the corner office

I'm currently making my way through an Umberto Eco novel. Consequently, I'm spending a lot more time reading the free newspapers on the train & tube than I normally do. I make a thing of this because I took a conscious decision earlier this year to stop reading these papers. I felt my IQ dropping daily, as I worked my way through yet another page of pictures of stupid models and has-beens and never-beens in the London Lite. The Metro is especially bad for its sensationalist headlines, designed to spark outrage and paranoia and anger, like a Daily Mail for people too cheap to pay for their papers (like me).

It's ridiculous. On Thursday for example, the Metro ran a story about cocaine killing record numbers of people this year. Of course, that's not what the actual headline was - the real headline was something like SOARING COCAINE DEATHS. Don't remember the exact wording, but there was some 'soaring' in there. And I didn't read the paper, because I was working my way through a fairly accessible chapter of my book, but I did see the number quoted in smaller text - about 200 people. Looking at the now tamely-headlined online article, the real number is 196 people.

196 people died of cocaine abuse last year. On an island of 60 million people, half of whom can't schnarf anyway because the weather's shit and their noses are always blocked. There's nothing soaring or alarming about it. First, the human gene pool is not feeling hard done by on account of losing a few cokeheads. Second, it's just a ridiculously insignificant statistic. You probably have more chance of tripping over a discarded copy of the London Metro on the Embankment tube platform and falling in front of an oncoming Circle Line train than you do of dying of a cocaine overdose. Silly.

But that's not the point of this post. The thing I enjoy the most about these papers are the letters pages. This week it was particularly funny seeing the reaction to Boris Johnson's Olympics handover. In the beginning of the week it was outrage at the fact that Johnson didn't do up his jacket buttons, and people were writing in to complain about how sad and awful a mayor he was and an embarassment to the nation. This along with the outrage and scorn heaped upon Johnson by the Chinese media and bloggers (digging their freedom of expression, oh yeah).

By the end of the week, after Johnson wrote a response in the Spectator saying he'd checked protocol, wasn't breaking any rules and decided not to do his buttons to 'take a stand' (because sometimes you just gotta), the mood had changed. By Friday the letters pages were filled with people saying 'you go Boris' and how buttons were symbolic of the subjugation of the Chinese people by their communist masters and no damned Chinese were gonna tell free-thinking Britons how they should dress and they can all just fuck off to their re-education camps.

It was beautiful.

For me, I said my bit about the Olympics before, but quite frankly, go Boris. He might be a buffoon, but he's a buffoon after my own heart, at least in the matter of doing up the buttons to one's suit jacket. And the Olympics left me with a lot more respect for him compared to 200K all-expenses-paid Livingstone's luxury trip to chum it up with his totalitarian buddies in Beijing.