MagaMania

Do you think magazines are a waste of time? I mean, when you think most of your big 'n' glossies are well over the £3 mark, and you can buy a whole novel for less than a few pennies more (if you shop in the right places i.e Amazon), and magazines are full of adverts, and have some articles that really annoy you like, for example, the story of a woman who successfully got a book published because her sister's friend's auntie once used to work in a major publishing house and knew someone who liked a bit of a book she wrote and offered her a 3 book deal on the strength of a shonky paragraph or two written on the back of a coffee-sodden napkin...

('Sssssshhhh, now, says Miggins. You're starting to sound bitter and twisted.')

...so, well, I was totting up in my head the number of magazines I have subscriptions to at the moment. I had a bit of subscription frenzy just before Christmas courtesy of my Tezz-Co Club card points, so I haven't actually had to pay for these subscriptions. I would like to point out that I DO NOT shop in the aforementioned supermarket because I do not approve of their shonky practices, but I have one of their credit cards which I use as cash and pay off in fulll every month. I earn points when I use it and therefore THEY have to give ME something for nothing. That's my theory, anyway.

And a couple of subscriptions were very special offers because I was being tempted back as a 'previous valued customer' i.e gullible mug. So currently, the magazines that land ker-plop on the doormat every month are: The Home Farmer, Zest, Woman and Home, Prima and Country Living. And every three months I get a copy of a magazine specifically for women writers, called Mslexia. Mslexia smells lovely and feels lovely; I would continue to subscribe merely for those reasons.

Andy's regular reads are The Sky at Night, Interzzone (some weirdo sci-fi thing) and Doctor Who Magazine (another weirdo sci-fi thing). So between us we accumulate 25 magazines every three months. That's 100 a year!! And that's without the occasional purchase of Men's Health, or Good Housekeeping, or arty-crafty mag that catches our eye. Oh, and the Sainsbugs effort which this month has some very good recipes in it.

But I like magazines. They appear when you need them most. Yesterday, for example, after hiking to school in the freezing cold, teaching some recalcitrant teenagers who were more interested in not being there, and coming home again, there were three magazines waiting for me! So I had a very pleasant afternoon, snuggled on the sofa, safe from the blizzard that was raging outside, with copies of Woman and Home, Zest and Mslexia, every aspect of my well-being, physical and mental, catered for.

However, no more. I need to curb my magamania for the postman's sake. He is very good, our postie, but I think sometimes, when the new issues come out within a day or so of each other, he must sigh at the extra load he has to carry to our house.