There is only thing to regret about the passage: The Spectator was fetched to the Billabong from the newsagent only today, whereas it was formerly available of a Friday morning. It seems the distributor now delivers on Mondays, meaning less good reading to enhance the weekend pleasure of a comfy chair.I did not know whether to laugh or cry last week when I read two pronouncements from the Fairfax stable. The first was a headline in the Age: ‘Royal Mail appoints new chef’. It illustrates that the Age is no longer a newspaper but a lifestyle magazine that is besotted with the incestuous food culture and the celebrity gods who rule it. There is no law against headlines like this, but it highlights the absurdity of a commercial organisation chasing a narrow section of the community to the prejudice of the majority, its real potential market. Even stranger is that it continues this suicide march despite collapsing circulation and share price. The Age forgets that the readers it needs to survive are not the minority who pay $100 for a meal prepared by a celebrity chef at some over-priced clip joint, but the majority, the normal average citizens who simply cannot afford such luxury or self-indulgence. But the Age has, sadly, long lost any sense of representing normal, average citizens.
Tom Switzer, who edits The Spectator, should do his utmost to see Friday distribution restored. It would be in his readers' interests, hence his own. It is just wrong to be kept waiting for Rod Liddle's thoughts on the Affair of the Racist Handbag, quite possibly the funniest thing any of us will read this year.
