Hastie Reads the Papers and Predictably Gets Annoyed.
Every time I think of the Guardian, I feel my gorge rising in my throat, and I break into a cold sweat at the inevitability of it all, so on Sunday I bought the Times. I don’t always get a paper, but I felt like I needed to last weekend – they all seemed so desperate for my attention, flaunting their inky pages with enticing stories of riots and death. The rioting, so it turned out, was little more than what we ex-criminal lawyers call ‘crime’ but this time given a hike-up by the media in its generous coverage and (let’s face it) encouragement. They needed something to look big so that we’d forget the hacking and suspicious deaths of whistle-blowers.
So when the fun ran out in the main paper I made the terrible mistake of looking in the Magazine. (Charlie Sheen was on the front cover – I think you can forgive me.) There was an appalling article by Daisy Waugh. I think she must be related to Evelyn. Evelyn is one of my heroes, so I’m inclined to be lenient towards her. Perhaps she was having a bad day writing this, but it was RIGHT AT THE START OF THE SUNDAY TIMES MAGAZINE. I couldn’t COULDN’T understand the point of it.
The title was ‘My house is worth an Olympic gold’: surely reason enough to put a stop on the article. Break it down to its components: My house – upon what did this writer choose to cast her critical and witty eye this week? Her house. And the second word: worth. As the article proceeds, we learn that this definitively means PRICE. It concerns how much money she is likely to make during the Olympics if she rents her house out. WHY do we need to know this? WHY is this the LEAD ARTICLE of the SUNDAY TIMES MAGAZINE? I suppose it may be informative for those people who will be living close enough to the Olympic games, i.e. London. Do I have to point out, as I did consistently when I lived there myself, that NOT EVERYONE LIVES IN LONDON, and some of us MOVE AROUND OUTSIDE OF LONDON SOMETIMES. If this was a paper entitled THE SUNDAY LONDON TIMES, I would understand BUT IT IS NOT.
The article doesn’t just delve straight into this slick world of upper-middle class Londoners who crack soulless in-jokes about the prices of houses – oh no, it begins with a now standard dig-at-the-French-stereotype-whilst-also-making-sure-everyone-knows-I-have-a-house-there. This, in my book, is completely unforgivable; a nasty little trend that has been churned up previous by the likes of Stephen “Year in the Merde” Clarke, who at least sometimes offers some kind of grudging admiration for People Who Happen To Be French. In fact, my next blog will continue this theme…
Daisy has a problem with a lady who works in her boulangerie. I say her boulangerie, but in fact, it is not hers. She has moved there, and quite frankly, if she is as dull and annoying as she seems to be, I would have probably have pelted her with stale croissants until she’d gone away. This boulangere does her usual Stepford-boulangere frosty-French, inflexibly polite smirk. Daisy tries to ask her what she thinks of losing the bid for the Olympic games and is disappointed when the boulangere doesn’t react. She finally leaves the country. Why does she leave the country? Because her brain is pre-conditioned into that state of rigid, morbid, money-fixated tedium that can only be created and appeased by a life-long residence in the capital city of this miserable island.
HOW much money was she paid to write this article? Or was it just a favour from the editor so that she could pass it around at dinner parties?
And they wonder why people are rioting…
