I haven’t posted much this week because I have been getting up too early. Instead of shambling up between 5.30 and 6.00 am and absorbing coffee while I think out loud, I have been getting up at the same time, putting on some clothes in roughtly the right order, walking to the newsagents to buy all the daily papers but the Star and then speed-read the lot of them. This is to write the Guardian’s online daily summary of the British press, which has to be finished by 9am: I was filling in three days for Ros Taylor, who was on holiday. It’s not exactly demanding work, but the effect of speed-reading all of the newspapers, and whipping up a coherent summary, is to destroy the power of reflection after the deadline has hit. It’s incredibly difficult to get it back. I can’t stop thinking like a newspaper. My attention span narrows to about ten minutes, and nothing seems urgent unless there’s a deadline right NOW.
It is also remarkable how quickly one stops noticing what utter crap most of the newspapers are, and how little they even pretend to supply news, rather than a sort of blurry timeless brightly-coloured sludge of stories about actresses, models and other people who don’t in any interesting sense, actually exist.
>>It is also remarkable how quickly one stops noticing what utter crap most of the newspapers are, and how little they even pretend to supply news, rather than a sort of blurry timeless brightly-coloured sludge of stories about actresses, models and other people who don
Your page is playing up. What I was trying to say is that this is especially prevalent amongst the Saturday and Sunday supplements. Only quite recently I was writing a piece on, of all things, holograms for The Times. “Please could you try to include some celebrity angle,” said the Commissioning Editor.
And someone said that, post 9/11, the media would abandon all this foolishness and become serious once more. When is it due to happen?
MH
Was in someone’s kitchen the other day. There were three women also present, discussing the minutiae of soap operas and sitcoms with passion and depth. At length.
I do not want to live in that world. I don’t even like visiting it. I can no more function as a social being there than I can fart phosgene – I am celebrity autistic.
Very upsetting. I wish they’d go away.
R
I just want to draw Rupert’s attention to the fact (if he didn’t already know) that immersion in soap is not solely the preserve of the female.
I work in an office of five people – three female, two male. Us three girlies wouldn’t know a soap character if it bit us on the leg, being of refined tastes and sensibilities.
The boys, on the other hand, discuss at some length the mysterious happenings of something called “East Enders”, after they’ve analysed the weekend’s sporting action.
And no, neither is gay.