poliphilo: (Default)
poliphilo ([personal profile] poliphilo) wrote2019-01-27 10:56 am

Give Us This Day Our Daily Paper

We get a paper because my mother has always had one. She likes to see it sitting beside her breakfast plate. Occasionally she'll puzzle out a headline and ask us what it means. 

The paper she gets from force of habit is The Telegraph- which is deeply conservative (Boris Johnson writes for it, as does William Hague) and weirdly supportive of Mrs May, though it rarely offends against human decency in the manner of The Mail. The Barclay Brothers own it- and run it from tax exile on the Island of Sark.

 In the afternoon I go prop myself up in a well cushioned corner and do the cryptic crossword- which I enjoy. Afterwards I flick through the pages, rarely finding anything to detain me. None of its writers appeal to me much- though I quite like Janet Daley.  

The Telegraph's Saturday and Sunday editions are enormous- padded out with supplements that consist of advertising lightly disguised as information. Most of it goes straight in the recycling bin.

Sometimes we're treated to a substantial supplement about China, its booming economy and its wise and dynamic leader-  all paid for by the Chinese Communist Party. Weird.

The trees deserve better. 

All this costs us a very large amount of money.

But we're helping keep a local newsagent in business. He delivers every day. Some mornings I hear his van bumping over the sleeping policemen in the early hours. We continue to have milk delivered for much the same reason. 

One does what one can to support the rural economy.
cmcmck: (Default)

[personal profile] cmcmck 2019-01-27 12:45 pm (UTC)(link)
One does, which is why we always use local companies.
cmcmck: (Default)

[personal profile] cmcmck 2019-01-27 02:25 pm (UTC)(link)
The Medway area suffered from a lot of the same as does Gravesend.

We get Brummie commuters moving in here but the scale is very different.
basefinder: (Default)

[personal profile] basefinder 2019-01-28 11:43 am (UTC)(link)
I would prefer no newspaper because it just gets recycled after a day.

Debbie likes to have the physical paper in her hands each morning.

But there is something to be said for keeping a newspaper in business.