What happened to books on the tube?

Have been catching the tube this week for work – for one reason or another it’s been about eight months since I did a regular tube commute and in that time it seems like the free papers have well and truly colonised the commuter brain. It used to be the Metro in the mornings. Now it’s the London Lite in the evening, plus the London Paper, and even the Evening Standard is shoving them down people’s throats now (seriously, some of those vendors are aggressive). 

This is the mental equivalent of eating pizza twice a day. You end up with dough for brains. Now I love pizza, and there’s nothing, nothing wrong with the odd free paper and a quick update on the likes of Peaches Geldof and Brangelina. But seriously, twice a day, every working day. It’s not healthy. It makes me sad to see it when there are so many brilliant books in the world. 

In fact, I would actually go so far as to blame the free papers and other mental pollution for the MP expenses scandal and the global  financial crisis. If we weren’t so busy trying to either process or tune out all the mindless garbage that gets flung at us day and night we might have noticed sooner that the coked-up bankers were going to town on our savings and the MPs had their snouts so deeply in the their troughs (and moats) that they’d clean forgotten that spreadsheets can be copied and sold.

Anyway, there’s no point complaining if you aren’t prepared to do something about it, right? Which is where my friend & I have been all night, dreaming up a reclaim your brain campaign.

Stay tuned.

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1 Comment

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One response to “What happened to books on the tube?

  1. Zoe

    Doubly sad when an innovative poetry publisher like Salt is about to go under….

    http://www.saltpublishing.com/blogs/confidential.php?itemid=622

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