One expects newspapers to tell you how to get fit, but not actually to cause good health. However, it can happen. I get serious newspapers such as the Observer delivered to my home, but when I want to have a look at any of the other ones, I simply walk to the corner shop. I recently bought the Daily Mail and in it read that the best way in which to stay healthy involves walking for at least 15 minutes a day – and the shop where I buy the newspapers is about seven and a half minutes away from my home. The perfect solution.
And I suppose it’s not a bad idea to occasionally taste the writing that you assume you are going to disagree with. Back in the 1930s, my schoolmaster father, who taught in a school that had a vigorous Officers’ Training Corps, asked each boy whether he agreed with an Oxford Union motion that “This house would not fight for king and country.” When he heard each boy’s answer he asked him to write an essay from the opposite point of view: an excellent way in which to exercise the mind.
Maybe we should all have tried it on the vexed matter of whether Britain should stay in the European Union as it is – which we more or less understand – or take the risk of leaving it altogether and… well, and what? Prepare for the next European war? No, that can’t be what the Brexit campaign intended. Plainly I should have taken my own advice and found out what they actually did want to do; but it’s too late now.
What do you think? Have your say below
