Is the Guardian worse than it used to be?

Zoe Williams, please stop posting.

Lol correct, didn’t she have that stupid take about two weeks before the start of second wave about how gr8 it is to work in an office

Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist.

you missed out "Tragically," at the beginning there

"Novels are terrible and you'll never convince me otherwise." We don’t need fiction – the real world is strange enough. Plus, fancy writing is incomprehensible, argues Ben Butler. Lucy Clark tries to prove him wrong.

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2020/dec/28/novels-are-terrible-and-youll-never-convince-me-otherwise

ok

i promise never to try to convince this man otherwise or to even think about him ever again

The plodding mundanity of Ben’s mind shows me exactly why people read novels.

Seriously, never trust people who go off about how intrinsically lesser fiction is and how they’d rather be reading a hagiography of some cunt. Basically take the John Waters view on non-fiction braggers.

it's all fiction really

I have no idea what’s happening and little interest in putting in the work of figuring it out.

i say ban non-fiction too… the thing happened! why are we just feebly repeating it print, who does that help?

Ben Butler is Guardian Australia's senior business reporter

could've just printed that, save bothering with the article

I'm possibly putting it a bit simplistic here, but even if someone spends 10 years studying the soviet archives and writes an account of life in the soviet union, it's still their story, filtered through their own biases etc

anyway Daniil Kharms was the only real non-fiction writer

Ben Butler is Guardian Australia's senior business reporter

lmao

Kingdoms may rise and kingdoms may fall, but some things never change - L@ur@ B@rt0n among them.

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2020/dec/29/i-was-bored-of-chats-about-house-prices-and-polyamory-but-i-had-a-secret-plan-for-happiness

It was January when I decided that salvation might lie in facts. I was in the Mojave desert, watching the sun rise over Seven Magic Mountains – Ugo Rondinone’s much-Instagrammed neon-rock sculpture in the Ivanpah Valley.

Lol she just can't help herself. I never see people on twitter sharing Laura Barton links with comments like "brilliant piece is this" perhaps all her readership are too busy joining creative communities and attending pop-up restaurants and festivals... eh what fucking year is this?!

Our house was still not ready when the lease on the rented flat expired and – having gambled on readiness – we had nowhere to live. Days before we had to move out, we were desperately casting around. With immense kindness, my best friend stepped in. He has a tiny, spare, one-bedroom flat opposite our house, in which family members stay when they come to London.

O the humanity!

never heard of this columnist before sounds hillaria

one of my faves of this genre of myopic priv-class blathering was when the late Deborah Orr was pondering something like: why is everyone so critical of zero-hour contracts? what about people like my friend who likes to teach Yoga part-time occasionally and not be constrained by something as vulgar as a full-time working week.

i thought spare rooms were luxurious and this guy's got a spare flat!

"oh, this old thing? i run it out every few months just to keep the rust off"

this from the guardian’s “analysis” of the new BBC chairman appointment:

Sharp’s appointment to the BBC could be a sign of the “Sunakification” of the British establishment, whatever that means.

well i think you’ve really nailed that. identified a really important process in the framework of institutional governance. if it is a process. and idk governance what the hell is that is it just a word? not really sure what i mean by framework either like a climbing frame maybe i guess.

>>> Our house was still not ready when the lease on the rented flat expired and – having gambled on readiness – we had nowhere to live. Days before we had to move out, we were desperately casting around. With immense kindness, my best friend stepped in. He has a tiny, spare, one-bedroom flat opposite our house, in which family members stay when they come to London.

Where's that from? Not ms Barton!

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2020/dec/29/crammed-tiny-one-bed-flat-realised-i-loved-my-home

So bad it needed to be posted twice.

Didn't he used to post here or am I confusing him with someone?

yes he did!

He has a tiny, spare, one-bedroom flat opposite our house, in which family members stay when they come to London (yes, I know, a spare flat. But all I can do is thank goodness he has it).

does everyone at the Graun have a friend who just happens to have a spare fucking flat in London?

Boggling at the Hann article. All the 'what i learned during lockdown' pieces have a base of privilege, which is fine tbh, but 'after being mildly inconvenienced, i learned that i love my spacious Victorian house in London' is fabulous.

(PS did I mention I'm a music journalist)

Down and out in a one bedroom flat in London

Someone who had previously spent 20+ years as a staffer and has an Oxbridge spouse with an even better staff job should probably not be regarded as a precarious freelancer, yet this is every self-employed, married 40s/50s music writer I know. They’re all in houses or large flats which they bought because they married another middle-class person with a flat bought for a song in the ‘90s, consolidated, and if they have a mortgage at all it’s substantially lower than the price of a room in a flatshare. Boo fucking hoo.

it's not that I disagree with what she's saying so much as that she is writing this article, now, while living in the USA. you know, that USA

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/jan/06/britain-used-to-be-my-home-but-its-beginning-to-look-unrecognisable-to-me

lol, the request for money at the bottom of the page is longer than the article.

Boggling at the Hann article.

Don't even know where to start with that, it reads like a parody and then the accompanying photo just pushes it over the edge.

temporary living in a one bedroom flat when you own a spacious London townhouse must be a bit of a bind tbf, maybe he should have had a crowdfunder link at the bottom of the article - help fund for him and family for a weekend in Provence to psychologically recuperate from such an ordeal

Just think, they might have had to live near some working class people.

that kitchen he's standing in is probably bigger than half the flats I've lived in tbh

...then the accompanying photo just pushes it over the edge

Indeed, it's almost as if it supplied by an AI:

epitome of middle class middle aged wankerdom - check
smug expression - check
immaculate kitchen unit and fittings - check
sense of spaciousness - check
rest of house in shot hints at the epitome of guardian lifestyle aspiration - check

Gotta give the cozy catastrophe soft-left crowd some comfort food, let them believe the world isn't completely going to hell in a handB&Q cart and keep the advertisers happy.

The kids – 20 and 16 – couldn’t tolerate how cramped it was; once lockdown loosened even a little, they went to sleep in any house that would let them in.

Was there ever a period since March that it was okay to sleep over in someone else's house??

Nothing to do with being confined with this nitwit for hours at a time.

These fucks live on another planet

lol but this reminds me of last year some actor shared a video of a zoom audition he did where this cunt director (I think confirmed to be Matthew Vaughan which makes sense) didn’t realise he had his mic on and was overheard saying “these poor people, they live in these awful tiny apartments, no space” & the actor told him off & was saying “yeah I know I have a shitty flat, give me the fuckin job so I can get a nice one!”

But the whole time I was watching it I’m like “that’s a shitty flat?!” I swear these ppl should see my place

OTM... er, apart from the bit about your flat, that I can't comment on.

Even visiting it after hours to check on its progress could be disastrous – such as when I discovered the builders had left a bottle of milk on top of a box of records, but hadn’t secured the lid. This was a box containing my oldest vinyl, the stuff from my teens. Now the records were stained and stank of sour milk. I went through the Discogs website calculating their worth. There was a 12in single from 1987 that had been in near mint condition – an unblemished cover, barely played. It had been worth £120. It wasn’t now.

tenner says it's mbv - strawberry wine

fucking builders eh???

Reading between the lines, the klutz knocked over a bottle of milk ruining his own records.