YOU’VE ARRIVED BACK at university; you’re sauntering down Gower Street when you’re accosted by oddly clad street merchants wearing ridiculous logo-covered baseball caps who are giving you a newspaper for free. Yes that’s right, for free.
Have the days when one had to pay to consume news, politics and sport disappeared? The Free World marches on; financial and cultural bonds are disappearing. The old barriers that once separated us, granting opportunity to some and shackles to others are visibly evaporating. Sod barricades and Bolsheviks; pick up your free newspaper (you have the CHOICE of two), swipe your Oyster card and shove an espresso up your arse. Look, even the people who give us the “freesheets” are all ethnic minorities. This is working multiculturalism and you know it you fascist bastards.
If only. The sad truth, metrosexuals, is that you are not experiencing cultural harmony in one of the world’s Most Cosmopolitan and Global Cities™, but mere exploitation of cheap immigrant labour.
This “Freesheet War” is hardly new and you are a fool for thinking so. Remember the by the same press merchants as London Lite: who additionally own the Daily Mail and the Evening Standard. Phew, that’s a lot of newspapers. But there’s more! Standard Lite? Replace the former with the word ‘London’ and you have the rebranded version of a paper you read with fashionista elegance today yet scoffed at last year. Apart from a bit of superficial tweaking not much has changed there. So what has?
This is it; it’s the one you want. It positively ignores the rules of conservative grammar laws; it’s thelondonpaper. You like the purple look and those adverts on the sides of buses that shout out slogans such as “You Live London”. You don’t know what the fuck all of this means but boy; doesn’t it look good in the back pocket of your skinny jeans?
Journalism has reached its lowest ebb. Before you had to pay to read shite; now you can do it for free. Dear Reader, next time you are offered a “freesheet”, hold your head high and walk on, making sure that copy of G2 is poking out the top of your bag.