My day with The Daily Telegraph: why I need to be more of a retard.

Being on holiday is, of course, on the whole a good thing.  But it does have its drawbacks, and one of them, at least if you’re overseas, and I am all the way away in the south of France, is irregular access to your regular newspaper.  Normally, even in somewhere as la France profonde as the village I'm staying in, the local Presse can get your paper to order, and every year until this one the local Presse has done so as a matter of unfussy routine. Recently, however, their supplier changed, and suddenly my summer source of Grauniness is not a secure as it once was. Having arrived only last Friday, this hadn’t until today been a problem. I got the Saturday edition on Sunday, and I got The Observer easily enough in the metropolis of Mirepoix. But, today, alas, no Graun.

Now I am an avid Guardian reader, but I would like to be clear about a few issues before I go any further. I do not (normally) have a beard and do not wear sandals and thus, like most Guardian readers, I do not conform to the Guardian-reader stereotype. That said, the absence of beard is not a choice, or at least not my choice. It is simply that my partner is barbaphobic. But the sandals issues is my choice, as I despise the affected rancidity of bourgeois bohemians. Anyway, I digress. Point is, I find life very hard without my Graun, and, no, reading it on the internet is not the same. Nevertheless, I decided to make the most of the absence, and indeed to take it all in the manner of the inspirational Caitlin Moran, author of one of the books I’ve chosen for this summer’s non-newspaper reading, as it happens, who says in her fabulous new book: “I am, by and large, boundlessly positive. I have all the joyful ebullience of a retard.” (How to be a Woman, p. 5). I, sadly, do not have all the joyful ebullience of a retard. But I am trying really hard to be more like one. 

So it was with a positive outlook and a smile that I purchased, for the first time in my life, a copy of The Daily Telegraph. (Ms. Moran’s paper, The Times, was also unavailable, and the only other paper available was ex- and to all intents and purposes still-Nazi-sympathising Daily Mail, so The Telegraph it had to be.) And I found that reading another paper is really like visiting another country. Well, I say that, and reading The Independent is indeed a bit like being in France: a bit different, but not too much so, still comfortable, and in many ways cooler and otherwise superior. But I found that the Telegraph is a bit more like, I don’t know, South Africa ... in, ooh, about 1980. Here’s why. And, I must say, in a week in which one media scandal is dominating the news, my day with the Telegraph told me that the end of Murdoch will be far from the end of hideous media wretchedness.  

First up, beginning on page 1 and continued on page 2, a headline saying “Freeze immigration, says Miliband advisor” (Tom Whitehead and Mary Riddell). The news article was neutral enough, merely reporting, as far as I know fairly, what Lord Glasman said. But it does direct you to “Interview: Page B9”, an interview that makes clear what an intelligent and original thinker his Lordship is, freed as he is from thought-policing political correctness (or basic politeness and decency, as I call it). A smaller article on page 8 is headed “Gipsy camp closes school”, which certainly gave me the impression that a camp of gipsies (a collective noun for a group of gay gipsies?) physically closed down a school by, perhaps, walking up to it and locking it, or else possibly attacking it with spades, pick axes, and huge be-rhinestoned wedding dresses. But, no, the story below actually explains that the “head teacher deemed the sports fields unsafe when a convoy of 15 caravans arrived” and closed the school himself.  So, in fact, it was *the head teacher* who closed the school. *Not. The. Gipsies. Curiously, the article didn’t explain why the head felt the school was unsafe. Did the caravans have spikes on them upon which a pupil might impale himself or herself during a game of football, I was left wondering. Was there a danger that the school's girls might be influenced by hideously bad taste of Gipsy wedding apparel?  Also, wouldn't a paper like the DT normally spin a story like this in terms of elfin safety gorn maaaaad?  I wonder why they didn't in this instance. Strange.        

Next on page 1, continued on page 9, an attack on the BBC, and what turns out to be on its own evidence a thunderingly dishonest one: “BBC hires actors to help managers to take courage”, the page 1 headline says. The page 9 headline says “BBC spends £1m on actors to help managers cope with angry staff.” You have to read on quite late to find that the £1m was in fact spent over the course of 5 years on all kinds of staff training, and precisely £19,040 of it was in fact spent “on actors to play the part of ‘disgruntled employees’ who are against the move from London to Salford....” Another misleading headline, this time more weirdly so than anything, is “The shoe salesman who ran the Met”, which, as far as I can tell, refers to how Sir Paul Stephenson “is said to have placed a desire to serve the public at the core of his beliefs, a lesson he learned from a shop manager” who told him that “Keeping the queues down and the customers happy” was his mantra, a phrase which became Sir Paul’s mantra. Not exactly a shoe salesman running the Met, but I’m sure you get the message that you can't let the plebs run anything or it'll all end in tears.     

Back to the “‘disgruntled employees’”: I like those quotation marks. Republican Presidential nominee and dinosaur John McCain used them when describing Barack Obama’s ideas in the 2008 election campaign, not on paper but in speeches when he would raise his hands and wiggle his digits in a quote-unquote gesture as if to signify either the disingenuousness or else the sheer silliness of his opponent’s words—“dick fingers”, as Jon Stewart called them. Perhaps that was what The Telegraph meant by putting the term disgruntled employees in dick fingers. Because they couldn’t possibly be genuinely disgruntled about being arbitrarily relocated to Salford, could they? It's fiiiiiine. Or maybe just proud curmudgeonliness lay behind the dick finger usage. I have a cartoonishly curmudgeonly colleague who likes to put all new-fangled corporate-business speak in dick fingers. Words, for example, such as “management”, “meetings”, and “department”. Anyway, I guess that’s what was going on with Christopher Hope, Whitehall “editor”, on page 7, in an article on John Whittingdale, “the Conservative chairman of the media select committee” being “the only MP among 386 ‘friends’ listed on [Elisabeth] Murdoch’s [facebook] page....”  Apparently, “Mr Whittingdale brushed off the links, pointing out that he had lots of ‘Facebook friends’, including Chris Bryant, a Labour MP.” It reminds me a bit of Miranda’s sitcom mum, who might refer to “what I call Facebook friends”.  No, “Hope”, they’re just Facebook friends.

Anyway, we’ve seen The Telegraph on race, class, and dick fingers, now gender. First, in the purple bit at the top we have “Posh verus Push: How many C-sections is too many?”, advertising a B section piece in which Victoria Lambert, who I assume must be some sort of medical authority, explains that Victoria Beckham has had her fourth C-section and in which she asks whether that was “one too many".  Why “One” too many? was my first thought. Why not two too many?  Or, three?  Or four?  What's with the exact numbers?  At least the appropriately named Victoria (the journalist, that is) has enough awareness to ask in her first sentence “how many C-sections is too many?” To which the only appropriate answer surely has to be: mind your own fucking business, Lambert. Page 1 also announces an offer to show you how, on B14, to “Copy Michelle and beat ‘bingo wings’”. Sure enough, on B14 Matthew Barbour outlines seven ways to be just like Michelle Obama, top African-American woman lawyer and wife of America’s first black President, and, obviously crucially, non-owner of Bingo wings. I'm sure Matthew didn't mean any disrepect to Mrs Obama.  Not at all.  And I presume Matthew is free of all female aesthetic imperfections, although, to be fair, this is not just an aesthetic issue. The charming and helpful article was in the Health section of the paper. Got that, women? Also, Kate Moss was described on page 8 (main section) as someone who is “now a married woman and is, arguably, losing her supermodel looks”, and was described in this way by the staggeringly beautiful Tim Walker who, with one look at his face, has totally turned me gay. I’m guessing Tim Wanker is actually one of those made-up people to disguise the real identity of the kind of odious weasel or weasels who actually write this stuff, but I expect he, she, or they are even uglier. The same man, woman, or child, by the way, describes Andrew Marr as “the jug-earned presenter”. Not sexist, I know, but rude. Astonishingly rude, when you think about it.

And finally, just before the sport section, we have Rupert Christensen, who is not just an art critic but who with brilliant insight warns that drunks are “hilarious in the movies” but that alcoholism is actually a very serious issue. Thanks, Rupert. Who knew?  

  
So, how, at the end of the day, do you deal with newspaper like this? How do you cope with reading it while remaining sane?  How do you coping without reading it, but knowing what it’s like and that it exists in the world.  There’s only one way I can think of, and it takes us back to the example of Caitlin Moran: be more like a retard, be more like a retard....