Things I Have Learned Today

Today I was given a selection of articles from newspapers and magazines which I do not usually read.

Here are some of the things I have learned.

1. That it's the end of the world that there are baguette dispensers in Paris;
2. That e-books may be the future but they are the future for a world of uncultivated utilitarians;
3. That smartphones make us rude, boorish and of limited attention span - and that they're affecting adults as well as teenagers;
4. That it can take an actor an entire hour to recover when a phone interrupts his performance;
5. That there are no longer so many leafy avenues and the National Trust are doing a count to prove this;
6. That teaching can be almost movingly satisfying when pupils briefly 'get it', but that the teacher who wrote this is taking a term off to explore opportunities for different kinds of work, such as pursuing her writing;
7. That whatever the government says, kids should be taught proper manners at home, and that 'immigrant families' (sic) often get this more right than the lazy families of Broken Britain;
8. That schools should be judged by their Oxbridge-destined pupils and that if the expense is putting pupils off, then tough - the school should still be judged, oh and by the way, modular GCSEs aren't worth the paper they're written on;
9. That GCSEs should award a significant number of marks for 'proper grammar' and that, by the way, modular GCSEs aren't worth the paper on which they are written;
10. That only pedants like the Oxford comma, and some of those pedants are showing their extreme worthlessness by giving vent to that pedantry on Twitter;
11. That it will soon be winter because the song of robins is discernible again;
12. That 'Jane Eyre' is more moral than 'Wuthering Heights' and that there will be new film versions of both in the next few months, and we will have almost orgasmic opportunities to tut tut about the film being just so shallow in comparison to the book;
13. That 'One Day' the film is shallow and brief - nasty, brutish and short, indeed - and that the book is either the best of the 2000s so far or a load of cliched nonsense depending on your point of view;
14. That maybe chicklit has its place because Louise Mensch (Bagshawe) writes it and is the blue-eyed, blonde-haired, dark-rooted darling of the Daily Torygraph and has sent in her practice essay for her Oxford Entrance Exam, all those years ago, defending light-hearted romantic fiction to the Torygraph to fill up a few column inches;
15. That VW are bringing out two new cars - a city car with a silly name (the Up) which is as nothing compared to the original 'people's car' or everyman's car, the Beetle, and an R--type Golf, which carries connotations of sport in its badging but has nothing on the traditional Type R sporty models of the past - though it is quite economical in terms of fuel consumption;
16. That BBC Talent Search winner Connie Fisher is giving up singing after damage to her vocal chords and that this proves, your honour, that Talent Shows Or Casting Shows Are A Very Very Very Bad Thing;
17. That when the Camerons were in Deepest Chiantishire, a waitress did not recognise them and asked Mr Cameron to carry his own coffee order outside to the terrace - insert joke about Big Society and Doing It For Oneself here;
18. That now that Belfast's shopping district has been so successfully regenerated, people are enjoying it so much that it has become apparent that the city has no 'heart', and two artists have opened an Art Cafe on a barge - celebrating the sort of art which happens over the table where eating and drinking go on (I suppose it gives them something to do in a recession, when art isn't selling...);
19. That there's going to be a prequel to 'Inspector Morse', called 'Endeavour', but that of course it won't be as good as 'Lewis' and 'Lewis' wasn't as good as 'Morse' and ITV should give the old geezer his privacy and not go poking around in his back story, especially as he failed his Oxford degree and that's just a bloody disgrace and shouldn't be glorified on TV to give those useless reprobates of students of today a bad example;
20. That a clever mandrill somewhere has invented body language meaning 'go away', which she subsequently modelled for other mandrills to the extent that they're all using it now (at least, all the mandrills in some zoo or other) - and that this is quite possibly more than most modern teenagers or technology-bound adults could do, because they're all too busy watching TV talent shows, tweeting on their smartphones and skimming through morally bankrupt e-books as they munch on baguettes from a vending machine.

If anybody is looking for me in the next few hours, I shall be either hiding in the cupboard under the stairs, or watching 'The X Factor' with my BlackBerry to hand, ready to live-tweet my reactions. I have already finished reading the iPad edition of today's Times and read a chapter of a novel on my Kindle.

I am now placing my hands over my eyes to say that I would like to be left alone...