Gossip Girl
I rarely read gossip column magazines so when I do it’s usually in my Doctor’s surgery or in a Medical Centre waiting room where someone else has ingeniously pilfered the crossword page or worse filled it in with ink-pen and the word is wrong.
To someone like me, that’s extremely annoying particularly when it’s as plain as the nose on my face what the answer should be! Crossword Puzzlers are fanatical. I’d say I’m only mildly so!
They can get the same glint in their eyes that Scrabble players have when calculating the best triple word score they can get with 5 consonants and two vowels, particularly if two of those letters include a Q and a Z. In truth, puzzlers like scrabblers can seem very scary!
At some stage in the course of the day I play a game allowing myself exactly four minutes to complete the Double Crossword or Quick Crossword and double that plus two minutes for the Cryptic.
The Cryptic undoes me most days because I’m usually feeling so smug with myself for finishing the other two in four or under that I get to feeling that’s quite enough rigor for one day. I like getting out while I’m ahead, don’t you?
Cryptic puzzles are for neater minds than mine particularly during the Christmas break. Mine becomes strangely nomadic at around four minutes and one second, preferring the scenic tour elsewhere on the page and resting on my laurels from those earlier successes. I’m lightweight like that!
This time of year gives me permission to lounge as I rarely lounge in any other part of the year, like a lizard flat out drinking! I have a wish list of books to read and will probably read them all in the first week following Christmas day, five days away and counting.
I don’t find gossip column mags particularly edifying to be honest, there’s something particularly irksome to me about the intrusive nature of its style of reporting that bothers me, nevertheless, I’m as much a social voyeur (however sporadically) as any regular reader of these magazines simply because I do/have read them.
It’s a curious fact, that seeing how the other half live is an inherently individual and collective but morbid fascination we have and one that many magazine publishers understand well and bargain on moving their product. It never ceases to amaze me what gets reported about this celebrity or that celebrity, what they’re wearing or not wearing.
I often feel like I’ve landed in some alternate reality when I read those mags. The thing I’ve come to appreciate about me and my life is that I’m astoundingly ‘average’ and that ‘average’ is actually very comforting. Gossip girl? Me? Not likely, I don’t have that much time on my hands!
