Is the Guardian worse than it used to be?

I have an actual paper copy of a Guardian in my hands for the first time in years.

(delivered by a friend of a friend in the NHS who's been sneaking me in coffee and breakfast rolls. She got me a Herald yesterday.)

Now... is it worse than it used to be?

honestly the paper version is not as bad as www.theguardian.com

I agree! It works better on paper.

Is Onimo in a hospital?

I miss breakfast rolls.

I am in the hospital. I have the Guardian and you lot to help me pull through.

gulp

Yikes, Onimo!

I like the Tree of the Week feature:

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/series/tree-of-the-week

“These places began to fall to the Tories in 2017 before leaving Labour en masse in 2019"

Really?

Must have imagined Labour losing Shipley, Manchester Withington, Rochdale and Scarborough in 2005
And Dewsbury, Redditch, Redcar and Bradford East in 2010https://t.co/4Yo536XzHV

— Andrew Fisher (@FisherAndrew79) December 9, 2020

the Graun's northern correspondent mindlessly parroting Kieth's nakedly factional slant on the decline of Labour in the north shocker.

fictional/factional

I used to like those scouse bastards for their stubborn anti-Tory hatred (even though they used to historically vote for them along sectarian lines and were still voting for the fucking Liberal party up to the late 80's!) But I want them to abstain on Starmer Labour and help bring about the demise of this fuckers' political career.

Corbyn became Labour leader because the party had a series of massive problems that were causing terminal decline. It is a ruinous fantasy to pretend that Corbyn himself sparked a decline in a previously healthy party. Wild nonsense.

— Simon Vessey (@Simon_Vessey) December 9, 2020

If Kieth isn't interested in the big picture of the decline of the labour party beyond what use it is for the current McCarthyite purging of all the left, then he will need a lot of dumb luck to ever get into power and nobody will be popping the champers apart from landlords, cops, and his right-wing banker pals from the Trilateral Commission if he does. Yes i know this isn't the Keith thread and I'm a monomaniacal ranter etc.. but lol whatever, it keeps me off the streets!

xxxp TIL Redditch is in the north

pvmic ;p

I've got a good friend from Northumberland and don't get him started on places in the Midlands being called 'the North'.

I don't even consider Chesterfield the North tbh so some serious liberties taken with Redditch there!

real London heads know anywhere north of the Watford gap = The North

My friend will not have Derbyshire under any circumstances.

I defer to It's Grim up North, where Nantwich is the most southerly place mentioned.

Redditch is level with the Watford Gap! I guess the northern suburbs of Redditch may be north of it

if extremely orthodox and conservative looking het-men call similar others duck or love without any homoerotic subtext or irony, then you might have left the north a bit!

My North marker is Sheffield. Anything below that is not the North. (Though one of my besties is from Stoke and it feels more "Northy" than here, even though it's almost the same latitude.)

oops, the gap is a bit further north than i thought and Redditch probably a bit further south

Stoke feels more North because weird accent and permanent glacial temperatures caused by locals clinging to the last Ice Age

tbf have heard Londoners confuse Watford Gap with Watford and think St Albans is in the north

I saw this bungalow getting done up recently, it's in the middle of nowhere next to a farm and I've never seen such a long and expensive refurb done on one little small modest bungalow as this - it took almost a year and no expense was spared including an antique royal mail postbox mounted into the drystone wall and a lovely big wooden gate, the sandstone roofing tiles were removed cleaned of moss and a whole new roofing timber was fitted before they were put back. I bumped into an old work colleague doing the alarm system, door entry systems and sec cameras etc and said it was like fort knox. Anyway it turns out it is the new Savile Estate Office and this current Lord Savile lives in Cornwall but his family have owned most of where I live since late medieval times. Real Yorkshire!

🐦[“These places began to fall to the Tories in 2017 before leaving Labour en masse in 2019"

Really?

Must have imagined Labour losing Shipley, Manchester Withington, Rochdale and Scarborough in 2005
And Dewsbury, Redditch, Redcar and Bradford East in 2010https://t.co/4Yo536XzHV🕸
— Andrew Fisher (@FisherAndrew79) December 9, 2020🕸]🐦

the Graun's northern correspondent mindlessly parroting Kieth's nakedly factional slant on the decline of Labour in the north shocker.

Is there a *paper* Guardian today?

hopefully not

last week's guide had 2 weeks of tv in it so i'm assuming not.

There is one (with magazine and Feast).

it's feast or famine time

Oh lol Jesus Christ I thought that was in ukpol

John Harris notes that Orwell is pertinent to Britain today.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/dec/27/history-britain-ruling-class-created-crisis-boris-johnson-brexit-covid

Surprised no one remarked on this.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/dec/26/hancocks-half-hour-britain-laughing-1950-radio-comedy

Hancock's Half Hour reminds us what once united Britain: laughing at each other
Zoe Williams

Before Tony Hancock and Sid James even touch on what they hate about cappuccino and kebabs, they take a detour via cleanliness – “All this hygiene stuff may be very nice but it takes all the charm out of things”. This is actually the core case of the anti-mask brigade: the ones who say it’s an infringement of their civil liberties are pilfering the line from their US counterparts. Most of them just find it charmless: life is when you can see one another’s faces. Anything else is less like life.

Hancock hates young people, whose crime is their youth plus intellectualism (“Sitting there with their green fingernails and their omnibus edition of Ibsen”). I mean, hear the timeless gentleman out: he could be talking about snowflakes. He could be Nigel Farage.

jesus fucking wept

"This is actually the core case of the anti-mask brigade: the ones who say it’s an infringement of their civil liberties are pilfering the line from their US counterparts. Most of them just find it charmless: life is when you can see one another’s faces. Anything else is less like life."

No evidence for this statement, and it doesn't even feel intuitively true. Unfortunately it's a defence of people who are consciously posing a danger to public health.

i've been following Peter Hitchens on Twitter and altho he tries to use the language of science for a lot of his anti-covid rhetoric you get these occasional Freudian insights - he thinks masks make us look "foolish" or "weak"

"They fuck you up, your mum and dad.."

I mean the Hitchens bros were posh military brats in the last days of Empire.

Zoe Williams, please stop posting.

Lol correct, didn’t she have that stupid take about two weeks before the start of second wave about how gr8 it is to work in an office

Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist.

you missed out "Tragically," at the beginning there

"Novels are terrible and you'll never convince me otherwise." We don’t need fiction – the real world is strange enough. Plus, fancy writing is incomprehensible, argues Ben Butler. Lucy Clark tries to prove him wrong.

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2020/dec/28/novels-are-terrible-and-youll-never-convince-me-otherwise

ok

i promise never to try to convince this man otherwise or to even think about him ever again

The plodding mundanity of Ben’s mind shows me exactly why people read novels.

Seriously, never trust people who go off about how intrinsically lesser fiction is and how they’d rather be reading a hagiography of some cunt. Basically take the John Waters view on non-fiction braggers.

it's all fiction really