Happy birthday, grandma!

I'm away for my grandmother's 96th birthday party - she really is immortal, which hopefully means that I'll live long enough to bore your grandchildren too. As it's a family occasion, we're all sitting in separate rooms, reading newspapers (siblings apart - illiterates all). I've just read the Irish Times, and it's a real pleasure. It's still a massive expanse of newspaper, still running pages of close-type small ads, and clearly limited in its global reporting (lots of wire-service pieces), but it's beautifully written. 

It's an odd paper. Formerly the voice of the bitter Ascendancy which took several decades to come to terms with letting the culchies run the country, it's become a sophisticated, largely liberal paper which takes a cool, disinterested (is this the character of Church of Ireland Protestants?), rather despairing long view of the vagaries of Irish politics and governance - a bit like the Guardian but without the slightly desperate attempt to be cool, probably because it's the paper of record with no serious competition. There's something delightfully old-school about a paper in which letters start with 'Madam' (editor Geraldine Kennedy) and end with 'a chara etc.' The paper seems suffused with the barely suppressed notion that, had it been consulted, the country wouldn't be in its current economic, political and moral turmoil - and it's probably right.

None of this applies, of course, to the Saturday supplements. Like the Guardian and all the others, they're obsessed with something called 'lifestyle', which seems to consist of consuming vast quantities of food while wearing expensive but ephemeral clothes. I hoped that, with a recession, this rubbish would fade away, but apparently not: the Guardian featured a man's shirt for £850 yesterday. I know that I'm a penny-pinching git, but this seems excessive. I can see the point of paying £5000 for bespoke suit that will last for an entire lifetime, but that much for something which will seem unwearably outdated in a few months' time just makes me incandescent with impotent rage. 

The Irish Independent is a bigger seller, but that rag is an hysterical, reactionary turd of a publication - much more like the Mail than its sister paper in the UK. I rather like the Examiner too - formerly the Cork Examiner, making a play for national status. Unfortunately, however, the British tabloids and mid-markets are muscling in on the market by adding 'Irish' to the masthead and sharpening their most stridently unpleasant views even further: they seem to believe that the Irish are even more insular and racist than their home readership. Say it ain't so!

I browse through other papers too: Libération, L'humanité and Le Monde sometimes, and struggle through a few in languages I barely recognise - good for the soul and brings a new perspective.