Don't read the Daily Mail...or the Telegraph

Why no one should read the Telegraph

The Mail remains, at the moment, the absolute no-go zone, newspaper-wise. Why would anyone read such a hate-filled publication?

Anyway, the 100 books Telegraph article I looked through raised some questions:

• No Murakami? I don't get that. Where's Pynchon, where's Gravity's Rainbow? Edna O'Brien?

• Why are authors limited to one book?

• No modern sci-fi? There's (the overrated) Ballard but no William Gibson?

• Where's Lowry's Under the Volcano?

• What about the beautiful but obscure? Two authors you really should read before you die: Richard Brautigan and Russell Hoban.

• There's Amis (M) and M^cEwan, but no Iain Banks? Is it because he had that favourite FTT t-shirt?

There's two ways the Telegraph scores points:

1. Training puppies. It is now probably behind the Times (thicker paper, more supplements, more pages) but it was once top of the table in terms of absorbent newspaper per pound, ideal for owners house-training young dogs.

2. The crossword. This is just my (based on nothing concrete other than my own crossword-completing abilities) theory: Telegraph readers lag behind other broadsheet readers a bit, intellectually. So they have to simplify the cryptic crossword accordingly. Simplify it sufficiently that, despite my original intellectual shortcomings being compounded by heading footballs and opponents' heads for thirty odd seasons (I heard this on the radio recently: “I managed Manchester United for four seasons. Summer, Autumn, Winter and Spring”), I can, on rare occasions, actually finish the thing. Without making words up or inserting random gibberish.

Actually, the heading isn't fair.

Those two mad old country ladies French and Saunders do, they should read the Telegraph. It would suit those Two Fat Ladies (now One Fat Lady) too. Anyone who retires from the services but maintains the title Brigadier. Tim Nice-But-Dim. Those blokes at the rugby in highly polished brogues and Barbour jackets. You know. Those types it quite suits. The same way a folded up copy of the Sun or the Sport is compulsory on the dashboard of every old white van littered with large paper coffee cups and empty fag packets.

I've been strolling...

I've been strolling down my favourite lane

And I've been bowling my left arm occasionals again

Life gets sweeter the more that I understand

The flora and the fauna and the hedgerows that abound in this land

Half Man Half Biscuit – Tyrolean Knockabout