Liverpool airport is a curiously unreal place in the half-light before dawn on a cold November morning. Out across the Mersey at high tide, raindrops turn the silver to lead, and at the easyJet departures gate people in tracksuit bottoms brush against the occasional tweed and Remembrance Day poppy. Intending stag-weekenders, and the set who have a little place in the Pyrenees, coincide but do not mingle. A young woman is trying to buy rosé wine, and an elderly gent is trying to find a copy of that morning’s Times.
The elderly gent is me, flying to Barcelona for the day for my sister’s 60th birthday lunch, to return that night to Manchester.
And yes, all the morning papers are available and I buy the one I write for; but it would make no difference if the paper had been the Telegraph or any other quality newspaper: my experience would have been the same. That experience is one I must have had thousands of times when younger: no more an ‘experience’ then than cleaning my teeth. This time, however, it felt strange and almost new.
I read a newspaper.
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Of course I read newspapers all the time. I read them mostly online these days — it’s more convenient when you’re busy. And I’m always busy; always trying to do two things at once; always hurrying from one to another. For this kind of newspaper reading, online is brilliant. You can dive in, dive out. If you know what you’re looking for (and I usually do) you move with one click straight from a contents list to your desired report or column. There are news and politics summaries too; and you can flick between papers, and Google, and check a video link, and consult Wikipedia.
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