"You'll get booed but it won't be the Boar War"
"Drew the grunge girl turns into a goddess (thanks to a posh frock)"
Sitting on the tube, you have to make space for the Metro paper. Commonly placed on the ledge behind the seats, but also atop the seats themselves, the Metro is the most popularly regarded item on the tube. They're left in these areas because the person who has picked up a paper cannot be bothered to take them to a bin. Should I specify 'recycling bin'? Don't be silly! The person who has picked up a free paper does not feel the responsibility to behave appropriately because of the association of the paper with this particular means of transport, therefore it is the duty of the underground staff to dispose of their free rubbish. And they don't have a responsibility because their very good shitty salaries don't cover recycling. (Pffff.) Okay, many of these papers are being re-used, but that also happens to be part of the problem.
This rubbish is produced five times a week, with a readership that stands at approximately 3,287,000 according to the National Readership Survey (http://www.mediauk.com/article/32696/the-most-popular-newspapers-in-the-uk). This is the figure that relates to adults only between January and December 2010, and I have an inkling that it is veering a little from the truth, for I can barely find space for these papers.
When I see somebody reading the Financial Times, or The Guardian or, by goodness, even The Sun I cheer on the inside. They have actively sought to gain knowledge and a version of truth through a medium that does not have quite the same tone of dictatorship. Naturally, most papers you read have a political slant and seek to gain followers with the same slant, but the difference between the papers you seek and the papers you get handed free of charge is that the latter is a mindless acceptance of the words and pictures in your hands.
Indeed, it is the mindlessness that is the crux of the matter. Person after person reading and viewing the pages, lapping up the information about Emma from Wolverhampton whose baby nearly drowned in the paddling pool in the garden before the neighbourhood parrot came and rescued her; or how Gary from Puddletown had a dream about his best buddy Nigel being attacked in the night by a burglar with an axe, so he called the police and saved the day; or how Cheryl Cole is now 7 stone 1 pound and a quarter after being on a grapefruit juice diet.
WHO CARES ABOUT EMMA OR NIGEL OR GARY OR CHERYL?!
This must be so damaging - allowing one's complex brain become so riddled with fluff, and rife with other people's 'facts' about what the Tory government's wife is planning for her next celebrity bash, and what Nigel and Gary are doing at the weekend that one is less able to consider that, actually, there are other ideas and facts and events to consider. But when you are so overcome with fluff, it is difficult to see much else of substance.
And don't forget that much of this seems to have been written with the idea that the readership has a ten year old's vocabulary. But I suppose the vocabulary doesn't matter when there are so many pictures of nothing and so many pages filled with sports 'news'. "But it's 8am! I don't want to be reading Dostoevsky!" And that is a fair point. But there is much ground to cross between the sentences in the Metro and the sentences and meaning in Crime & Punishment. How about an audio book as an alternative?
I don't think that not thinking 5 days a week is something to be celebrated. We easily get into habits, and when the habit is not thinking, it affects our day to day life outside of our activities on the tube.
And when millions of people have sucked up the same information, suddenly we find ourselves with an army of dull and like-minded people, unable to process thought independently or interestingly. We find ourselves in a 1984-esque scenario, where we are instructed one way or another about what to think and how to think about it.
Furthermore, thinking about these papers also gets me a little annoyed at the liberty that people take with space. No, just because you have the Metro in your hands does not mean that you can venture into my area. Keep your arms in your own seat, and if you're tightly packed and standing, don't huff because there's not enough space to open it - I think people come before rubbish. And when you're turning the page, do you have to make quite such a song about it? Flapping the pages with gusto as if you are turning to Mummy and saying 'Look what I did! I read 10 sentences and looked at 20 pictures! Aren't I clever!" No. You're not. Keep it to yourself - I don't want it or your arm in my space.
p.s. the quotes up above were taken from a paper in 2010, May I think, which were just so damned bad that I had to write them down. If I'd had hold of a paper, or took one up once a month, I'm sure hundreds more like it would have followed, but these were hurriedly scribbled from my view across the aisle.
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