smell of the print, and exiting with an armful of new paperbacks.  Nor will I get pissed and go on Amazon.  These are distractions.

But that doesn’t apply to buying magazines, does it? 

No? 

Great!

That’s why it was quite legitimate to buy a copy of ‘The Field’.

‘The Field’ is an absolutely astonishing magazine.  It is all about hunting, shooting and fishing but, and this is the astonishing bit, it is unironic and unapologetic in its coverage of these matters.

I’ve long believed that because of a combination of desktop publishing and the cheap costs of printing, there is pretty much a magazine about every subject. 

Back in the day, there used to be things called ‘fanzines’, small circulation magazines produced by enthusiasts about various subjects (most famously music but also genre literature) printed on hand-operated presses using chemicals that, if used today, would get you onto some sort of watch list and, as I recall, used to result in an experience that made reading a fanzine one step away from glue sniffing. 

The advent of the internet allowed many people to move their interests on-line while the advent of computer composition for magazines enabled there to be more than one magazine published about, for instance, quilting, when one might reasonably assume that the natural number of magazines about quilting required in the world is one.  If that.

Depending on the social circle you move in, hunting shooting and fishing are either cruel, a bloody good weekend, or an excuse to wear a lot of tweed and drive a 4x4.  ‘The Field’ is for people who like their lives uncomplicated by moral choices about killing things.  This is because the people who read ‘The Field’ probably live in the country, and realise that in the county, things are red in tooth and claw to say the least and everything is out to get you.  When faced with an angry badger, shoot first, or the little bastard will savage you long before he manages to cough on you, infecting you with bovine TB and condemning you to life as a poet.

It is a little odd to read tales of slaughter told with such relish, and yet somehow attractive too.  It might be something of an exaggeration to describe a brisk bout with a trout as a ‘battle’, but it does readily convey the image of three hours in the blazing sunshine flogging yourself up and down a river with several pounds of angry fish on the other end of the line and nothing but upper body strength and, if all else fails, something your mate brought back from Afgan for you to fall back on, but it paints a picture.

My favourite article, even better than the pictures of naked posh birds taken from the type of charity calendars that young farmers like to crack one out to, is the reviews of the guns.  Guns are reviewed in ‘The Field’ the same way that cars are reviewed in other magazines, and cost about the same.

Reading about something written by an enthusiast is always a joy, and there’s a neat counterpoint when it’s written by people who think (rightly) that their way of life is under threat and yet shows, at the same time, that huntin’ shootin’ and fishin’ are as alive and well today as they always have been, at least between the pages of the magazine.  One gets the feeling that people who own guns are rarely ambivalent in their opinion.  When you’re facing down a charging boar, it’s deeds, not thoughts, that count.

Gentleman's relish

Jesus fucking Christ would you believe the amount of porn the is on the Internet? A year or so ago the population of Lego minifigs actually surpassed that of human beings. That is, the factory that turns out the colourful choking hazards churned out its seven billionth or something. The calculation did not take into account that, very much like human beings, minifigs have a finite lifespan. Unlike human beings, I imagine that a lot of them end their days in the intestinal tract of an infant, or canine, or infant canine. That's what porn has become like, there is now so much porn that one person could not hope to get through it all and remain hydrated in their lifetime.

And the variety is staggering. I'm told that web sites these days offer sub menus to cover every taste, some of which, and I like to think of myself as a man of the world, I have never heard of. Believe me, once you do hear about them, they tend to be something that you will never forget, no matter how much you want to. For instance, if you type 'pegging' into Google will you be rewarded with links and images about a) how to secure guy ropes, b) how to hang clothes on a washing line in such a manner that creasing will be minimised or c) something so bloody deviant that you think you'll have to bloody sandpaper yourself to ever feel clean again. Answer: c, and no, pegging does not involve sandpapering bollocks, that's an entirely different category.

Before the Internet, in a kinder, gentler age, porn was distributed in one of three ways. It was sold in newsagents. Hard core stuff was sold in sex shops. And children accessed it by finding discarded porn mags in hedges. Quite why porn was so freely available in hedges I'm not sure as I never imagined that browsing through a porn mag was an activity hat leant itself to being undertaken al fresco. Now I know that there's a category for that too.

The hedge dwelling discarder's mag of choice was 'Razzle'. There's probably an official advertising or publishing industry term to describe the demographic that it was aimed at, but let's just settle for 'downmarket' and leave it at that, although 'downmarket porn lovers' is probably a fairer, shoddier picture. Razzle did though, years before people started posting pictures of their girlfriend passed out drunk and naked on the web 'for a laugh' and lads' mags featured high street girls in their pants on the covers, blaze the trail with using very-much-not-models to fill its filthy pages in a section titled 'readers wives'.

This provided a terrifying insight into the world of kitchens because, for some reason, the kitchen was the place of choice for the ladies to pose. Terribly unhygienic. There were three constants in the resulting snapshots. Harsh and unflattering lighting. That sort of flat, characterlessness that you get from Polaroid shots (this was in the days before digital photography and one hardly wanted to rock up at Boots to collect some explicit photographs and be smirked at by the oik behind the counter). And unattractive, bordering on scary, subject matter. In many cases where there had been 'tidying up' of hair down there, any trimming would of been better done taming the horrendous perms that often topped the model off.

Simply put, the 'readers wives' section was more horrific fascination material than erotic. An overweight housewife atop a kitchen counter legs akimbo is not, and never will be, erotic. Adding stockings does not help. Stockings do not automatically make something erotic. The sight of a shotgun wielding bank robber does not immediately fill anyone witnessing a bank raid with the urge to crack one off. Indeed, of anything likely to invoke gentleman's wilt, 'readers wives' would do the job. Maybe that's what the editors were thinking placing the feature half way through the magazine, instead of simply having a page adorned with the words 'enough skiving in the bogs, get back to work'.

Razzle has, I imagine, long gone and, until broadband reaches rural areas, so has accessing porn in hedges.

A change of scene

What between the riots, recession and no Downton Abbey on the telly on a Sunday night, one could be forgiven for concluding that things could be described as grim. And that’s just at home, when one turns on the idiot lantern to the BBC Speculation 24 channel (other ways of upsetting yourself and commenting on how a newsreader’s blouse is inappropriate are available) you let a whole world of misery flicker into the room. If it’s not the planet trying to make life difficult for people, it’s other people trying to do so.

Is it any wonder that people turn, in a variety of ways, to alternative realities? The great thing is that doing so does not require a huge glowing contraption that makes a whooshing noise and flings you to an alternative England where there are cool airships, the Crazy Frog ring tone was never invented and neither Hitler, Murdoch or Cowell attained positions of influence, rather people are constructing their own realities.

And they are well catered for. Stop in at any newsagents and, after you have bought your scratchcards and fags and noted down the number on the card in the window advertising a ‘large chest for sale’, you may notice the plethora of magazines that line the walls like a fresco pained by somebody with multiple personality disorder and a passion for part-works about quilting. The gateway to alternative worlds is here. Either different worlds altogether, inhabited by celebrities who although they notionally occupy the same planet that the public do, inhabit a different existence, or a minute focus on a part of the reader’s world, such as the one that collects lace.

And especially railway modellers. There are any number of magazines dedicated to modelling, military and civilian and by far the most populous of these are for railway model enthusiasts.

We have all, at one time or another, run a toy train around an oval track but, for the serious modeller, it’s much more than that, it’s the creation of a perfect world, where the trains have character, rather than being shaped like an articulated dildo and where they pull in and out of stations, normally small country stations, that have station masters and porters and are even probably manned at night.

Most importantly, the trains run on time. Because the modeller can write his (no ‘or her’ here) timetable.

This is indeed an alternative world, one in which the modeller has control of the rolling stock, every run and every shunt. Imagine the sensation of power and relief that a commuter must feel running their own train service. An alternative, preferable world, complete and to scale and never, ever, late.

Judging a magazine by it's cover

While magazines in the past were generally content to contain nothing more than articles with pictures to illustrate the words, or pictures with words to explain the images (or, in certain glossy cases, lots of pictures, very few words and what words there were preporting to be from readers who had had quite exciting erotic experiences that they felt they had to share with other readers, when the reality was that the apex of an erotic experience for a reader of such material was actually a crafty hand shandy parked up in a in a lay-by between sales meetings while perusing it), magazines today come with all sorts of free stuff attached to the front of them, CDs and DVDs being the most common cover mounts because they are handily flat, while stuff like golf balls and fresh veg you don't see so much of.

Kids' comics have, of course, long been exponents of enticing new readers with a free gift. Now the norm, it used to be the exception and seeing a cheap bit of tat selotaped to the front cover of a comic sent a thrill of excitement and must-have pester power through a young lad keen to start tooting on their 'space distress siren' or, as it might more properly be called, crap plastic whistle.

Comics came with 'space spinners' (plastic hoop), 'club wallets' (cardboard envelope) and other novelties that made the magazine popular with kids and, thirty years on, drives comic collectors to fits of sorrowful rage as they come across another first issue with a mutilated cover where the toy had been ripped off, or to effervesce with joy if they come across one that has not.

Also available as cover mounts, sweets (or, more normally, a sweet, but hey, a sweet is a sweet, right?) or 'space dust' which I'm not sure is a sweet or some sort of junior amphetamine. What was odd was that these toys and sweets were never available to readers in Northern Ireland. Obviously it was considered that it would be unwise to fuel sectarian violence with sugary treats.

Of course, cover mounts were not confined to kids publications. I seem to recall that every single edition of the 'Peoples' Friend' ever published came with a free rain hood. This was genius, women who have a tartan shopping trolly in one hand and the magazine in the other are unable to hold an umbrella as they wait for the bus in the rain, reading hospital romances.

These days the chief exponents of the cover mount are the collectible or the hobby part works. The collectible part works promise you 'strange smells of the world' and have a different jar for you to sniff the contents of every week, or something.

The hobby part works used to be straightforward, you got a magazine that told you about Nelson and the navy and, free with part one, the bowsprit of the 'Victory'. By the time you had worked your way to the rudder you probably had a stack of magazines about eight foot high, a greater understanding of life in the navy in the Neoplionic era than any man alive and a nagging sensation that you missed issue 176 and, with it, a starboard gun port. Could be worse, the magazine could fold before you collect the issue with the glue for assembling the damn thing.

The thing to do is to cut your losses after issue three, go to a model shop, buy a replica kit, glue and paints and then leave the whole thing unmade on a shelf for a few decades. It's the same result as collecting the part work without all the schlepping down to the newsagent, where the danger is that you will be enticed by one of the more edgy, modern, cooler part works, like 'learn to bake' with a different cake tin free with every issue, or 'the family surgeon' with each edition covering some common operation in detail and containing a piece of surgical kit. Just remember to collect the issue with the batteries before you try attempt anything likely to require the defribulator. And remember, Botox is not a toy.

The glossy printed page

Subscription magazines. Consider for a moment just how many there must be and how varied their contents. If you go into any large newsagent you'll see a bewildering array of magazine titles on display, covering not just news and celebrity cellulite mocking, but crafts, hobbies, pastimes and, on the top shelf, special interest. We live in a world where printing is so cheap, and journalism is so cheap, that the market can support two different magazines about crocheting and probably another two about croquet, bought by people who have an interest in crocheting but were in a hurry and didn't stop to read the title of the magazine properly. And that's just at the news stand, where shelf space is finite.

Imagine then just how many subscription magazines there must be out there. For every magazine about model railways on the news stand (a subject covered with an unhealthy degree of fascination in an earlier blog) there must be a dozen others with a limited circulation. I adore the idea that there may even be regional magazines about model trains, after all, there used to be regional railways.

Of course it would not be true to say that there is a magazine for every hobby indulged in by the English. It's much more accurate to say that there are at least two magazines for every hobby. You just know that where there is a hobby the is a difference of opinion about what should be written about it. From jazz to rocking horses, enthusiasts have got something to say. The honourable exception is people who restore vintage machinery in any form, they are too busy sourcing parts or making tea to write about their appreciation of grease nipples. Luckily this very subject is tackled extensively in other literature, with leather covers.

While a portion of the population look forward to that day of the month when their magazine arrives, there is, of course, more to a subscription than the annual cost appearing on your credit card bill discreetly as 'pigeon fanciers' gazette' and opening that plain brown wrapper with trembling hands every month to see if the picture of your bird you sent in has made it in this issue.

While many magazines now come with stuff attached, it used to be that at the start of every year it was enough that the 'part works' as they were called were just magazines, a format that leant itself well to collecting an encyclopaedia type magazine or a cook book on a weekly basis.

The premise was that you'd buy a modestly priced magazine every week, send off for the binders to house same and before long you'd have twenty volumes about Great Serial Killers Of The World or something equally gruesome.

The reality was that you bought the first ten issues and then stopped. The reason for this was simple, the publisher had to get people to buy the magazine, people who had an interest in the subject, and hence had to put all the interesting stuff up front in the first few issues. I used to get a weekly part work called 'the unexplained' and for the first, say, twenty issues it was everything a schoolboy could want to know about the world of the strange. I became the playground authority on werewolves, yeti, UFOs and other weird stuff. But there's only so much cool supernatural stuff out there, even if most of it is made up, that's why 'The X Files' is so, so much better than any of the imitators that have come along since. By the time the magazine had to resort to guff about ley lines, it was time to quit.

The same is true of the magazines that promise to give you the A to Z of modern weapons. Issue one to five has loads of really cool gear like aeroplanes and tanks, issues six to ten is about guns and ammo and night sights and can still be cool. Beyond that it's mines and other static defence measures and beyond that, presumably, pointy sticks. And the same with cookery magazines, when the issue has the recipe for 'aubergine surprise', it's time to quit.

Smallholdings and small magazines

Yesterday at the newsagents, I was more than a little surprised to see not one, but two magazines devoted to smallholdings. One called ‘Smallholder’ and the other ‘Smallholdings’. What staggers me is not that there is a magazine for smallholders, there’s a magazines for just about everything these days, as the existence of ‘backscratcher collector’ proves; but that two magazines could have such different editorial approaches to the same subject that it could support two magazines. What in the world could one offer that the other could not? Surely there’s only so much you can write about getting mud out from underneath your fingernails and sticking your hand up a pig’s arse for fun and profit.

I love the idea that the second magazine might have been started after the editorial team had a massive falling out about creosote and the two publications are as polarised in their opinions as The Daily Mail and any real newspaper. Either that or one of the magazines has been started up by some hip young gunslinger who thinks wants to sweep away the old fuddy-duddy conventions of smallholding and is not afraid to use the term ‘boutique farming’ in front of others.

I love that there is no profession so obscure, no hobby so odd that it can’t support its own little magazine, be it the full glossy or a fanzine produced in a basement in Solihull titled something like ‘Swafega Collector (incorporating ‘Laiths and Laithmen’)’.

Vogue -part 2

Ever since I saw the film ‘The September Issue’, I’ve wanted to pick up an issue of Vogue.

‘The September Issue’ is a documentary about putting together the September issue (duh!) of American Vogue. It’s like ‘The devil wears prada’ but impossibly more glamorous, cruel and wonderful and it left me thinking that with a few more perfectionists, the Earth would be a better place, or a smoking cinder.

Essentially the editor of the magazine has to try and crush the defiance of lots of creative people while simultaneously bringing out the very qualities that make them creative. The whole place is like a beehive – full of poison, manufacturing something sweet and everyone serving the queen.

Favourite scene? The model wolfing down a tart. I have no love for any woman who is an anodyne waif…but the second she attacked that jam tart with gusto…bloody ding dong, you’re telling me she’s beautiful and real too? (And has access to free food? I mean it’s free right, and she could bring it home and it’s not like she’s going to eat all of it.)

Deal time…when they launch the 1,000 page issue – I’ll buy it. If only because I want to see what the writing is like. If they can firehose money on photo shoots then they should emulate Playboy in terms of writing. If Mailer and Hemingway used to write for Playboy, why aren’t Amis, Ford and Coe write for Vogue.

What I particularly liked about the documentary was the obvious passion that everyone had for the subject. But let’s not think that this is isolated to the world of fashion. Among the many magazines at the news stand are modelling magazines, not magazines with models being skinny women but rather the models being 00 scale. That’s right ‘Model Village World’, the rest of us might think that it’s ridiculous but these people have a passion for documenting an unobtainable beauty, like a 1950s perfect chocolate box English village (complete with sleeping cats and sleeping murder) but it’s less furiously ridiculous than seven pages of a glossy magazine devoted to the snood. Scale modelling. Remove the ‘scale’ and is there any difference? Come to think of it is there any difference even if you leave in the ‘scale’ – the models in Vogue are size 0 (if not scale 00) and real women are, what, size 16?

In establishing the fashion model industry we have created a breed of people who would otherwise perish in the wild or have to serially shag Premiership footballers.

Vogue - part 1

Like many men, I have never looked inside an edition of Vogue.

Not even American Vogue because, apparently, there are many international editions and like McDonalds trying to appease the local market by introducing the McBlubber (Iceland), the McAntelope (Namibia) and the McSpitinyourbunyourcapitilistdog (N.Korea) each has its own take on fashion. American Vogue I imagine as glitzy and dizzy, like a cheerleader just about to stop vomiting because she has drunk too much and starting to vomit through an eating disorder. European Vogue has lots of little black dresses (apart from Italian Vogue, which has lots of big black dresses as worn by your mamma). Japanese Vogue probably has some totally weird manga shit happening and British Vogue is, basically, printed on tweed.

Not that I’m a stranger to a woman’s magazine. Oh no! I remember well one time at an ex-girlfriend’s place, chuckling to myself as I leafed through her Cosmo and noting that she had scored very low on the ‘are you ready for a relationship with somebody who still insists on playing Dungeons and Dragons with his mates one night a week’ quiz.

The next week, suddenly single, it wasn’t so bloody funny.

There are two reasons to love women’s magazines, the first is the personality quizzes (and the first question should always be ‘if you think this quiz will help you get through life, you need a) a dirty martini…NOW! b) a ride on a fairground ride, of any type, but one that pulls more Gs than NASA rate as safe is recommended and c) self-esteem). The second reason is scent strips.

Ever wondered why women always smell so good?

Men smell of the world. At least that part of the world that appears to be inhabited by rutting animals, scared animals, scared rutting animals, industry, steam engines, athletics, locker rooms, discount soap, teenage angst, laundry, fried food and, my own particular scent, a heady mixture of Star Wars and tears.

Women smell like…well…you know men are always doing that thing when they shove their nose in their loved one’s hair and just…inhale…the way that women do with laundry? Well, it’s not because we’ve got this thing for shampoo and it’s not because we’re weird (unless he’s a stranger). It’s because we can’t believe a human could smell that good.

I mean, if you saw a flying saucer having a space battle with a swarm of cyborg dolphins, on fire, you’d stare, no? That’s how alien the concept of smelling good is to men.

If we can drag enough of that smell into ourselves then maybe we can somehow purify ourselves – like that time you thought you could cure that hangover by sticking a garden hose in your mouth and trying to flush you hangover out of your pours through pressure (thank you, Harry Harrison for putting that thought in my head, ever since I’ve been soooooooooo tempted to see if it works).

But women’s magazines give some of the secret away and that secret is…scent strips! That’s right – scent strips. That stuff you buy your girlfriend or wife once in a while to make them smell purty, apparently they have people on magazine production lines spraying that stuff on pages and then gumming them shut at the factory, like camp umpa lumpas.

Christ, imagine that for a job – the guy that spritzes the scent strip? How long would it be before you wondered if that CCTV camera was a dummy and if it was time to do something fun, yet evil?

But that’s why women smell so good. An average woman buys what, forty or fifty glossy magazines a week? (She must do; I go to the news stand and there are THOUSANDS of the f**king things, so somebody must be buying them). So they have all of these scent strips. OK, so you start with some in the knicker draw, then the sock draw, then the…er, whatever draw (do women have things in draws, most of the women I know keep stuff on the floor or, judging by the errands I run, at the dry cleaners). But then you have more of them so; handbag, glasses case, anorak hood, purse, ipod keepie thingie, pockets, desk draw, gym locker, composter, CD case that was supposed to contain the original cast recording of ‘Oliver’, I mean, WTF! and, my personal favourite…sellotaped to me.

So that’s why women beguile. They smell nice because they surround themselves with strips of paper impregnated with musk. That, and they are made of sugar and spice and all things nice. Which I guess means bacon?

Which ‘Wind in the Willows’ character are you?

Quizzes in women’s magazines appear to give you insight into yourself by telling you which celebrity you most closely resemble. Apparently it’s good to resemble Angelina Jolie. I can see being married to Brad Pitt would have its uses – I bet she never has to wait in line at Alton Towers. Being like Madonna is bad. I can see this too, I look ridiculous in a leotard, but then so does Madonna.

I used to enjoy doing the personality quizzes in women’s magazines. Years ago, when I used to go out with a woman who bought magazines that had personality quizzes in them, I would wait until she had left the room and then flick through whatever glossy happened to be at hand, hoping for an insight into her personality to be revealed through sight of a completed multiple choice quiz, so saving all that tedious business of conversation. Such tactics were not without risk – the ‘what kind of lover am I?’ quiz clearly showed the result ‘filthy’, but had been completed by her flatmate.

The ‘Wind in the Willows’ is a great book – it has shown millions of kids how great it would have been to be born middle class in the Edwardian era. These days the middle classes are worried about their mortgages, their kids’ school fees and somebody spraying ‘tosser’ on their 4x4. Back then, all you had to worry about was being broken in by the wrong sort of homosexualist at school and, later on, being machine-ginned to death in the Great War.

There are several key characters in the book. Mole is the stay at home sort who, nevertheless, once he is out and about becomes tremendously enthusiastic about things. If you are the sort of person who prefers the company of a DVD box set on a Saturday night to the company of others, but once persuaded to go to a party has a drink or two to overcome nervousness and then wakes up on a Sunday afternoon with a banging hangover and your e mail brimming with .jpg attachments promising ‘hilarious pictures of you last night’, then you’re the Mole.

Ratty is the typical feckless Edwardian gent. He has his own house, his own boat and a quite a lot of firearms. If you are the sort of person who buys organic and sees nothing wrong in a bit of direct action against new roads, then you’re Ratty. Also enormously loyal to friends, to the point of visiting them in prison when they are convicted of fraud.

Badger. Badger is the one all boys want to be. Tough. Resourceful, a man apart. Lives the in centre of the wild wood and is rarely seen. No mention of infecting cattle with TB. These days Badger would be the old chap who lives in the last remaining house that wasn’t demolished when they built the new estate. His is never bothered and his gardens are free of litter, this is because Badger is active in the community, quietly helping those in need. He is also an active vigilante, using the vast selection of weaponry he brought back from the last war and a new assortment sent to him by chums in Iraq, meaning that his garden perimeter is lined with Claymore anti-personnel mines. No men can actually be Badger, we change our bedding too infrequently.

Toad. Toad is always entranced by the next big thing, in the book he becomes a road hog. If you are the sort of person who thinks that fitting out your mum’s Nova that you were given on your 18th birthday with a plastic body kit and driving it at 90 mph through the village, then you’re Toad. If you made and then lost a fortune in the dot-com boom, you’re probably Toad too.

We want to be Badger, we don’t want to be Toad, we’re worried that others might see us as Mole but, if you have read the Wind in the Willows more than once and enjoyed it to the point where you can recognise yourself in the characters, you’re probably Ratty. And that’s no bad thing.

"Your Issue Here"

Sometimes it seems as though modern life contrives to irritate the hell out of one. Irritations, I think, are governed by the same sort of immutable laws that govern physics, but without smart arses like Einstein or heroes like Scotty around to challenge them.

One of the laws is that irritations become more irritating at a rate somewhere between cumulatively and exponentially - at a rate that could be dubbed the catastrophe curve. For instance, an annoying ring tone may be a minor irritation, but coming on top of a stubbed toe, a fatuous remark by a deejay, playing ‘hunt the housekeys’ and a sprint for the train, the theme tune to ‘sex and the city’ ringing out loudly could well see the owner of the mobile being pitched out the train window - no mean feat as they don’t actually open.

The second law of irritation is that things become irritating if you put them in inverted commas.

(Not, you understand, that anything in inverted commas can ever be as irritating as those people who actually PUT things in inverted commas when they are talking to you. Anyone mining punctuation near me is in great danger of my miming my own particular band of kung-fu grammar I call punchuation, not least because they are usually saying things like ‘and just because I put up a poster of Hitler in the office, apparently I’m some sort of [mime] racist [unmime]’.)

For instance, at the moment, it’s Summer. More precisely, it’s “Summer.” Summer is fishing the parasol out of the shed and using the barbeque for cooking for three weeks in a row. “Summer” is the sort of weather we are currently experiencing and is heralded by the ritual of chanting ‘are you f**king kidding!’ every time the weather forecast comes on.

The only thing more irritating than the use of inverted commas where they are not required is not using them when they should be - case in point, the front cover of glossy magazine promising celebrity photographs. This should actually read “celebrity*” “photographs**” where * is ‘some woman off a soap’ and ** means ‘fuzzy long-lens grainy images of a woman, yes, yes we’re pretty sure it’s a woman, in a bikini, well, half of a bikini - at least we’re pretty sure she’s topless, could just be the way the shadow is falling.’ Indeed, one could say that these “magazines” are shite - no inverted commas required.

The exception that proves this rule. Occasionally I enjoy leaving the office and meeting a colleague for “lunch”. Lunch means a sandwich, snack or soup. “Lunch” involves a relaxed examination of the brewers art. Oddly, I now refer to such excursions as lunch, the dropping of the inverted commas lending the impromptu trip to the pub a much needed respectability I feel.