Change is in the air

An interesting piece, a week or so back, from Matthew Parris in the magazine – sorry I haven’t got around to it before now. There are columns I read immediately in The Spectator and others which I lay down like a fine wine to mellow for a while, perhaps for months or even years, always knowing that they are there in their splendour waiting to be savoured, to be held aloft in a crystal goblet and their beguiling complexity of flavours – is that a hint of vanilla and perhaps peach, and, good Lord, can that be quince? – shared amongst great friends, in warmth and in silence. That’s what I do with Matthew’s columns.

Matthew was sort of bemoaning, but not really bemoaning – I couldn’t quite work it out, to be honest – the death of “fine writing” in newspapers and magazines, having just been given an award for his work. There was a new type of columnist on the block, he averred, who was more instantaneous and reactive. And while this did not mean the columns were any more “superficial” than the sort of considered and elegant stuff he writes, they were characterised by a “lightness…. a formlessness….. a train of consciousness quality.” He cited as examples two Times colleagues of his, the excellent Hugo Rifkind and the utterly unreadable Giles Coren.

He has a point, I think: there is a change afoot. The old-style columnists survived because we were forced to buy into the notion that they were omniscient and that we should be interested in them for their own sake, regardless of what they were writing about. A columnist, for example, who advanced the thesis that lightbulbs were, by and large, a good thing, or that the city of Paris could be terribly crowded sometimes and not very convenient as a transport hub, would once be read as if he had delivered a monumental insight which had somehow escaped the rest of us. Not any more. Now there is a demand for immediately formed opinions on issues of consequence, and the concomitant proviso that we are not always right, and more often than not dead wrong. The quality of writing, mind, has not changed much. I think this is an improvement – but, as ever, as ever, I could well be wrong.