Newspaper Nostalgia 🗞️📰😊

Newspaper Nostalgia 🗞️😊

I start reading the newspaper from the back.

The sports section will not be the bearer of the worst news unless it concerns my favourite Roger Federer being defeated in some match against the equally beautiful and talented Djoker…I can live with that 😊

As I make my way towards the midsection, I know more or less what to expect because quite a few columns are ‘…continued from page 1’.

I also read with a pair of scissors handy, a sight that worries my husband no end. In my defense, I don’t know when I might need to cut up a picture and stick it in my art scrapbook, for future reference. That the ‘future’ has not arrived for hundreds of them, is a completely different matter. Maybe, I just have scissor-happy hands.😂

I also cut recipes and stick them in a separate recipe note-book I started rather ambitiously. I have recipes from the 1970’s, If I am to be believed. I urge you to not fall for that 😁..

I sometimes ask myself exactly what am I waiting for?…Wasn’t the lockdown enough reason to mend my old ways and hit the kitchen with new aromas and dishes? Clearly, Not.😁. Yet my recipe books keeps bloating with the inclusion of more and more delectable dishes!

There are times, mostly on Sunday afternoons, when my husband looks at me through a gaping hole in the paper and wants to know what was there. Obviously I have no idea, having cut the caption right off.🤔

I look serious and innocent as I go through the pile of cuttings that lie by my side. They are like cryptic messages left during the cold war, but I pretend to make sense of them. Joining the beginning of one to the end of another and almost having a ‘eureka’ moment, but not quite.😔🙄

The newspaper never reaches him the way it should…Or the way he presents it to me…It has been folded wrongly and the front page is always missing, having got lost somewhere in the middle. It’s one of the perils of being creative with the reading process. But serious readers don’t get that. I tell him he’ll find it, eventually…that answer doesn’t go down well either🤭

I promise to make amends. ☺️

And what’s with the size of the newspaper? One would need a giraffe neck to be able to scan left to right effortlessly. I struggle with that too, my arms ache and my neck feels frozen from all the unwarranted exercise… it seems like one should ‘warm up’ before undertaking the newspaper reading marathon. 🗞️📰

Trying to hit the center spine so that it would buckle and fold like the legs of a boxer after receiving a knockout punch, is a precisely learnt habit too… one that I haven’t mastered. The hollow thwacks my hand generates against the paper is reminiscent of growing up with two older brothers … such a violent start to the morning.😅

The paper is certainly designed to be upright under the weight of the truth it carries and never baulk under pressure, it seems.📄😁