Enemies of Reason Poundshop potshots at the media moral maze.

Mail-free life: Day 8

Somehow. I don't know how I've done it, but I have. I have neither looked at a copy of the Mail nor gone on their website in an incredible 8 days now.

Sure, there've been moments. There was a time this morning when someone in the office had opened up a copy and was reading it with a cup of tea. I felt a bit like (the immortal) Rodney Bewes in that episode of Whatever Happened To The Likely Lads, having glimpsed "England F" on a newspaper stand; but it was an entirely different TV hero of the 1970s who came to my rescue as, just like Lewis Collins in the Professionals but without the good looks or leather jacket, I barrel-rolled under the desk as if some flakey terrorist had lobbed a grenade in my general direction and I needed to protect my bubble-permed mate from certain death.

That was a close one, I thought, dusting myself off as I emerged from the charred debris - which actually turned out to be just the dust-ridden desk and faded chocolate brown Austin Allegro-coloured carpet of my workplace. Ah, we all have dreams - dodging grenades or avoiding even a few words of a Mail headline (which was, I like to think: "SO, MR BROWN, ENDLESS HOODIES SETTING FIRE TO AN OLD LADY, YET WE CAN'T DO ANYTHING BECAUSE OF HUMAN RIGHTS OR SOMETHING - IN THIS POWERFUL ARTICLE, SOMEONE WHO HAS BEEN AND ALWAYS WILL BE A PRICK ARGUES WE SHOULD BE PRICKS ABOUT STUFF").

And, since abandoning the Mail in favour of a holiday in humanity, my daydreams appear to have become rather infused with the television of my youth. I have no idea why this might be, but there are clues everywhere. It brings to mind the old Monty Python sketch about the funniest joke in the world - "they had to translate the joke into German one word at a time. One man saw two words by mistake and had to go to hospital for six weeks" or something like that - where there's something so dangerous that it has to be handled with a terrific amount of care.

Sure, I may have mentioned the Mail earlier thanks to Upon Nothing's posts about Littlejohn's nastiness and inaccuracies written about Michael Foot*, but that's like seeing the Medusa's reflection in a mirror - I'm not directly harmed by the Mail in that instance because I've only seen it by proxy. I'm still safe and it hasn't managed to penetrate into my brain and inject the venom; I'm very much not infected with whatever mission they're on today, and I'm very much happier because of that.

And there are temptations too. I keep thinking to myself: well it can't be that bad, can it? How bad can it be? You know, like those ex-addicts who've given up some kind of horrible drug and then fancy a cheeky go back on it, forgetting the havoc it brought to their lives. Except that I can't say I was ever addicted to the Mail, more that it was a grim fascination, like seeing a car crash on the motorway and not being able to look away, even though you might want to.

True, there's a certain degree of active participation involved with looking at that dirty rag of a paper, or landing on its website; but I felt helpless to control myself. I felt incapable of escaping, until whatever it was - call it fate, call it joy - managed to steer me away into the calmer and decidedly less brown waters of a Mail-free life.

And still I've managed to escape - not just the Mail itself, waiting around the corner like a man with a custard pie filled with human shite; but from my own temptation as well.

I must be strong and keep going. I don't even know what I'm trying to achieve. But all I know is that everything seems a lot brighter. I'm not ready to come back. Yet. Don't make me go back. Just a few more hours in the happy place.

* The get-out if it were to go to the PCC, by the way, would be twofold. Firstly, it'd be the "right to offend and have robust columnists like this fuckwit" argument; secondly it'd be the idea that Littlejohn wasn't saying this was true, but merely reporting that someone else had said it was true, which he did accurately. My answer to that is that if someone accurately reports something inaccurate, and doesn't bother to check whether it is inaccurate or not, then that's just as much of a problem as if they report something inaccurately. You may find that the PCC don't see it that way.

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