Enemies of Reason Poundshop potshots at the media moral maze.

Here goes

Before I head down the paper shop (see previous posts for the backstory), I have prepared a 'safe area' at home for the reading of the Daily Mail. This is a sterile environment in which I have removed all sharp objects. It also contains:

A NICE CUP OF TEA.

A LITTLE TOWEL FOR THE TEARS.

A PHONE SO I CAN CALL FOR HELP.

AND IF ALL ELSE FAILS, A SHITLOAD OF WHISKY TO TAKE THE PAIN AWAY.

I'd better be careful though. That monkey loves whisky. He'll probably drain the lot while I'm down the shop.

Day 15: Ready to go over the top

Right. You'll remember that yesterday I was a bit gung-ho about bringing my D**ly M**l exile to a swift and dramatic conclusion, by promising that I would go out and actually buy a copy. A real freshly-printed copy of the M**l. The real dead-tree inky thing that is enjoyed throughout the land. The real thing.

I feel a bit queasy now. Of course it seemed like a good idea at the time - it's always easy to promise these things when they're in the distance. Now it's less than 24 hours before I buy the bastard thing. Actually buy it. With real money. Money that I've earned, working, doing a job. All that, to spend 50p,or however much it is nowadays, for the literary equivalent of being violated with a ruddy great cactus.

I think it's time, though. Time to end the exile. I've done my bit of wandering around a Mail-free land and I've found it difficult to try and escape it. Everywhere you go, you can feel its laser eyes burning into you as it peers at you from around the corner. There's no way of escaping it, not really - oh, you can try, but you inevitably end up stumbling across it sooner or later. Better, then, to know your enemy, and to try and tackle it head-on. Yes.

It won't be the first time I've read the Mail of course. But I imagine it'll be a very different animal from when I last saw it all those years ago - then it was a faintly ranting middle-class slush of spitting hatred and awful photo bylines of crap writers like Lynda Lee Potter and Nigel Dempster - sadly no longer with us, though they've gone to a better place, I'm sure, even if I don't believe in Hell - with tedious vaguely masturbatory fashion items and truly pointless guff. Oh Jesus, and those fucking cartoons by "Gary" as well. Even the TV reviews, as I recall them now, had the whiff of a squawking Tory wife in Surrey about them. It's that cloying chintziness that I recall so well, above and beyond the content; I think it's something that doesn't come across too well in the online version, so I'm hoping the paper one will be just as I remember it.

So, here's the plan. Tomorrow morning, I'm going to buy it. Go into a shop - my nearest paper shop - and get it. Just the Mail. Nothing else. Just one transaction. "Just the Mail for me please, good Mr Shopkeeper sir," I'll say breezily, as if it's a perfectly normal thing for someone to do - though in my local corner shop they'll look at me quizzically to wonder why I'm not asking for a great big 3-litre bottle of Natch* and a packet of Kingsize Rizlas along with my daily dose of misogyny and thinly veiled racial prejudice. No matter. Just the Mail.

That's all I want. I can't help it. The devil made me do it! I can't save myself from myself. I am trapped by the tentacles of my own octopus, doomed to swim this lonely brown sea from now until the day I slip on a rollerskate at the top of the stairs and go flying down, impaling myself on an umbrella at the bottom, only to be found six weeks later after neighbours complained about the smell of death, with my eyes pecked out by mice. (That's the way I want to go, anyway). I might as well face it. I need to go back. Back to the Mail. It is, like the crown of the Statue of Liberty sticking out the sand, my destiny.

Tomorrow, then. Tomorrow I'm going to buy the bloody thing. And read it like I've never, ever read it before.

* For those of you outside the Bristol area, Natch is a delightful cider-flavoured drink. Don't try it. Ever. And don't say I didn't warn you.

Day 14: My supermarket shame

I wasn't thinking, really. I just lazily ambled into the Co-op, thinking there was nothing to concern me, but then of course it happened. Before I knew what had happened, I was right there alongside the newspapers as they yelled their front-page headlines at me.

I only caught three words. "WILL YOUR CHILD". At least I think that's what I read. My mind went off spiralling in a few different directions. Will your child be murdered by someone on Facebook? Will your child be bringing home one of those ghastly immigrants? Will your child be in debt for the next billion years thanks to Gordon and Alistair? Will your child ever stop crying long enough for you to kick off your slippers and read the Daily Mail in peace? Will your child grow up in a world in which no-one has any respect for newspapers and the stuff they print? Will your child even care about that?

I thought of all these things as I skidded past the booze section - I'd hastily set off at a canter past the newspapers in case I was tempted to go back and read it all. In my mind, I emulate the giddy heights of Michael J Fox's chase scenes through buildings, particularly the overcompensation when running around corners; but in reality I'm nowhere near MJF in his Teen Wolf pomp. It was all I could do to stop myself from stacking myself pathetically into a shelf of beer - which, thankfully, I managed to do. I'm sure it would have given the otherwise bleak-faced staff something to smirk about as they watched the CCTV footage over and over again. "Is this what it's come to?" I asked myself. "My mission to avoid the Mail, just fodder for people in the Co-op to laugh at when I go tumbling over like the inept Weeble that I am?"

I have been asking myself if it's really all worth it, and I'm not so sure it is, at times. Sometimes it seems that avoiding the M**l like the plague is almost as bad as the plague; surely it would be simpler just to look at it, roll my eyes and then carry on with my day. But is that possible?

So. Here's the plan. An experiment, if you like. Tomorrow I'm going to carry on avoiding my papery nemesis, as if everything's carrying on as normal. Then, on Thursday, I'm going to buy one.

Yes. Yes, you heard that right. Not avoid it at all. But go into a fucking shop and buy one. With my own money. Using cash. Buy it and look at it and read it. From cover to cover. Oh yes. I'm going to read the whole thing. From start to finish. Every word. Every syllable. Every sentence. Every whine. Every moan. Every angrily questioning headline. Every single bloody thing. And then, when I am done, I will tell you what I have seen. I will report back. I will be Fortinbras, having to report the terrible thing I have just witnessed to the world. I will be he who has borne witness to the atrocity. I will look, with my own eyes, and not shy away from what I have seen. I will dive, headfirst, into that lake of pus, that piss-coated bouncy castle of sniping and thinly veiled prejudice, and emerge with a triumphant grin. I will survive.

That's the thing. I've skirted around the edges this past couple of years. I've flirted with the Mail and all the delights within. We've exchanged a knowing glance on the stairs a couple of times, and I've gone home and wondered what it might be like in its pants. Now it's time for that office party where we get horrifically ratarsed and copulate like a couple of mangey foxes out by the swings next to a pub car park. And then, the postmortem.

Yes. I think the time is right. I must confess to you now I have never bought a D**ly M**l, with my own money, in my life. Sure, I've seen them. I've looked at them. I've had them shown to me by people who thought I should read what was within. But now, I want one of my very own. And I'm going to have one.

And you can't stop me.

A narrow squeak

Day 13*. Two long weeks I've been free from the Daily Mail (see previous entries here, here, here, here and here) but it so nearly ended this morning.

I was wandering towards the office earlier this morning with not so much a skip in my step as a pocketful of stones and a hankering to dive into the nearest canal, but since there are no canals around here, I popped into the newsagent to try and find something approaching food.

Inside, I knew there would be newspapers - and probably a Mail peeping out to try and catch me. Sometimes I imagine there are fiendishly cunning booby traps - you reach out for a Caramac and a tripwire sends a Mail spiralling into your face; before you know where you are, you've ended up reading how immigrants are to blame for temporary classrooms whereas the reality is a little bit different.

I'm a bit wary of these situations so I try not to even glance over in the general direction of the papers - but I wasn't prepared for the sweet old lady who was stumbling out of the doorway, clutching a freshly-minted Mail under her arm. Shit! What could I do? I couldn't go barrel-rolling around the pavement as I can in work, as (a) no-one notices me doing my Lewis Collins impressions at work, and if they do, they either don't care or mark it down as "the madness" finally having claimed me; and (b) the pavements around here are liberally sprinkled with dog-turds, which would have made the remaining hours at work slightly more unpleasant than they usually are.

With that option gone, I considered pushing the old lady over, but that would have just confirmed everything she already thought. She probably took one look at a young thug like me** and imagined I was going to mug her to begin with. That's what she buys the Mail for in the first place, I assume - to paint a picture of a world in which everyone under the age of 45 is going to beat you up, drop-kick your puppy into the river and the police can't do anything to stop you, because they're too busy meeting their diversity quotas, or Brussels has said that you have so-called 'human rights' or something, and even if you did get caught, the PC Brigade would put you up in a luxury jail with a 56-inch plasma TV and free beer on tap in every room and people feeding you grapes and giving you handjobs, and you can't even set fire to Golliwogs outside a black person's house any more without someone getting somehow upset about it, not like in the Good Old Days when there was rationing and near poverty, and everyone was prejudiced and sang songs and pulled together.

Me pushing the old lady over would just make her think: Well, the Mail was right, yet again, about Broken Britain*** and how things are all going wrong. And besides, I didn't really want to push her over. No, what I really wanted to do was distract her - perhaps by pointing at a slightly darker-skinned person across the road and yelling "ASYLUM SEEKER! They're off to take your pension away!" - then elegantly swap the Mail under her arm for something a little less venomous and a little more benign; perhaps a booklet of Geert Wilders speeches or a great big photo of Nick Griffin's wobbly face with a vandalised mosque in the background.

But I haven't the skills to do that. My eyes were drawn, instead, to that copy of the Mail and what was on the front page. And yet, a stroke of luck: she had the paper folded over so all I saw of the front page was the words "Daily Mail" and some big green unreadable panel trying to advertise something inside. Phew. I'd escaped. I'd seen the Mail, but it wasn't enough of the Mail to count.

A narrow squeak, though. I fear I'm not going to be able to hold out for much longer.

* In all the excitement I lost count. I think it's 13 - and not 14, as previous entries may have suggested.

** All right, the 'young' bit is probably pushing it a bit.

*** There's a Conservative Party poster up near my house in which someone says "We need to fix our broken society". Now I'm not saying that these aren't her words, but is there anyone in the world - other than David Cameron - who would ever use that phrase, ever?

Day 11: Cabin fever sets in

I won't pretend to you it's all gravy, this business of wrenching myself away from the teet of withering hatred that is the Daily Mail. Not at all. There are times when it almost seems that my meandering mission - if you can call it that - to extricate myself from the barbed tiger-cage isn't going so well. Without my muse (you could see it as more of an anti-muse) it's become a little surreal at times.

I put that down to my imagination beginning to think about things a little more creative than millions of spongeing asylum seekers waiting at Calais to come over here and siphon off our hard-earned taxes, or hooded children looking at bad things on the internet and then bludgeoning formerly-hard-working-pensioners around the face with big sticks covered in knives and acid. Now my imagination can take flight with new ideas.

Turning into Lewis Collins in the Professionals, as I did the other day when confronted with the ominous crinkle of a Daily Mail page in the office, was only the beginning, it seems.

Now, I am beginning to develop what I can only call a form of cabin fever, and I've started to speak to my flask of weak blackcurrant squash as if it's a living thing. All of a sudden - and I don't know how to explain how this has happened, other than to say it simply has - I have taken to running ideas past it to see what it has to say. It's as if I'm telling these stories to the flask - it has become Padma to my Saleem, if you like - in the hope I can explain things better. But, worse than that, the Flask seems to have more of a grip on reality than I do.

"That's all very well," says Flask, sternly, not moving from its vantage point next to the monitor but still giving me what I can only describe as a despairing glance from its shiny surface, "but I'm beginning to get the feeling that people are tiring of your MacGuffin and your Dave Gorman-style capers. This isn't a fucking Edinburgh show, you know; you don't need a theme, or a peg upon which to hang things."

I look back coldly at Flask. What he has said has hurt me, of course, and I know that in a sense he is right. Sometimes, it takes a friend to tell you when you know things aren't going well, but it's almost as if I am not ready to face that truth on this one. "Look Flask," I growl, returning to my typing, "I am aware that you have my best interests at heart, but this is very much something that I have to do, for now. You wouldn't understand how much my life has improved since I started giving up that horrible thing."

"Oh, but look at you," he sighs, continuing to keep the blackcurrant squash cool all the while (never let it be said he is not a multi-tasker), "You're talking to a ruddy flask. Look at me! Look at you. Look at us both. Is this helping anyone? Why don't you just look at a front page or something and satisfy your curiosity?"

"Well, I suppose I..." I begin, but then I'm struck by something. "Wait a moment. Why would you want me to start looking at the Mail again? I knew that blackcurrant squash tasted a bit evil..."

We struggle on the dusty carpet, exchanging blows and vicious kicks. Bruised and grazed but still able to fight for my life, I take his plastic lid in my hands, and with a mighty effort, rip it off, unmasking him.

"So it's you," I wheeze, looking at Paul Dacre's bloodied face. An impeccable disguise, but luckily I had kept my wits about me, even during a low point.

"You may have unmasked me," cries Dacre, divesting himself of his flask costume and diving through the window, "But I live to fight again! Hahahahaha! I'll get you!"

That was a close one. You keep your friends close, but your enemies closer, they say. I just hadn't realised how close.

(Honestly, I'm all right. Don't walk away backwards smiling and nodding, reaching for your mobile phone to call the authorities. Everything is tickety-boo)