Oops!

Just left a post telling everyone all about my story which should be appearing in the Observer tomorrow. Unfortunately, as my Mum pointed out about 5 minutes later on the phone, it's not a good idea to break a story your newspaper is planning to publish the next day on your own blog.

Ah, the inexperience of callow youth...

Very superstitious

Today’s G2 in the Guardian features a mind-boggling collection of traditional superstitions, but what interests me is where they find their origin.

For example, it’s lucky if a black cat crosses your path but unlucky to view it from behind.

How exact is this? I mean, what if you see the cat from a 130 degree angle? Does that mean a fortuitous morning followed by kangaroos falling onto your head from the sky in the afternoon? Or did this one just arise when someone saw a black cat from the back too late to stop it from crapping on his shoes?

Then there’s the terrible peril you’re likely to incur if you walk into the house carrying a hoe. Exactly what a hoe is or why I should want to bring one into the living room is a mystery to a city boy like me.

But I’m more interested in the cure. Apparently you must walk backwards out of the house carrying the hoe to exorcise the bad luck demons. They don’t mention the bad luck incurred by stepping backwards onto a rake and impaling your foot. Perhaps that isn’t unlucky, just painful.

But my personal favourite is ‘Never give a knife as a housewarming present or the recipient will become your enemy.’

I don’t know about anyone else, but anyone who gives a knife as a housewarming present is probably a psychopath who wants emotional counselling, or failing that, locking up. What would this hypothetical person consider as an appropriate gift for a christening, an Uzi 9mm? Very odd.

NB Anyone attempting to follow the G2's advice to cut your hair in a storm for good luck, please use plastic scissors.

Incensed!

I've just been insulted by the lift at The Observer.

As i stepped into it, not another soul in sight, it said "Lift overloaded!" in an irksomely smug tone.

I replied "You're no oil painting yourself mate," tightened my belt another notch and took the stairs.

White papers

The defining characteristic of the press in this country must be the polarised spectrum that sees most newspapers adopt either a distinctly left or right-wing stance on nearly everything.

The current debate over multiculturalism/immigration/integration in one that highlights this more than ever. The anti-immigration rhetoric coming from the Mail, the Express, the Telegraph and the Sun is predictable enough, but there is something disingenuous about the coverage by the left-wing papers.

These are the reporters who subtly but confidently paint racism and xenophobia as primarily working-class characteristics, which they, as members of a middle-class intelligentsia, are obliged to combat.

Strangely enough though, when I go to see Tottenham Hotspur, I can look around and immediately see 10 or 15 non-white faces within a few metres of me. Yet in the newsrooms of the Telegraph and Guardian, I see not a single black face and very few that are anything other than pasty, pallid or pink.

Could it be that those who are most vocal about welcoming immigration suffer themselves from an innate, even subconscious racism? Is there, perhaps, a tiny part of the brain that thinks, “We could do with some Polish plumbers, but god help us if they start coming for my job”?

You’d never get anyone to admit it of course, but the one-tone nature of the staff at national newspapers is as much an indictment of journalism industry as it is of a wider social problem. They are aware that their readership is primarily white and middle-class, but have been slow to hire representatives of other backgrounds in order to widen that readership.

Until the conveyor belt of university graduates stops rolling into Fleet Street, this will never change, and the guilty secret of those oh-so righteous but oh-so exclusive press circles will remain under wraps.