Now we seldom buy a paper, opting instead for a selection of downloaded articles. A Sunday Times is moderately expensive (£2.75, i.e. €3.15, $4.94 CAD) and, more to the point, contains massive amounts of material - on the housing market for example - that we have neither the time nor the interest to read. This involves a fair bit of skim and download during morning Starbucks sessions but gives a broader range of viewpoints and only articles of interest. And even more selectivity with those articles recommended by a tribe of trusted Twitter posters. An excellent referral system.
Miss the twenty-four hour wifi access, but there is the compensatory better tv and radio news. And a sort of feeling that London is a hub of news, although rather cynical about how that works. May is not Thatcher and Russia is not the Falklands, but difficult for her to dismiss a gift poisoning. Continuing reminders of the book Events, Dear Boy, a compilation of British diaries of those in power or near to it throughout the twentieth century. The overwhelming, if not entirely deliberate, message was that those one would suppose had inside knowledge, if not wisdom, frequently had highly limited understanding of events and their context and looked at the world through a flawed prism of ideological bias and - worse - ego. Well, nobody thought Blair's invasion of Iraq was unique. But interestingly the lessons of the Iraq war have not only failed to chasten Theresa May, they haven't done much to persuade the general public to half the degree of cynicism I was born with.
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