It is Saturday and again I have failed to buy the Guardian. This is now two days in a row and I feel guilty about the fact that I don't miss it. Tomorrow I will buy a Sunday paper other than the Observer (which I have boycotted ever since their splash feature on Internet paedophilia), so there is no need for the Guide.
The creative precision with which the Guide was conceived is what renders the Saturday Guardian essential to so many. That same creative precision drives me witless. As the editorial quality has plummeted it has ceased to be that funny little pamphlet you keep safe that also has listings in, and become that fussy little booklet you can't find anyway. I'm watching less TV these days too.
Do I have something against the Guardian Media Group? Perhaps I
do. I feel physically sick if I miss the Monday or Thursday Guardian,
which annoys the hell out of me. I try and read another couple of
papers during the week, though the gap between buying a copy of, say,
The Telegraph, or The Times, and actually reading
much of it is rather larger than it should be for a
wannabe would-be
journalist. Which I am not. (If you believe that you should
contact me about an option to buy London Bridge that may interest
you.)
As a recently converted connected on-line junkie,
you might have thought I'd read all my news on-line, but
I don't. I'm paying by the minute for local calls I can barely afford,
and with the speed of my less-than cutting edge set-up (a friend who
came to visit thought I had a 9600bd modem), I just can't be arsed to
wait five minutes while illegible text on a blotchy
background competes for bandwidth with an over-large logo picture that I
know what it looks like!
Many large commercial sites are like this - I guess they're just not interested in communicating with users of older computers. This seems shortsighted somehow. All computers will be older someday. Text-only options are an affront. What's wrong with minimalism?
Anyhow, I like newsprint. Not very tree-friendly, perhaps, but it doesn't make me a Luddite. A pedant perhaps. After all, if I really want to read a specific thing in the Saturday Guardian, I can go to a library or swipe a read of a friend's copy at some point in the next week. If all else fails, I'd probably be better off buying fish and chips than attempting to look it up on-line.
(This seems ok - Bad Editor)