It's been many years since I've blogged (my Catholic mind, no matter how lapsed, still tells me there's something dirty about that word: blogged. Go on, say it out loud. I'm not wrong, am I?). There are many reasons I quit:
1) I found more pressing things to do, like descend into destructive self-analysis
2) I was getting too old for this shit
3) I read the columns printed in Sunday supplement magazines.
After this opening paragraph, you're probably assuming:
1) I'm highly self-critical and self-involved (yes and yes)
2) I have seen Lethal Weapon
3) I'm middle class.
It's the last one that's the most important, not to detract from the awesome contribution Danny Glover and Mel Gibson made to cinema with their portrayal of Riggs and Murtaugh. I'm middle class - I don't own a wooden salad bowl yet, but I do have Coldplay albums, a sense of liberal guilt, a deep knowledge of ennui and enough pretentiousness to use French words. Thus, you would think I could read the Sunday magazine articles with ease, quickly convincing myself that what I really need to fill the emptiness of life is a neon pink salt and pepper shaker set featured on page 59.
However, I find so many things wrong in these columns that I am led on to explain again why I stopped writing. The most vital reason I quit writing blogs was that I realised there couldn't be anyone who found what I was saying remotely important. Stick with me, here. I mean, I wrote and my friends could read it but, so what? I talked to them in real life anyway. It quickly dawned on me that writing blogs was just a way for me to carp on about something without having my friends interrupt me with sharp observations such as: "You finished bitching yet?"
No one cared: my friends probably didn't care about how the newest Coldplay song really spoke to me (I am indeed off the hook) and, eventually, even I didn't care. So, why am I writing now? Because, like all good lapsed Catholics, I am susceptible to ranting and revelations. I had two of the latter. Firstly, some of my friends on here have blogs and are actually very funny through them. Secondly, I am inspired by the insipid and vapid Sunday supplements to pen this rant. Strange, no?
I'll get to the point - have you ever read those columns? A friend of mine (let's call her Hippie) recently sent me a link via her blog (see: http://solopolovision.blogspot.com/) . It was an article from a Sunday supplement penned by a Bridget Jones clone who was pondering upon the unhappiness of her love life. In any case, it made me realise that people get paid to write about things no one else could possibly care about.
Think about it: you sit down in a cafe with a friend and she starts bleating on about her love life. It's always happened and will continue to the end of time, barring men not acting like men or women accepting that people are human. However, she starts getting more self-absorbed and you want to tell her to get some perspective or that things will get better. Then you find she can't hear you. So you decide to walk away, much like you can put down the article. But then you find out someone is paying her to tell you this stuff. Someone is paying her to tell you things you already knew about life, but in a whining, grating tone. You're livid. So that's when you pick up the scone knife, plant it between her shoulder blades and thus the cafe becomes forever associated with a horrific stabbing, so much so that it ends up going bankrupt. You're in jail, the cafe owner has committed suicide and the knife shall never again know the pleasure of buttering a scone.
My point (which I eventually meander to, now and again) is that the people who write these things very rarely offer anything entertaining. Why do I care if the writer is unlucky in love? It may be tongue in cheek, but is she writing anything in an interesting or amusing way? No? Then let me just suggest the character could head to Ann Summers and the column could finish there.
Ok, that's a shallow point, but there's a decided obsession with discussing the obviously tedious, like there's a contest between columnists for trying to kill off brain cells with mundane musings. I once tried to read a Sandi Toksvig column and I do think she is a very intelligent woman. However, she was writing about the minutiae of life and Scrabble. By the second sentence, I wanted to kill myself. By the third sentence, I wanted to kill everyone in the world to save them the horror of reading the article. By the fourth sentence, I had decided worldwide homicide was too much effort and settled for numbing the pain with Tesco Value whiskey.
There are good writers in these things, but the bad far outweigh them. Still, people can argue that, even if you don't agree with it, there are many who see a point in those kinds of articles found in Sunday supplements. But tell me: what is the point? I have heard short poems depicting the tragedy and comedy of mental health with more eloquence than can be found in a book's worth of Sunday supplement columns. I can even see some sense in nonsensical pop song lyrics (e.g. "usually drink, usually dance, usually bubble" - what the hell is "bubble"? It could be some dirty slang and this, therefore, interests me) but the columnists of these magazines do not generally enlighten or even entertain. They write because they were famous for something, know someone on the paper or were/are known writers. These things do not necessarily mean said people can produce an interesting sentence about life events. I once read an established author's column and found myself wondering how knowledge of his dining habits added to the quality of my life. So, he has problems working out which bits of cutlery to use - a revelation so incredible it's like God lifting the scales from my eyes.
Some would suggest that if you don't like it, don't read it. That's lazy thinking, a get out clause for those unwilling to form an opinion. The problem is that it's just so lazy - the idea that it's ok to write this sub-par crapola because no one likes to think too much on a Sunday morning after the previous night's wine box escapades. No one's saying fill the Sunday Times with the works of Aristotle (apart from Aristotle groupies, of course - they're proper hardcore) but, for the love of God, act like you respect your readership more than fobbing them off with one woman's need to drag us down to her 15 year old teenager mentality.
This leads me back to why I'm writing, I suppose. I don't want to write about how I'm up, down or sideways, but I do want to write and I will have a lot of opportunity to do that soon. Also, knowing that in the United Kingdom there is probably at least one person who finds reading Sunday supplement columns a nice way to pass the time, I believe there is at least one person out there (besides myself) who will find what I write to be of minor interest. Am I a hypocrite? Only if I get paid to write about keeping up with the neighbours or my hilariously ineffective attempts at human interaction. Someone come make a hypocrite out of me, dammit. You know I'm good for it.
