An Epidemic of Free Newspapers

Now, I have a bit of an ambivalent relationship to free stuff. On the one hand, I love a free drink. At work occasions, where the wine or the beer (or both) are free, I will stay to the bitter end. Even when I lose the power of speech, even when I lose the ability to stand upright, I will stay. In fact, the only thing that will get me to leave the work party is when the free alcohol runs out.

So, on some levels, I love free stuff. But generally speaking anything given away free is crap, and I don’t want it.

The other day I was in a shop, buying a newspaper, and the shop assistant – who seemed to be a smiley, if over-earnest, fella – offered me a free poster. I asked him what the poster was of. He told me Battlestar Galactica. I grimaced slightly, and said no. He looked at me incredulously, and asked me whether I was sure. I said I was, and he spluttered “but it is free!”

Yes. Very true. But the fact it is free does not make it any good. In fact, if someone is giving something away free, generally speaking it is utter crap and they can’t get rid of it any other way.

There is a plague in London at the moment. A plague of free stuff; an epidemic of free newspapers.

The Metro is bad enough, but at least it attempts, on some level, to be a newspaper. The pretenders to the crown, thelondonpaper and The London Lite, are so reprehensibly bad that they make The Sunday Sport look like the work of Woodward and Bernstein.

Plus The Metro at least has the common decency to restrict itself to being handed out at stations, and being found dumped in buses and tubes. Not so the new London rags. They are literally everywhere. Like bubonic sores on the already pock marked face of London.

Seriously, I will walk out of the office onto the street and someone – a person paid to hand out a free newspaper – will thrust a newspaper that you wouldn’t use to wipe a dog’s arse (if, indeed, wiping canine anuses is your thing) at me. Even though I am wearing my “whatever you do, don’t get in my way” scowl, even though I am listening to music on my headphones and have my hands thrust in my pockets and therefore I am unable to hear them offer me the newspaper and unable to take the newspaper even if I could hear them, they still feel the need to thrust this worthless waste of a tree at me.

Which is bad enough, but part and parcel of living in London. What really pisses me off is the fact that there is someone, 100 metres down the street, to thrust another free piece of crap at me. They are everywhere, literally everywhere, I go - always looking to palm their terrible, rancid, gossip rag on me. And the worst thing is they never, ever notice the fact that I have refused a free newspaper 100 metres – and a few seconds – ago. They see me ignore the newspaper, but still think that, less than a minute later, I will be looking to take the same free piece of shite away with me. I mean, what do they think? That I regret turning down the free newspaper? That I have spent the past few seconds beating myself up about the fact that I have down the rag? That I am waiting for some, brave, heroic newspaper distributor to give my life meaning again and give me the chance to take the retard version of The Metro? Or perhaps they just don’t think, which may explain why they are doing a job that makes toilet cleaning look glamorous.

The other day I saw a free newspaper distributor pack a bin bag full of his free crap and dump it into a public bin. And that made me smile, in spite of myself. I sense he wasn’t making a comment about the content of the newspaper, but rather his inability to get rid of his copies, even though the cost to the punter was nil. And I think that distributor deserves a big hand. If all of his peers followed his example, and dumped their wares in the nearest bin before pissing off the pub, London would be a much better place.