Wednesday 22 August 2012

Presumptuous Journalists.

I saw a leader on the front of one of those silly lifestyle magazines today. It was presumably from the publication’s agony aunt.

(Why do they have agony aunts? I assume I’m right in thinking that the people who ‘write’ to agony aunts aren’t real. Surely no real person would write ‘My boyfriend has left me for a woman with bigger breasts. Should I have mine surgically enlarged in order to get him back?’ Would they?)

So anyway, the agony aunt pronounces:

Why Clive James’s wife should take him back in spite of his eight year affair with another woman.

I think it would have been entirely proper to stick a piece of paper on the cover, on which was writ in big letters:

Why silly journalists should mind their own business and stop passing judgement on a matter of personal relationship about which they have no intimate knowledge.

I do.

(Thank you again, Zoe Mintz. I do so love this habit I’ve developed of echoing the affirmative, and it was all your doing.)

4 comments:

andrea kiss said...

I've always wanted to be an 'agony aunt' (i've never heard that term before... here we just call them advice columnists or Dear Abbies after Dear Abby)

I'd be a good one ;)

JJ said...

No you wouldn't. You're too intelligent and intuitive. You'd soon realise that the process is unavoidably superficial and effectively worthless.

andrea kiss said...

Oh, but i'd be so honest! Too honest. Then they'd take my column away...

JJ said...

Is that the one with the double strength elastic?