My love of magazines was fostered and encouraged by my mum who was an avid reader. She wanted to instill the same love of reading in her daughter and figured that comics may be a good place to start honing my skills. It certainly worked, so much so that I can pretty much define my life by the comics and magazines I have loved.
I started with the Twinkle (pre-school), Bunty (infant school), Mandy (junior school), Jackie (early teenage years), Just Seventeen (mid - late teenage years), Cosmopolitan (early twenties), Marie Claire (late twenties/early thirties) and currently Red.
As well as the quality monthly mags I am also a sucker for the more low-brow gossip mags; Heat, OK, Hello, Now, Closer..... bring 'em on. There is no better way to numb and becalm my frantic head than to spend a lunch hour flicking through the ridiculous lives of z-list c'lebs.
As addictions go this is a pretty tame one but it does have a sinister downside. As a result of this constant ingestion of magazine frippery my brain is full to brimming with useless, random information but very little of anything which is, well, intelligent. Once you get to my advanced years when at best I'm pretty much half-way through my likely allotted span (ill health and catastrophe permitting) I think its fair to say that the brain is pretty much at capacity. For every piece of information that now goes in, another piece has to make room by simply fading away to leave the merest shadow of itself, occasionally grasped for but never to be recaptured.
How I wish that rather than following the antics of Katie Weissel and Cher in the X factor house, I instead understood why accelerating tiny particles into each other somewhere deep under Switzerland is actually important. Instead of marvelling at Courtney Cox's poise and dignity in the light of David Arquette's craziness, I understood how quantum physics meant that Schrodinger's Cat could be both theoretically alive and dead at the same time. Hell, to be honest I would settle for knowing how the television works.
However I think inner peace comes from accepting our limitations, so for now I will continue to while away the few minutes of spare time I have by catching up on the latest celebrity Botox overdose and the progress of Anne Widdecombe's Strictly Come Dancing training.
