My reading habits are changing or perhaps more accurately my newspaper reading habits are changing (my book reading habits remain largely unchanged). We still buy both The Guardian and Observer at the weekend and subscribe to the first on line for the rest of the week. The latter was more of a charity gesture to keep it going through difficult times. We think it is worth supporting as a vaguely leftish and truthful paper and one not owned by a large right-wing organisation. I have to confess however that we rarely read this version of a newspaper somehow it doesn’t seem right reading a newspaper on line but that’s probably just me.
At this point I would normally say I digress but since I don’t have the faintest idea what this retirement blog is about it’s hard to know whether I’m digressing or not. But I think it may be about my changing reading habits. In which case let me say that how I read the two newspapers above has changed as my retirement ‘progresses’.
The first way it has changed is that I read less and less. In fact weirdly I find I am pleased when moving through the pages I realise I do not have to read / am not interested in a particular article. I’m actually pleased to not read this paper that I have paid a fair amount of money to have in front of me.
One explanation and quite a logical one is that the papers are full of unpleasantness. Unsurprisingly they reflect a world that I increasingly regard as full of unpleasantness and I am happy to bury my head in the sand and pretend it (the unpleasantness) isn’t really happening.
And it fits with my view that my retirement world is shrinking – travel, visiting the pub / restaurants / friends, cultural experiences etc, even walking the dogs and much else is getting less frequent and generally less desirable. I have to force myself to get off my arse and do things or I will atrophise (is that a word? My spellcheck doesn’t think so, should be atrophy apparently). You see even my brain is growing smaller.
At times like this, the idea that this world is a particularly nasty place, I have to revisit my history books and confirm that there was nothing ideal about any past era, all had their short-comings / nastinesses. In this sense today is no better or worse than past times. Is it? I used to laugh at my mother when she said, in her old age, that she had stopped watching the news because she found it depressing. Except now I am doing the same thing and / or in the context of this blog, turning the page on the nastiness.
Alongside the simple notion of reading less in order to avoid the bad bits of life is the perhaps more interesting question of why do I read what I do choose to read? Obviously you will assume as I did that I read only happy things. Whilst there is some truth in this it’s not quite the whole truth. One small example from The Observer this weekend and a review of a book of poetry by Tom Paulin who I used to enjoy many years ago when he appeared as a critic on TV in the 1970s. I haven’t heard from / about him for a very long time and reading this review it became clear why. But the point is, having skipped much of the paper until this point I read this review (a long one) all the way through. But why, why choose this one?
Unusually, I paused and asked myself that very question and annoyingly although I did come up with some possible explanations and although I felt that those explanations told me quite a bit about the kind of person I am today, I’m not going to tell you. I’ll leave that for another blog. Sorry if you wanted to know.