Man up

Dave Barry, the straight man’s David Sedaris, once wrote about the ‘Martian Death Flu’*.  A funny column I seem to recall, and an excellent example of the gender that does not have to give birth hugely over-reacting to minor health inconveniences.

Documentation of illness has, naturally enough, evolved over the years, like germs developing a resistance to Lucozade, a bubbling coppery liquid guzzled by wan tots in my youth and, if my colleague who told me this the other day is to be believed, loaded with caffeine, which would explain its restorative effect on the metabolism of a seven year old in 1970, if nothing else.

Dickens wrote movingly of poxes and ailments.  Operas trade in consumptive maids, oddly able to sing about their condition for three hours at a stretch.  In the 1970s there were a lot of films like ‘Love Story’, where a happy, handsome couple started a new life together, until he or she got something cinematic.  Luckily this trend ended with a bang in the 80’s when family members were killed not by a virus but by terrorists, enabling 110 minutes of bloody retribution by the Slow One, the Austrian One or the Balding One.

Journalism has cultivated a reputation for sensitively chronicling illness, and anyone that does so is to be applauded and rewarded, by getting better.  This is because when you feel under the weather, the last thing you feel like being is creative.  I’ve had a cold for the last two days and the only thing I have crated is a mound of crumpled tissues next to my bed that would put the floor of a bedroom of a teenager in a house with no parental controls on the internet to shame.

In the age of social media, people are able to share their experiences of being ill in the short, medium and long term and get support and sympathy.  A word of warning though, if you start reading any post titled ‘does this look normal?’ think twice before scrolling down.  Then don’t.

One of the worst things about being ill is that one cannot enjoy it.  Normally if somebody were to suggest to you that you should spend a few days in bed watching TV† and being brought sustaining broths, you might show an interest.  However, if the quid pro quo is a tickly cough that really gets going a few minutes after you want to get to sleep, you might be wondering if finally getting to see every season of ‘Will & Grace’ is actually worth the cost.

It’s not.  When you have a cold you suffer the double whammy of feeling ill, but not having the flu, the one everyone takes seriously.  Even the name ‘Common’, means that it’s undistinguished.  Best thing to do is hunker down and plot vile revenge upon all those bastards who still insist on soldiering on into work, on public transport, your public transport, instead of taking a couple of days to get better.

And frankly, anyone with the fortitude to successfully write about, photograph, paint, draw, etch, stain glass window or otherwise document their ailment deserves plaudits for being able to condense a cohesive thought in a medicated mind, even if that medication is simply caffeine and about 800% of the RDA of sugar for an adult, courtesy of ‘Lockets’.  This on top of the disturbance to the mental processes brought about by the constant consideration you are giving to spraying your hands with sanitiser, and the face of anyone who sneezes near you with CS gas, the next time you leave the house.

Having learned never to Google symptoms, the internet is, I suppose, a decent place for the snotty and the coughy to exchange supportive messages and a sure sign of mankinds’ advancement to a point beyond issuing anyone afflicted with anything with a pot of paint to mark their door and a bell to ring to advise others of their condition.  Insert topical joke about underfunding of NHS here.

Ironically, it marks a healthy relationship with illness that is very British, such as is not exhibited by tourists you see wearing surgical masks on London’s streets.  Not many haiku about snot.

* Don’t know where he wrote this originally** and for those who have not read the rest of the blog post before skipping to this footnote, can’t be arsed to research it.  However, I can tell you that it’s collected in the Pan paperback ‘Dave Barry’s Greatest Hits’.  This was published in 1988 when the only way to access transatlantic written humour was to go to the US or to buy collections such as this one, lovingly put together by an editor.  This was before the internet, and meant there was a lot of quality control.  The two conditions may not be entirely unrelated.

** Miami Herald most likely, just looked at the introduction to the book.

† Or as it’s known these days, ‘Netflix’.  Being in bed for a couple of days offered an excellent opportunity to catch up on all those documentaries that I have taped‡ and had hoped to catch up on when I had the time.  However, I have discovered that the perfect sickbed viewing is actually horror, specifically anything with a zombie in it.  I love a gory special effect as much as the next man, but nothing I’ve seen on screen compares to the contents of my tissue bin when it comes to biohazard.

‡ Should this be recorded?  Fuck it, I’m going to carry on using ‘taped’ until everyone stops using ‘dialled’.

Kindles can't stop a bullet!

Books, famously, furnish a room, and arguably a soul.  They also furnish a handbag, a backpack, a messenger bag and a pocket.  Especially a pocket.  It has been suggested that, back in the days when Penguin were publishing what are now described as design classics fit to feature on mugs and deckchairs, but back then were, you know, books, artful seducers used to carefully select just which book would be just visible jutting jauntily from their (tweed) jacket pocket, ensuring that any impressionable young woman might note that the dashing chap at the end of the bar was familiar with Lady Chatterly, and opening up the possibility that she might play ‘Mrs Mellors’ for a short time.

Books are also something of a comfort.  There’s a reason why the ‘YA’ section of your average high street book store is enormous, it’s because the only thing that teenagers consume more of than fiction about misunderstood young people is haribo and zit cream.  If, as a teenager, you are so confused that you don’t even understand yourself (except for your feelings about Lizzy Feathergrew who sits across from you in double chemistry, your feelings for her are very, very clear, but you wonder if she’s into girls) then it’s good to read about teenagers struggling with being teenagers.  If they also have to struggle with vampires, alien invasions or oppressive regimes, then so much the better.  Just read that shit up and wait until you’re twenty six, sitting at your desk or standing at your lathe or slinging latte or assisting at lambing time or whatever, and you go bolt upright (very much like you used to do at the thought of Lizzy Feathergrew) and say, out loud, ‘Fuck.  Allegory!’.  Then move on.

We take books into uncertain environments.  There are rightly celebrated relics of the battlefield, books that have stopped bullets because the soldier in question was either clever or fortunate enough to have a book, for instance The Bible, in a pocket that covered an important organ (not The Mighty Wurlitzer).  That The Bible has saved the lives of so many Tommies because of its ballistic blocking abilities is less to do with its miraculous heritage and more, I would suggest, to do with the fact it records everything from the creation to Armageddon.

Ironically, if our gallant soldier was carrying a slim volume of verse by a poet reflecting on the horrors of war, he’d be fucked.

The moral of the story, if you are going into battle, read Stephen King.

Sadly, there are still too many battlefields.  There are also many uncertain environments.  And no environment is more uncertain than ‘abroad’.  That is why the choice of holiday reading is so important.

If it’s a beach holiday, then the prime directive is this; you must not be precious about the bottom of your book absorbing around a litre of perspiration from the tummy you rest it on (hopefully yours, if you rest your book on somebody else’s tummy whilst on holiday, you are reading the wrong blog) and being forever impregnated with the scent of suncream.

As an arch bibliophile (look it up before calling the police) I find the notion of giving away a book about as disturbing as the notion of trying to track down Lizzy Featherstone on social media years after she left school.  Without saying goodbye.

Anyway, despite requiring counselling if I lend somebody a book, I am tremendously impressed by the libraries that spring up in resorts, where tourists drop off one book and pick up another.  Like literary STDs.

There should be a military imprint of bestsellers, with Kevlar front and back covers.  If nothing else, this would enable some squaddie somewhere to proudly show off his copy of ‘Fuck the French’ with a bullet embedded in the front cover (a picture of Jeremy Clarkson, in leather jacket and jeans, looking incredulous).

Bullet position?  Head or crotch.  You choose.

As might the enemy.  As with ‘Mrs Mellors’, might your attention be drawn to a cheeky cover poking out of a pocket and, if you were a foreigner might you think ‘Ah, Clarkson’?

Books, you see, are the best defence.  Ask a teenager.

Country Life

If I’m honest, I’m not quite sure why I started reading Country Life magazine.  Probably, it was in the hugely mistaken belief, which is the driver behind any story about celebrity, that through reading about a subject, one could become part of that world.  This is not a new phenomenon and is why so much Young Adult fiction has a dash of the fantasy, many teenagers spend a lot of time wishing that they were somewhere or someone else, the irony is of course that eventually they get their wish, they turn into an adult, someone else entirely, although one would hope they never lose their taste for Haribo.

Country Life magazine is, at first glance, the publication most associated with waiting rooms, the exception being the waiting room at Dignatas, in which the sole reading material available is the ‘Daily Main’, after reading which some visitors have been heard to exclaim ‘Fucking Hurry Up’ at the door marked ‘Exit’.

Anyone taking a cursory glance at the cover, advertising, contents and overall glossiness of the publication might think that this is the magazine for Torfs.

It is.  But it’s so much more.

With the exception of the ‘Evening Star’ (the sister paper to the ‘Morning Star’ and yet not remotely associated with the inexplicably more popular ‘Daily Star’, the ‘Evening Star’ being the sort of newspaper that would be published by the hard left if they had knocked off after publishing the morning edition, celebrated as traditional journalists do, then brought out an edition where they really wrote what they thought and where every editorial began ‘Right…’) Country Life is the most militant publication not actually produced in the front room of a self styled ‘activist’ who wears a combination of corduroy and cheesecloth and churns out their publication on one of those hand cranked printers the sole purpose of which was to give millions of schoolchildren an introduction to purple ink and solvent abuse.

Think I’m joking?

Here’s how militant Country Life is.  It abhors littering.  And bad behaviour.  And ill manners.  And unnecessary noise.  It hates pollution.  It is an advocate of the preservation of environment.  It is the champion of the agricultural sector that we rely upon to, you know, eat.

Moreover, it champions the preservation of our heritage.  This takes many forms.  The most obvious is that it tends towards Stately Home Porn but, and this is the saving grace, it knows where to draw the line.  Published every week apart from at Christmas where one imagines the entire staff are off first killing and then cooking their Christmas dinner or at least causing a scene at Waitrose, the magazine often spreads a feature over two issues, occasionally this will be a feature on a Stately Home with words about architecture and history, and images (‘figs’, never photos) of the grand hall, the long drive, the privy, and so on.  Occasionally, if it is not term time and the younger daughter of the house is back from a Scottish university where she doesn’t have to pay fees (how do you think these people hold on to their wealth) there will be a picture of a young woman in a ballgown, cuddling spaniels.  Otherwise, images of the owners remain mysteriously absent.  That’s because usually they might be confused with the gargoyles festooning the East Wing.

I started buying Country Life magazine when I noticed that it featured articles of interest to me, such as farming, food production and the future of our environment.  The property pages I skipped past and the section on antiques and the art market were not really for me, I couldn’t afford a £12,000,000 estate in Scotland or an oil painting of the same place at the same price.

I started subscribing to Country Life because it had something important to report every week, or something interesting to say about gargoyles, or because it featured an estate for sale that looks like an oil painting, and there’s always the lottery.

It’s also something of a counterpoint to the rest of the media (apart from ‘the Field’ magazine).

And, of course, there’s always the young lady gracing the frontispiece, like a posh Page Three.

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.

Books and Bookers

What is the greatest prize in writing?  Obviously, it’s making enough money from selling your writing to enable you to do a couple of hours scribbling in the morning and then slope off for lunch and legitimately describe everything that happens after that as ‘research’. 

There are other, more formal examples such as the Nobel prize for literature, the Golden Dagger award for mystery writing, the Daily Mail Letter of the Day for the most Frothingly Insane Rant About Gypsies, the Orange prize for jolly well having a bash at trying to be as good a writer as a chap and, the daddy of them all, the Booker!

The Booker prize has traditionally fulfilled two functions, first it tells the sort of people who only read one book a year what book to read this year, and second, because it’s televised, it confirms everyone’s prejudices about the publishing industry, that it’s full of people who talk too much and only stop talking when they are drinking.

Publishing is changing.  You no longer have to have your manuscript rejected by hundreds of publishers to feel belittled and crushed.  On-line publishing means that you can make your writing available for free and you can feel belittled and crushed directly by the public, cutting out the middleman and moving straight to ‘bitter’ without ever having passed ‘success’.  Of course, anyone truly unsuccessfully dedicated to their art will describe their writing as ‘difficult’ and themselves and ‘misunderstood’.  These people can often be seen smoking furiously and, in their weaker moments, wondering if they should just sell out and write something commercial that involves handcuffs and things being pushed up people’s bottoms – so that’s either erotic fiction or crime writing then.

It’s good to see that travel writing and biography have their own prizes and that writers of non-fiction get recognition, especially when the book recognised is not, for instance, written by a comedian taking a ‘sideways’ look at the people of Mongolia – the only time a writer should take a sideways look at anything is when they are stretched out on the pub carpet.

But perhaps prizes for fiction writing are, to a certain extent, unnecessary.  The measure of a success of any book is going to be the amount it sells.  The measure of the popularity of any book is going to be the numbers it sells week on week and the measure of the worth of any book is surely if people are reading it years from now. 

What prizes for fiction allow is a panel of judges to have the opportunity to advise us that the corking novel that we really enjoyed, enthralled us, kept us up nights and transported us more effectively than that economy class flight it made bearable, the same novel we recommended to all out friends and bought for family members was, in fact, too shit to even make this year’s longlist and what we should have been reading was the one about the depressed piano tuner with the difficult relationship with his mother and which does not have a happy ending at all and is very, very unlikely to ever be made into a film as the scene with the lobsters will never get past the censors.
How great then, to see Hilary Mantel win the Booker Prize this year, winning it for the second time, for the second book in a trilogy, which just like the first is a bestseller.  The sheer bloody balls it must have taken the judges to go with a populist choice that is already on the Ikea coffee tables of many people, that is popular with readers, and that in paperback form will be a pleasingly hefty beach read when on holiday and handy for twatting mosquitoes.

Prizes shouldn’t matter, but as long as we have them, who they are given to does.  The reality is that awards will always be with us, from the best in breed in the fat pigs class at the local agricultural show to the Golden Thingie award for best actor.

And really, who of us can truthfully say that offered a rosette and a ten quid book token, we’d turn it down?

Criticism

What purpose does criticism serve? If you’re a child then the criticism you encounter is likely to be fairly unsophisticated; for instance a playground of kids chanting ‘Janet smells! Janet smells!’. Later in life you might start to encounter criticism of your creative efforts, as your work is branded ‘bland and lacking the essential element of whimsy prevalent in many of his contemporaries’, which is a bit fucking harsh given it was the first time you used finger paints and you were only five. Still later and one gets used to the knocks of opinion, which is useful for when you develop romantic feelings for somebody, go out with them and suddenly find yourself on the wrong end of a ‘it’s not me, it’s you’ conversation during which your insensitivity is mentioned no fewer than seven times before you realise you are being dumped. But don’t worry, you will eventually find somebody to settle down with who will criticise you but not leave.

There is a danger that criticism sometimes just seems like an excuse for the critic to show how clever they are by being both cruel and amusing, all the while demonstrating that they are not as talented as the person they are criticising and making a pretty good case for the argument that critics are just frustrated artists.

But people like to read reviews, because tickets are expensive and going to the theatre is time consuming. So you don’t want to waste your time and money seeing something that is crap only to discover afterwards that every critic was united in their opinion of its crapness. Of course worse still is coming out of a show thinking it was crap and not understanding the rave reviews. This is especially true of foreign films, which reviewers invariably praise because they are worried that if they say that a three hour documentary about an Armenian orphanage lacks even one decent car chase, they may be accused of being shallow.

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’)’.

Gonzo publishing IV: On writing

Any attention-seeking approval whore will tell you that the greatest profession to stoke the ego is; writer. As soon as you have one book in print, you’ve made it, because if it sells a gazillion copies you can revel in your fame and wealth and, more importantly, really stick it to anyone you felt ever crossed you. Or even better, pretend not to be happy and want to be taken ‘seriously’, thereby driving anyone who every actually crossed you into a foaming peak of rage by having fame and wealth but not enjoying it while they have no fame, no wealth and are made miserable not just by your success but by your apparent ingratitude.

If your copy sells one to a dozen copies, (depending upon the size of your family), then you can develop a shell of bitterness that it would take a tactical nuke to crack and sit inside it, stewing in your own misery but knowing, though never actually telling anyone, that you will be hugely popular after you are dead. Then who’ll be laughing? Probably whoever handles your estate.

Anyone who has ever put pen to paper wants to be published. Now, you can be. If you can have photographs printed into hardback albums then presumably you can have text printed up too. It’s the ultimate form of vanity publishing, but there’s no moment when you have to face the fact that nobody is ever going to want to publish your seven volume history of the trans-Pennine cycling club because of ‘lack of interest’. (Fuck them, these are the books that make Britain great, with passages like ‘as he shifted down a gear, Chunky Stevenson didn’t see the sheep in front of him and swerved to late to avoid it. The sickening ‘bahhhhhhhh-thunk’ was the very herald of doom for Chunky. As I came upon the scene of blood, guts, derailer parts, torn cagoul, wool and 3 in 1, I knew this was going to be grim).

Why stop at photo albums? It’s time to take back the shelves of our bookstores. For instance, I fail to see how paying three quid for a little book is going to make me, in any way, shape or form, calm, unless it contains the addresses of all the doctors in my area who are relaxed about prescribing tranquilisers. So why not slip a ‘little book of serenity for the soul’ onto the shelves with helpful passages like ‘feeling stressed? Tried lager?’

Better still, target your audience. Inside the glossy, pink, sexy hardback cover of the ‘ultimate sex and the city companion’ are chapters like ‘why does Daisy (or whatever their f**king names are) have so many boyfriends? Well, it’s unlikely that she spends her weekends watching DVD box-sets and eating ice cream).

Best of all, what’s the one book you expect to see in hardback? That’s right, text books. Now, I’m a fairly easygoing bloke, but when I hear somebody expounding the myth of Creationism, I get a twitch above my left eye. This is followed by a stabbing pain, usually in the speaker’s throat but the chest will do if he’s tall and I can’t get the knife up above the shoulders in time. Chapter 1; ‘unicorns’, how they are real and how having people laugh at you in public makes you a better person.

The trick is, of course, to get somebody to pay you for your thoughts. This is insanely difficult, as so many people give their thoughts away for free, usually after two large gins. Even less people know how to structure their thoughts in such a way that, on the printed page they make a) sense and b) the reader have an emotional reaction. The people who can achieve this are called poets. The worthy poets try to put into words what seeing the sunlight reflected on the rippling lake water on a winter’s day while they suddenly realise that they always have and always will love their ex more than the lover currently holding their hand, feels like. The others work for Hallmark, go home at five and eat well. They can also rhyme 275 words with ‘birthday’.

Yet more Gonzo Publishing

Printing has always been the province of the professional, with the notable exception of ‘Readers’ Wives’ providing a platform for the amateur. Now though, mortals can see themselves in print without having to go to a vanity publisher or sprawl on a kitchen counter with their arse in the air while their boyfriend snaps off a few ugly beaver shots with a poleroid.

Companies convert your photographs into photograph albums for you.

Sometime between having your portrait painted by a grumpy Dutchman and being able to take pictures your telephone, people used cameras with a strip of film. This film was typically bought for a holiday and traditionally some of it was used before the camera was brought back home and put on a shelf somewhere and forgotten, only to be rediscovered again at Christmas or a birthday. The film was then used up and sent off to be developed and, two weeks later, you had 36 photographs recording anywhere from a few months to three years of family activity, a few shots on the beach, one or two totally black photographs (the result of trying to capture the magical effect of the Christmas tree seen through the after effects of a huge dinner and half a bottle of cooking sherry by not using the flash) and, if you were trying ‘to use up the film’, seven pictures of the dog.

You selected the best photographs, put them in the family album, put the album on the bookshelf and forgot about it. Traditionally, it was not seen again until you brought your fiancée home to meet your parents and your mother got it out, open the page of you, age six, about to go to casualty with a toy train stuck up your arse. Or naked on a rug as a baby if you’re into that sort of thing.

Today we can back up all our photographs and keep them all. The difficulty is how to display them and this usually means, depending on your class, using your expensive printer to produce a hard copy of your favourite shot or, if you live in a caravan, having a photograph blown up and printed onto a four foot square canvas. Two things to note here, tattoos rarely photograph well and, when enlarged, that hilarious shot of you and your best friends on a beach at Ibiza clearly shows a bloke in the background masturbating. Into your beach towel.

The alternative is to get a hardback album printed and bound for you and, I have to say, they look amazing on the adverts. The finished result is just like those coffee table books of photographs that people used to buy in the seventies and I would guess that, if you are that way inclined, seeing yourself in hardback glossy print must be quite a hoot, especially as you can put captions under the photographs.

Why stop at the family album and the coffee table though? If you can get a book of photographs then why not a book of pictures and text, like a children’s book…that you can then slip onto the shelves of the local Waterstone’s. then you can sit back and watch the fun as some outraged parent verbally assaults a baffled store manager because their tot has been found sobbing after picking up ‘Mr Bunny and Mr Fox’, with illustrations along the lines of H G Geiger meets an explosion in a vivisectionists. Or, fed up with the head librarian never stocking enough of your favourite author? Slip the children’s classic ‘Burn pikey-kid burn’ onto the shelves and apply for the position yourself once he’s sacked for ‘ordering’ it.

Why stop at the library. Want to impress your neighbours? Note if they have a photography book then reproduce it, making sure to insert, say, a carefully photoshopped picture of you hanging out with the Rolling Stones. Next visit, substitute your tome; ‘Hey, you have this, have you seen page 42, gosh, yes, that’s me. Sign it, well, sure.’ Extra points for using a photograph from the 70s, showing you exactly as you are now. You can tell if they have seen ‘The Shining’ by the degree of freak-out that occurs.

Gonzo Publishing Again

The best thing about making your own printed page is, of course that you write whatever you like, usually scurrilous and it looks, well, more real. Because whatever else the printed word might lack, it does not lack authority. If you came back to your car to find a hand-written note from a traffic warden informing you you had a ticket, you’d probably ignore it – handwriting has authority in only two circumstances, the first is when the message has been left in lipstick on the mirror in your bedroom and says something like ‘you are a crap shag. Have borrowed your car, hope you don’t mind, Trixie xxx’. The second is when the message is written in blood on the wall of the cabin in the woods you are staying in. In both cases justification, font and point size are not really relevant. In the latter case, let’s face it, not even the message is relevant, not even if it’s ‘enjoy your complimentary muffins’. You’re gone!

That’s why people buy newspapers. They are the voice of authority. Well, for people who can read they are, for people who can’t read, they are the source of partial nudity, celeb scoops (usually two scoops, out of a bikini top, on a beach in a fuzzy long lens shot (it’s hard to focus when you’re masturbating behind a gorse bush being scrutinised by curious goats) and footie news or, even better, speculation.

Increasingly, it’s speculation that populates the pages of papers. Or columnists. I don’t have a problem with traditional journalism, where some bloke, sometimes in a dirty mac, sometimes not, goes somewhere, finds out stuff and writes it up in a concise and amusing way. I do have a problem when they rely on unnamed ‘sources’ or simply on the sauce for inspiration. It’s opening up a twenty page paper and finding ten pages of ‘comment and analysis’ that shocks the hell out of me.

Comment and analysis is, I think, a slang term for bigotry and opinion. Read the pages long enough and the same people offer the same opinions – but about completely different subjects. It’s truly astonishing, from the situation in the middle east to the way that the economy is affecting sales of garden gnomes, these people will link to their pet subjects, usually something about their forthright views on immigration, which, being about as palatable as a turd sandwich (on brown) leaves you with a nasty taste in your mouth.

The worst thing is that these people have been paid for their sub-standard annoyance of a contribution. By you. Suckah!

Because no matter how insightful, how erudite and how informed any blog might be, whether it be on politics, gardening or cooking, it’s free and so, by today’s twisted value system, it doesn’t carry as much authority as a newspaper. This view might be changing slowly, but it’s up against some tough challenges, namely, that if you have paid for something, you are reluctant to admit that you could have got better for free elsewhere (prostitutes are the exception that proves the rule, if you want to have crap sex with somebody who is bored by the whole process, get married).

Newspapers mine blogs, reprinting swaths of them, but blogs rarely reprint whole sections of newspapers. This is because when a blogger makes it to print it’s the literary equivalent of being allowed to sit at the adults table (with the shock of seeing your work edited roughly the same as the shock experienced by children when they realise how dull adult conversation is, that you are expected to eat your peas rather than demonstrate your ‘nose cannon’ with them and that crayoning on linen tablecloths is a great way to earn a slap if you are lucky, or a steak-knife through the back of the hand if you’re unlucky enough to be sitting next to the great-grandmother who brought that tablecloth over from the old county).

Journalists and especially columnists are not happy to see their work appear in blogs. This is not just because of copyright, but because such blog entries often start ’72 fundamental errors in this piece of crap’.