Tuesday 7 June 2011

Metro Flickers...


London is in the grip of a mania. A serious malady which seems to afflict 9 out of 10 tube users. That pitiful excuse of a newspaper, artlessly named ‘Metro’, appears to be surgically attached to the hands of my fellow commuters!?!

For those not totally familiar - Metro is a free 'newspaper' distributed in the mornings, primarily at tube stations. Some poor soul has to stand in all the weather that the gods can muster, handing them out to the grabbing paws of the ungrateful masses, who seemingly possess an insatiable thirst for day old gossip, recycled reportage and a Daily Express-esque political bias. The particularly acute cases will throw themselves at a dog-eared copy as if it was the last mouldy loaf, left on the shelf in a particularly bleak 80's-era communist satellite state! Why people are quite so keen to get hold of a copy is a mystery on a par with the Bermuda Triangle, the Mary Celeste and Donald Trump’s ‘hair’. I certainly wouldn't have it within 100 metres of tomorrow's fish & chips. Nor The Donald’s comb-over for that matter...

To give some sense of the calibre of journalism in question; one of my recent favourites was a page 3 splash (i.e. the third most important event on the planet...) which featured a jellybean that allegedly resembled the face of Kate Middleton. The headline read "Future Queen Seen on Bean". It would be rather humorous if I didn't suspect that the majority of Metro readers actually do qualify this as news, as opposed to Syria, Libya and the slow painful death of the NHS.


However there is an interesting contradiction in effect. It is very much a love/hate relationship. The savagery with which some readers attack the Metro is bewildering; it's almost as if they are grossly offended by its contents and want to be rid of the inconvenience as quickly possible. The angry snap of paper rings out the length of the tube carriage, as each page is turned with a ferocity that wouldn't look out of place on a piranha. And yet these same people greedily grab at a stray copy like some starving gannet. I confess it leaves me utterly perplexed and more importantly, doubting the sanity of the majority of the Londoners who surround me on the crawl to work each morning...

Boat drinks books!