As usual, I was reading the Times today whilst having breakfast in Tesco. A Saturday ritual. Today there are 80 pages - not including the separate Sports, Weekend and Magazine sections. As I skip through each page, I am struck by how little that is written I am interested in.
Front page: picture of Elon Musk with Donald Trump and a black eye (Musk's not El Presidente's). I don't care about Musk, he's extremely weird. I don't even care enough to be sorry for his son, who will grow up permanently mocked for having the name X Æ A-Xii. Trump I do care about because he's a consequential personality, potentially affects my life and the lives of those I care for. The only admirable thing about Elon is his fierce determination that humanity should settle extraterrestrially and his actions to begin the process of that happening. Space adventures are exciting; humans settling on Mars would be thrilling. I just don't want it to be him.
Defence pledge by Labour. 3% of GDP to be spent on defence by 2034. Don't care - 9 years away, governments are generally useless so won't happen anyway. Ignore. Turn the page.
Miliband, Blair, royal gifts, migrant return hubs. Don't care.
Cabinet anger at attorney-general over Nazi remark. Misleading, mischievous reporting; storm in a teacup. Farage with a pint of bitter. Here today, gone tomorrow so no need to care. Limit yourself to one glass of wine a year, says former drug tsar. Seriously, I can understand why my two sons never read newspapers.
Prince Harry.
Russell Brand.
Gerry Adams. Now there's a blast from the past.
Airlifting gorillas in the Congo. A whole page of interesting stuff.
Druids, witches, Sadiq Khan and cannabis, funeral costs.
Have-a-go Jenrick. Confronting fare dodgers and knife carriers. All very noble but you're filming yourself? Not so noble, Kemi will be 'avin' a larf. Slightly care because these buffoons could theoretically be the government in 4 years' time.
Pronunciation of 'mischeevious'. My friend Tony will care.
Teenage hackers and supermarkets, the Princess of Wales (of course) promoting a brand of sunglasses. The royal family sponsored by themselves. No different from Jenrick really.
Page 40, halfway.
La Scala in spotlight after Gaza protest. Teenage Texan wins spelling contest. In Guatemala, archaeologists have discovered a Mayan city dating back almost 3,000 years. This remarkable news gets one tiny paragraph whereas "Kate" got half a page.
Page 45, the start of the Business section, followed by Money, Weather, obituaries, reader's lives - skip, skip, skip, skip - and finally the crossword. Which I don't care about on a Saturday because it's a prize puzzle, which I'm not smart enough to do, and doing it online doesn't have the usual Check (i.e. cheat) button.
30 minutes to browse whilst eating breakfast, a further 30 re-reading whilst writing this. £4
But I don't care; I can just go and check out the Sports section.
That’s depressing. I’ve cancelled my subscription to The Guardian which I’ve read since I was 18 principally because it’s been taken over by those men (and a few women) who persistently assert that some men are women and should be allowed in women’s private spaces and play in women’s sports teams even though they are stronger and much more powerful. They have driven all the good women journalists to The Times. I am on the cusp of subscribing to their digital editions. But you might have put me off.
ReplyDeleteAlso the G seems to be getting its money from the USA and Australia and I’m really not interested in much that issues forth from them. It’s all trivia.
ATM I read interesting people on Substack - Nick Wallace for example and lots of blogs about London. The Londoner is brilliant and so is London Centric. Also The Cultural Tutor who has opened my mind to so much of architecture, music, rhetoric, art and philosophy.
I'm sure my fellow Times readers would happily welcome you to the fold.
ReplyDelete