What the papers say

 I have recently, embraced as all middle aged men should, a refreshing change of career.

Alternatively, I have recently, as all middle-aged men invariably do, suddenly regressed to acting like a teen-aged boy.

Both of these statements are technically true, and both of these statements have a sizable element of contestable opinion. As such, they're pretty much perfect for summing up the subject of today's blog, which is: newspapers, and what I've learned from helping my boy out with his paper round.

It was a perfect lock-down storm which drove me to it. In the teeth of a bitter winter cold, in the dank darkness of a January morning, I stood in my kitchen dubiously eyeing two large piles of newspaper. Eldest son had returned, with a defeated and haunted look in his eyes. One of the other paper-boys hadn't showed up, poor old eldest was lumbered with two rounds for the foreseeable, and the absolute state of the roads and pavements, covered as they were with sheet ice, precluded him taking his bike.

Being at something of a loose end myself, and perfectly happy to take the opportunity to get a bit of extra guilt-free exercising in (reasoning that it counted as work, so I could go out for a run later with a clear conscience) I volunteered to help. And so, for the last couple of weeks, I've been found popping papers in letter-boxes all over Ormskirk, essaying a cheery whistle as I've strolled. And as I'm noted for being prone to a bit of pat, smug and self-satisfied analysis, I got to having a bit of a wonder as I wandered.

Regular readers will be aware that I harbour something of an animus towards the Daily Mail. The odds are, if you're reading this, you're no great fan either. Today's Mail contains a spectacular example of that paper's particular brand of wrong-headed nationalism as a story about food shortages in British supermarkets due to the increased difficulty of importing goods post Brexit is spun to lay the blame squarely at the feet of the French for, um, enforcing the rules of the trade deal we negotiated.The phrase "Brexit red tape" is used, a lot, but at no point does it acknowledge that this red tape is entirely of Britain's devising, as part of a change that the Mail itself loudly and belligerently demanded and supported. 

Anyhow, that's by the by. Further examples of it's awfulness are unnecessary. I'm either preaching to the converted, or you've already stopped reading. Possibly while deriding me as being "woke" or something (what is it with angry people and that word?). The main point is that, of this paper round, the Mail comprises far and away the bulk, as in at least two thirds of them. This was the first surprise (I'm aware it's the most popular paper, but it's brought home more forcefully when you have a bag full of it). The second surprise was that the second most popular one was the Express, which is like the Mail, only slightly more mad.

I genuinely didn't think that anyone still read the Express. I'd forgotten it existed. 

The Telegraph had the next best representation, and there was occasionally the odd Guardian floating around. But mostly the first two. Some households took both, which seemed like overkill, surely after one paper's spent forty pages telling you that the EU and immigrants are to blame for everything that's ever gone wrong in your life, another one doing it's just rubbing salt into the wound. And I got to wondering what effect this has on public life.

(you may be wondering at this point why I have yet to mention the S*n. There's a reason for that, there weren't any. I live close enough to Liverpool that to be seen with a copy of that rag is as wise as Mike Pence dropping in at a MAGA rally)

A constant refrain among people who one could loosely class as "progressive" is professing to be mystified at the remarkably robust poll showing by the Conservative Party. Surely, they opine, they are demonstrably the absolute worst? Surely having the worst death death rate, and the worst-hit economy, of anyone in Europe is a cause for national shame? How the hell are they still polling at 40% after Barnard Castle, £12.2 billion completely wasted on Track and Trace, the PPE outsourcing to their mates companies scandal? Why are people not up in arms about the absolute chaos at the borders? The fact that Northern Ireland has been hung out completely to dry, that there's now a border in the Irish Sea? That the Fishing Industry's been sold down the river? That they were happy to break international law? That they bent over backwards to accommodate Donald Trump? That they just lie, and lie, and lie, even to the Queen?

I advise those people to do my son's paper round.

In Mail world there is plenty of criticism of the Government, and it would be disingenuous to suggest otherwise. But it's highly selective (witness the spin on the piece I cited earlier on). The general rule is that, while they may be making the odd mistake, anyone else would be worse. Getting Brexit done bought Johnson enough political capital that he's immune from serious criticism, even as makeshift morgues can't keep up with the stacks of the dead. Even as friends of friends line their pockets with taxpayer's money. If you read the Mail all this is quietly ignored until it becomes unignorable. They stuck militantly to the line that schools should remain open until the audience became overwhelming, at which point it simply wasn't mentioned. Essentially, they are about maintaining the status quo, even if the status quo is a shitshow.

The other refrain among those people is that all those who read this must, by extension, be awful themselves. This is the sort of head in the sand othering of an entire swathe of the population which leaves the left out of power, Remember Hillary Clinton's Deplorables? Well, the group of Nazi cosplayers who ransacked Capitol Hill this week certainly were that, but they weren't all Republicans. Likewise the Mail espouses some fairly wacky positions, and is, to my mind, pretty poisonous, but its readers (based on my admittedly small sample size of a couple of paper rounds) are like as not perfectly pleasant elderly women who express concern about the missing usual paperboy.

(though, if we are to play up the stereotype, I should point out that the only grief my son's got during these extra rounds for being late was from a bloke who took the Mail AND the Express and got very shirty with the small boy who'd been gingerly traversing ice-slicked pavements with a bag-full of papers for two hours. Saying that his doing two rounds was "no excuse". Weirdly, when I delivered them the next day, at the same time, he had very little to say on the matter, despite my smiling broadly at him and waving the papers in his general direction)

The point being that, while not foaming at the mouth fascists themselves, when the time comes to mark that x at the ballot box, some of that poison remains in the system. People who'll fund-raise for charity, take pride in their community, love their families still believe, on some level, that the Tories are the party for them.

In a sense I feel like this blog's already an anachronism, paper circulation is plummeting, and one thing I did note about those getting them delivered was that they were universally of a pensionable age. There's a possibility that I'll look back on this in a couple of years and it will have aged like a fine haddock. I do still buy a paper, it's a lifetime habit, and I can never really take to doing crosswords on screens, but I suspect I'm at the southerly end of the age spectrum. The students who man the counter in my local corner shop are mystified that I'll pay two or three quid for something like this. One lad actually laughed at it being so expensive, and asked me why I bought it. I asked him in turn how much he paid for a pint, and how long that lasts him. But they had a point, in a society where so much information is freely available, it must seem almost perverse to pay money for it. But that's a different argument altogether.