Just occasionally, a line in a newspaper editorial captures something so succinctly that I can’t help but smile. This line about Suella Braverman, from Clare Morrison in The Independent this weekend, is a great example:

She somehow managed to get the entirety of Northern Ireland, regardless of background, to come together and say in one voice: “What is she going on about?”

Surely we’ll have a new Home Secretary by this time next week.

It’s over twenty years since I left my Saturday job at a branch of Homebase. One of the deputy managers I worked for adopted some peculiar methods to improving the customer experience. When the checkout queues became very long, he used to ask for one of the checkouts to be closed so that the assistant could hand out Quality Street as an apology to the waiting customers.

I was reminded of this when I read Simon Calder’s piece in The Independent about Transpennine Express. The train operator is aiming to improve customer service by running fewer, older, and slower trains while working to “surprise and delight” customers by occasionally handing out free coffees or ice creams.

Experience has taught Wendy and me to avoid journeys on Transpennine Express services wherever possible, as the services are so frequently cancelled or overcrowded. A tiny possibility of receiving a free coffee at the station is unlikely to change our minds.

I wonder if that deputy manager has had a career change?

The image at the top of this post was generated by DALL·E 3.

Howard Jacobson’s wonderful Independent article uses a powerful mix of haughtiness, humour and persuasion to react to April’s news that Zac Efron had his shirt ripped off at the MTV Movie Awards.

I think the passage of time has somehow made this article even better – perhaps it is because summer’s approach makes its message more timely. I can’t help but think that the missing comma in the headline is intentional, as a lovely punctuation pun.

Oh, and I should apologise to anyone who was in the same Starbucks as me as I searched the stock photo archive for something to top this post… frankly, I’m surprised Starbucks wifi didn’t block some of those results!

Oh, the grammatical absurdity of that post title.

There was a time when I wrote on this blog daily. That time has clearly passed, but if I was still doing it, I’d have written something about i yesterday – The Indy’s new not-quite-free-sheet.

And if I’d have written something, it would not have been unlike what Jonathan Rothwell has written over on Crashed Pips. I agree with most of what he’s said, so it seems pointless to repeat it.

I liked i. But I say that as someone who’s never been keen on Metro‘s acres of dry agency copy. It’s not something I’d go out of my way to buy on a daily basis, but when I have to go somewhere on a train, I often snoop around WHSmith before boarding and find nothing that I want to read. Now, I’d buy i. It’s interesting and diverting enough to part with 20p, and small and disposable enough to stuff in a bag.

Yet I didn’t like everything.

My biggest complaint about it is the printing process used. Like The Independent, it’s printed with that horrible ink that comes off on your hands, your clothes, and gets everywhere. That is something that would put me off buying the paper in certain situations.

They need to change to whatever printing process The Guardian or Metro use, where the ink stays firmly where the printer puts it.

I also dislike the TV Guide, whose organisation strikes me as pointless. I don’t like TV in categories. I wouldn’t identify as a fan of ‘American Drama’, or ‘Comedy’, or ‘Documentaries’ or whatever idiotic bins they throw programmes into.

In American Drama, I’m mad about The West Wing, but couldn’t give a toss about The Wire, Lost, or Law and Order. When it comes to comedy, I won’t miss The Inbetweeners, but would switch off My Family, Harry and Paul, or Only Fools and Horses. And for documentaries, I’d pay good money to see The Secret Life of the Motorway on BBC Four, but would want a licence fee refund for Make Me a Man, The Boy with Three Heads and Eight Sets of Eyebrows (or whatever idiot trash they’re pumping out these days), or Help Me Anthea, I’m Infested.

I don’t watch TV in ‘Genres’, I watch stuff I like. So giving me a page divided into genres is unhelpful.

Also, they need to get TV Reviewers who understand that writing a review of the previous night’s TV is not actually what they are being asked to do. A good TV review is almost a meditation on life, and certainly doesn’t depend on having seen the previous night’s TV. Get Nancy Banks-Smith in to do a masterclass or something.

But the TV Guide is the part of the paper that’s had the most positive reviews as far as I can see, so maybe I’m just unusual.

Oh, and ‘Caught and Social’? Puns only work when they’re funny.

Yet all-in-all and rants aside, I hope that i sticks around. And, given what The Independent has become these days, I wouldn’t be upset if i replaced it.