FRIDAY STAIRS

Every Friday, just in time for elevenses, my day brightens when I hear the Spectator magazine plopping through my letterbox to land on my doormat with a rustling thud. Quickly, I rush downstairs to meet it.

Like most periodicals these days the Spectator comes with a full compliment of high-end advertising material wrapped up in an irritating plastic bag. Having no money for cars or jewellery, no figure for the couture and frankly no inclination to travel to exotic destinations, the glossy leaflets make a swift exit towards the recycling bin. I try to lead a sustainable life.

The magazine itself is a different matter. I embrace it eagerly and creep up the stairs to my office with a newly-made mug of Yorkshire tea, hoping to be spared the plangent jangle of the telephone for the next quarter of an hour.

If this sounds as though I am enjoying something illicit, well that is correct. The Spectator, friends tell me warningly, lurks deep on the right of the political spectrum. It is true that some of its readers probably wish for a return to some Hercule Poirot world of the 1930s when anyone not born in Britain was classed as alien. But that’s the readers, not the writers.

It is also true that some of the magazine’s opinions irk. I come from a respectable Liberal background. My mother used to tell anyone who cared to listen that she was a teller for the Liberals in General Elections, with an authority that made this lowly office seem as elevated as cabinet rank. My sister became a local Liberal councillor. I still pay my subscription and receive regular, if these days unheeded, summons to by-elections.

I wonder though if I am not drifting rightwards with age. Is this why I read the Spectator? I now get impatient with bureaucracy and am annoyed at the fecklessness of so many who should know better. I am Irritated by our present day ‘blame culture’ in which no one seems to want to show any personal initiative or shoulder any responsibility.

I am driven mad by the Kafka-esque excesses of Health and Safety which make teachers (apparently) wear goggles if they need to affix a notice using drawing pins. And when the little wooden cylinders that we blood donors used to twiddle when donating are taken away on the grounds that they might harbour germs.

Being a simple and independent soul running the smallest of small businesses, I view the burgeoning myriad of quangos and regulatory bodies and the committee management needed to co-ordinate and sustain their work, with the greatest suspicion. I ask how can we possibly afford for every decision to be made and documented in accordance with rules devised by someone else? Best practice has not only become unaffordable, it has stifled good practice. We are actually going backwards and as taxpayers we are paying through the nose for it. So anyway it seems.

But back to my office at the head of the stairs and the tea and the magazine, which I am already leafing through for the cartoons. For I haven’t come to love the Spectator for its politics but for its cartoons, its quirky blogs on life (Low Life, Real Life, High Life, Slow Life) its book reviews and its jarring articles by Rod Liddle who has a unique way of arguing a case which leaves me scratching my head and wondering seriously about my own opinions. And that’s good.

Mind you, I haven’t always loved the paper in this way. My present desire is only the culmination of a three year courtship. When it first arrived - I am not sure that I didn’t gullibly sign up to the flattering blandishment of a free subscription one sunny and carefree day and then couldn’t summon up the effort to cancel the direct debits - the paper would sometimes lie unopened and unread on top of the filing cabinets until thrown away in a clear out weeks later. It was only gradually, almost with reluctance, that I started to read bits here and there.

I suspect Matthew Parris may have been responsible, a writer whom I always read faithfully in the more mainstream ‘Times’ and whose style I admire. He writes fortnightly in the Spectator and is always thought provoking, interesting, humane.

Bit by bit I have come to love these quirky challenges to my intellectual and political perspective. Today I can’t say I read it all for some of the heavier political articles seem to me just ill thought out, even silly. There is so much grinding of political axes that you cannot see the ironwork for the sparks. But that doesn’t matter if you are prepared to take the rough with the smooth and to look forward to an interesting thud on your door mat each Friday, secreting yourself away for a moment at the top of the stairs.