h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

The bloke sitting next to me on the bus home yesterday was reading a newspaper, and I suddenly got a huge pang of sadness that I haven't done that for so long, and really, really miss it. But they really ain't what they used to be.

When I was a kid we got the Daily Mirror delivered every day, and I always read it, especially The Perishers The Mirror Online is still running classic Perishers strips http://www.mirror.co.uk/lifestyle/cartoons/perishers/ The Mirror was still a halfway decent paper then, for a tabloid. Tabloids as we know them now hadn't really emerged, and even after The Sun came along The Mirror kept its standards, for a time.

Then, when I was at my first job, I started buying The Times every morning, after becoming familiar with it at a friend's house where his parents took it. Back then you didn't read The Times, you took it. Difficult to describe properly, apart from a slogan - 'Top people take The Times'.

I had a job where there were periods of inactivity throughout the day while I was waiting for a process to complete, so I'd read it on and off, and even by the time I got home I still hadn't read the whole paper. This was in the mid 70s when William Rees-Mogg was editor, and the paper wasn't nearly as right wing as a lot of people thought, although it was very, very establishment.

Then Murdoch bought it and I didn't any more

I might have turned to the Guardian for a while, I don't remember for certain, but I missed The Times. It wasn't the same.

Then along came The Independent. I used to own a copy of its first edition. I wish I knew what happened to it. Any road up. It was my newspaper right up until the day I left for Texas. My morning routine was to read it while eating breakfast, and then later in the evening, and it had a cryptic crossword that I could do pretty well. I even finished it once or twice. After I'd been here for a few years and Mrs Gosho and I were earning pretty good money, I got an overseas subscription (it arrived sporadically and several days late, sometimes three or four day's-worth in one hit) and repeated that routine.

And that's what I really miss. Holding a broadsheet (I know The Independent isn't one any more) in my hands, getting newsprint on my fingers and reading that Times New Roman font. Reading news on a screen (or anything, really) just isn't the same, and trying to find quality news coverage now is getting harder and harder. I tried a few US newspapers but there are just too many ads, and there's little world news coverage.

I still go to the Independent website every day. It's more sensationalist and lowbrow than I remember the paper being when I had it delivered.

Oh, I made myself sad again.