One of the highlights of my week comes on a Saturday morning, when I make myself a cup of fair-trade coffee and settle down to read the letters page of the Guardian. My wife usually joins me — it’s a sort of date thing, romantic in its own way — and we sit there cackling, our cares and woes forgotten for a while. Sometimes it is the smug little commendations of some earnest article that has uncovered the suffering of an hitherto unreported minority of the population — that stuff is quite funny. But then all newspapers print letters from readers telling them how good they are. Much more fun — and fecund — are the gripes, the expressions of outrage and fury, the voluptuous revelling in acquired victimhood, the absolute intolerance of views which run counter to their own. That’s where we get our real laughs.
For example, the Guardian magazine has long since ceased using attractive young models for its fashion stuff, in an attempt to be politically correct. But still the moans will come in about how much the clothes cost and, really, should you be writing about fashion when Cameron and his fascist junta are busy murdering innocent benefit claimants? That’s a weekly gripe. God forbid anyone interviewed in the pages of that publication uses language which could be deemed offensive to the LGBQT community; there will be a howling at the moon.
And so we sit and snigger at the epic self-regard, the desperate yearning to be transgressed, the nursery-school Stalinism, all on display. You wonder how the hell you could write for this publication — you must have to watch every word for a possible slip. The injudicious use of a word like ‘-grandmother’, for example (banned by the Guardian style guide. She’s just a woman, you sexist bastard).
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