I heard the news today

“Aim to know more about the world than you did yesterday,” is the advice that adorns the cover of my current little notebook. I travel everywhere these days with my notepad and pen. It is the obvious thing to do if you have a brain like a sieve but you want to write about stuff. Not a diary but just prompts; things that I have seen, heard or read during the day that amuse me or strike me as pertinent.

Its latest incarnation and my next volume is the “Hornby Trainspotter’s Notebook with Pencil” combo [Made in China] that my daughter and her partner gave me as part of my Christmas present.

Much of what I write down comes from books and newspapers. I love newspapers, though I only buy one once a week. I made exceptions when we are away on family holidays. I remember how reassuring it was to still feel connected with home when on the beach in France by picking up a day old Independent at an exorbitant price that was probably comparable to the total value of the sac de croissants, grande bouteille d’Orangina and slab of Poulain chocolate that I had also bought. I had to go for the Independent, the Times or the Telegraph, because there was no sport to speak of in the continental edition of the Guardian, which was very remiss of them.

In this country, I find there is nothing better than taking the pristine, neatly folded copy of the Guardian down to the beach - so vulnerable to the elements and with the financial section already whisked away by a sudden gust of wind [I’m tempted to let it go, to be honest]. By the end of the day the whole thing looks like a dog has had it. It is short-term gratification - absorbed and expendable, but what a simple pleasure in the meantime.

Looking up from the paper this time last year I noticed another phenomenon – colourful bubble tents just everywhere, suddenly springing into shape and popping up across the beach, the shore looking increasingly like the pimpled surface of a table tennis bat. Between them, multi-coloured windbreaks all over the place, not just singly and one per family, but in multiple, all joined up into stockades against the wind, like Wild West settlers guarding themselves in the face of a hardly surprising attack from a group of unjustly displaced indigenous people.

The way that the media in general reports and writes about life is such an important part of our freedom in a liberal democracy. Long live discussion, debate and access to a plurality of opinions. I always make a point of looking at articles which don’t neatly coincide with my own view of the world. How else could we learn and adapt our own ideas if we close off the possibility that we might have just got it wrong sometimes?

Critical commentary, parody and mickey taking are themselves important parts of our belief systems in a healthy democracy. So, too, is the extraordinary range of hobbies and interests which appeal to the population at large. Just look in the larger town centre book stores at the extent of the magazines section. They stretch way down the aisles in the bigger supermarkets as well. Long may that range of choice continue to provide an insight into the richly varied and idiosyncratic ways that the British people choose to spend their leisure time.

The news on the telly is not immune to a bit of OTT journalism from time to time, when talking about the railways. Apparently, on the day after Boxing Day 2014 when everyone wanted to go back home, this was not going to be that easy via Paddington or King’s Cross, because of OVER-RUNNING ENGINEERING WORKS, which was kind of spat out as though it was the child of Satan. What was headline news on that day was quickly displaced the next morning, when real tragedy unfortunately struck elsewhere.

I know it is a bad thing that people are inconvenienced. I know I wouldn’t have liked it if it had happened to me, but it was not the end of the world. They would all get home. They would all get over it pretty soon. Nobody died. There would certainly be reasons for it and someone obviously messed up, even if the equipment was partly at fault. People will definitely have been blamed and they will no doubt have paid a price for their mistakes. I know that things have changed and that the public rightly won’t stand for incompetence in national bodies any more, but the shrillness of media responses should be commensurate to the scale of the problem. I think we sometimes lose a sense of proportion between hic-cups in our generally smooth and affluent existences and the genuine hardship that still blights so much of the rest of the world. Reporters gave air time to those who had noticed that, “Some people were ill…. others were upset” and even that, “Babies were crying.” And that’s news? All that stuff happens anyway, anywhere and all the time, actually.

Around the same time, one TV news channel surmised that there would be snow on Boxing Day and felt obliged to show us library pictures of a random suburban street with snow on the ground with the caption, “Last Year,” in case we could not imagine what snow might look like after a few months without it, or perhaps just to give us a clue as to what to look out for.

I know. They have to sell their papers. Now that we are to leave the EU and the numbers of immigrants are set to fall, what on earth are some of them going to find to write about? Personally, I’m bracing myself for more OVER-RUNNING ENGINEERING WORKS.

[Updated from an article which first appeared in the Railway Antiques Gazette, with thanks to the editor, Tim Petchey]