In the last year I’ve had the opportunity to house-sit for many a friend when they went away on holiday. Some have sent me long emails enumerating detailed dos and donts with the asceticism of PhD scholars, some have put a concise few on a post-it on the fridge…and some have simply left me a voicemail saying, “you’ll be fine, call me if you have any problems.” But at the end of all of these…no matter how short or long, verbose or reticent, trusting or not, there is one instruction that never fails to appear…(besides, of course, open-the-windows-and-light-a-candle-when-you-smoke-in-the-house-because-even-though-you’re-not-supposed-to-I-know-you-will)…and that is—don’t forget to get the Sunday Times.
Yepyep, I know. I may forget to water the flowers. I may leave a teaspoon or two unwashed in the sink, and I may eat all your smoked salmon and goat cheese, but I will not forget to get you the Sunday Times. I do it anyway…so it just means getting two instead of one—an act, that for some reason, gives me unspeakable pleasure. Two Sunday Times please! Yes, you heard me, TWO! Ch-ching! It’s the only tongue-twister I can do inebriated. Twosundaytimestwosundaytimestwosundaytimestwosundaytimestwosundaytimes! The Sunday Times are special. Some consider them so special that it’s the only newspaper they buy. Instead of reading Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday…they catch-up on the week-in-short in the Sunday Times….and! they get the entire TV-schedule for the following week too! Not to mention the CULTURE and the Sunday Times Magazines…oh! I get by with a little help from [these] friends…
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I heart newspapers. I do. There’s something so blissfully paradoxical about them, no? As I dig through my bag each morning for my wallet to buy one…rummaging past gizmos-and-gadgets-galore from the new world, including an iPod(nano), an iPhone, an iBook—(they all seem to begin with an i, nowadays, don’t they?) I can’t help but smile when I suddenly have in my hand a giant, freshly minted, printed and folded newspaper which reminds me that the small print of the old world still lingers…and is still written pervasively into the spaces underneath our arms. They are, in a way that nothing else I can think of is, (other than the metal coins I use to pay for them), so definitively old school. To the tune of the Beach Boys song, “wouldn’t it be nice if we were older…?” I hum…wouldn’t it be nice if we called them oldpapers?
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In yesterday’s Sunday Times Magazine there was an article about Steve Jobs—the infamous Apple-technocrat who came up with all the iHooHa. Apparently he’s working on something called a tablet – a laptop not much bigger than the iPhone. Erm, iWHY? Why are we so obsessed with making technology bite-size when we’re not going to eat it? (Just a thought). But as I read through this article that reeked of an age obsessed with the electronic, the digital, the nano, the new…I couldn’t help but notice I was reading it from a form of “technology” that hasn’t changed in decades….centuries…eons! Well, ok, its gotten a little bit more pictorial and colourful…much to my dismay, the once sublimely monotonous columns of black-and-white teeny-type have been replaced and interrupted with colourful half- or whole-page images, but beyond this, its more or less the same archaic, stapled, fragile pile of tissue they once read in the days of yore…
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Newspapers are still tooting along the course of their unbending revolution…the ultimate anti-revolution, the revolution of unchange. I think we should build a temple to the newspaper. From newspapers of course. Duh. They don’t seem get any smaller…the print doesn’t get any bigger...the big news still only comes in the form of a three-to-eight-word headline…and the rest of it is still…rather small. Even I sometimes need glasses to read it. Eek!
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[A few years ago, when the late Zambian president Levy Mwanawasa was likened to a “cabbage”—the ultimate unthinking vegetable, because he had “allegedly”—I love that newspaper word that you never seem to come across anywhere but in a newspaper—suffered severe brain damage in a near-death car accident, the following day’s headline was composed of his priceless seven-word defense: I AM NOT CABBAGE, I AM STEAK! To this day, this is my favourite newspaper headline ever. Ever.]
…I wonder if those words appeared in his obituary a few years later…may his steaky-soul rest in peace…
When I graduated from Bard College, the President, Leon Botstein began his address to the graduating class with what he called one “pithy” word of advice: “When you read the newspapers,” he said, “always start with the obituaries. That way, everything that follows, whether in the newspaper or in your day, won’t seem so bad.” I had always thought the obit pages were reserved for the likes of my grandparents, who religiously read them, with unwavering certainty that they would recognize a face or name, coloured only by the chilling truth that they too, would no doubt, soon appear amongst them…
One obituary in yesterday’s paper bore a subtitle composed of these four words…writer, lover, sailor and spy! Ahhhh! Can I say it again? Writer, lover, sailor and spy! Why, oh why, did such a man have to die! [When is the funeral and will his sons be in attendance? – Chanel suit, and chanELLO, I’m there! With all due respect, and sympathy, of course.
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When I was little…little, as in not much taller than a newspaper…I spent many a morning sitting at the feet of my grandfather staring at the back of the elephantine newspaper he held and so intently read…waiting patiently for his huge-beer-bottle-glass-magnified-eyes to peer through the middle as his giant hairy hands brought the two corners together to turn the page…I gaped in boundless awe at how he managed to maneuver the giant contraption...to sustain it so elegantly in all its fragility and capriciousness…I thought it a rather exquisite and graceful, and yet somehow, bestial performance. It was a rustling battle each time, one that both he and I knew, he would win every time, with only the utmost effortlessness. I imagined there must have been some school grown-ups went to…where they learned how to hold a newspaper, how to turn the pages, how to fold it so as to keep them all in order…such knowledge could only come from the most rigorous training…a training so rigorous it made their hands bigger too…
I would then have dreams in which my hands swelled to Gulliver-dimensions…dreams in which I too, sat behind two thick, seemingly impenetrable frames of glass, and with my bug-like eyes read through the newspaper…which in my colossal hands seemed hardly bigger than a piddly-pamphlet…
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And when mind wasn’t lost in these metamorphological meanderings, I couldn’t help but wonder what it was that he was reading about. Did he know all those people? All those places? All that news? Why did he squander so many hours of each morning reading a paper that tomorrow’s would render old? As the Rolling Stones famously sang, “Who wants yesterday’s papers? Who wants yesterday’s girls? Nobody in the woooorrrrllllldddd…..!”
Though I would perhaps agree with them about yesterday’s girls (but even this is not my territory)…I must disagree about yesterday’s papers. Who wants them? I do! I have a real problem throwing away newspapers. They have so many uses! Wrapping…packing…stuffing…painting….separating photographs…indoor gardening…ironing (seriously, my mom sometimes uses them for ironing!—put a newspaper over a tablecloth with melted candlewax on it and iron—the wax comes off!) And you thought that dinner party would stain your memories forever. Ctrl-Z! Zip-eh-dee-doo-ta-da!
And then…there’s stuffing your rained-on suede pumps with newspaper to soak up the water…or brand new ones to keep their shape…sitting on one when the grass is too wet or a bench too cold…covering your blow-dried hair when you get caught sans umbrella yet again! in yet another! spurt of London rain…they are the perfect accessory. As essential as Stephen Jones beret or gold chain belt…I do, I do…I love it when the front page of the newspaper matches my outfit…only it can do so in that perfect nonchalant, seemingly unplanned, effortless and priceless (well, 90p) way. Ch-chic! If that isn’t more dash than cash I don’t know what is.
Oh. And there is one absolutely priceless and efficient use I once heard of (and I apologize in advance for naming it, but I just can’t resist): save it for that moment when you have no other choice but to use it as toilet paper…you may just hit two birds with one stone, if you get to smear your s….over some s…’s face! Mmmm, what pleasure that must be. A pleasure big enough to forget that you may have little black and white print tattooing your tush for the rest of the day!) Again, sorry. So…all in all…their uses, like the arrangement of miniature letters and words and columns that line them…seem endless… yesterday’s girls: take that!
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And then…to capitalize on a rather crude segue…there’s the smell. I heart the smell of newspapers. I doubt I would heart newspapers so much if it weren’t for their smell….that oily, inky, epic scent of journalistic heaven, or hell…as you wish. If history had a smell, that would be it…
Herstory had a similar scent, for when she was daddy’s little girl and he would stroke her cheek, his hands always smelt of three things: cigarettes…money…newspapers. Perhaps this is why I toy with these three things all day long…yearning for my own “days of yore…” and if and when the smell should fail me…there’s always the taste…yes, that sooty, industrious, bitter-sweet taste that somehow rubs off onto the piece of gum you put in your mouth…when you suddenly remember you licked your finger to turn the page…yes, you shouldn’t have…but you did…you had to…oh! That taste…! Perhaps someone should bottle the newspaper “spice.” That would put a nice spin on things…
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Dear Steve Jobs, please don’t invent an iNewspaper…for without my newspaper, this “I” would be not I…
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