morning news

On Sundays, I sometimes leave my house before anything has happened. The scrap-furniture recycling places across the street that, despite the bold sign over the door promising Antiques, offer trash unfit to be touched with an unprotected hand but oddly fitting for the neighborhood are still closed when I make my way to the Co-op store just down the road. Even the Arabic grocers haven't put their disturbing displays of wooden yams, warty cucumbers and mushy tomatoes before the eyes of their peculiarly discriminating clientele. The street is as quiet as this busy street can be, and the sidewalks are deserted.

The Co-op store is open, I nip in and quickly load up on yogurt, milk, butter and Apple juice from Kent, the usual things to enrich a breakfast of strong coffee and home-baked bread slightly stale after a few days on the shelf. Before I pay, I pass the enormous rack from which the Sunday papers, the true religion of this free-thinking country, gush. No weekend would be complete without them, read leisurely and over the course of the day in a pub, over a pint and a roast, and with friends. Heavier in weight than in price by three pounds to two, they are the mandatory accompaniment of every shopper leaving the store early in the morning.

I scan the front pages, surveying the goodies designed to attract custom. There are two-for-one coupons, student recipe books (It's back-to-school, apparently.), a compilation of brightly colored autumn leaves of the English countryside and a box of free chocolate at Sainsburys, but there isn't what I'm always looking for, a DVD. I scored Sleepy Hollow earlier this year and, in a particularly lucid moment, The Graduate. If you haven't seen this movie on a ten-foot screen with the glorious light of the sixties flooding your room, you haven't really seen it. This morning, there is nothing comparable.

In fact, the newspapers' marketing folk seem to think people will grab their rags just for the content. The headlines are double-bold, and countless pieces of analysis, opinion and dissent are advertised just below. The focus of all verbal efforts is inevitably the same. There is only one topic this morning, and it's the reason I am curiously unresponsive to the temptation of newsprint. The Pope is in town.

I don't care much about the Pope; he has no bearing on my life. I deny the claim, made by some historians with a skewed vision, that the previous one had great influence on the coming down of the Berlin Wall. (As little as Reagan is closer to the truth, if you ask me, but do you?) When the current Pope was elected, the largest and most obnoxious German broadsheet ran the unforgettable We are Pope! line on the front page the next morning, celebrating the austere bishop's penultimate promotion with the same childlike enthusiasm with which they'd have celebrated a World Cup win. The country duly felt elated, but the exuberance subsided a few hours later when the brain kicked back in. It didn't matter.

And it still doesn't, except the guy is impossible to avoid. On Thursday, he came to Edinburgh to have tea with the Queen. Next he got sucked into London where he choked traffic with two processions that attracted worshipers and protesters who ululated with equal fervor. Today he's reading mass in Birmingham, and the papers are analyzing his every word and step.

There are devout Catholics that praise the old man for visionary leadership and spiritual guidance. There are humanists grudgingly acknowledging the Catholic Church's tireless charity work. Affirming atheists denounce the waste of tax-payers' money on a religious figure's proselytizing trip, and victim support groups and lawyers demand accountability and punishment for the sexual abuse of children that has been condoned by the Church hierarchy for decades. Thrown in for good measure are the comedians that try their luck at blasphemy but fail. The concept just doesn't exist here.

None of this is new, and none deserves special attention right now. Just because the Pope goes traveling doesn't turn any of these topics into news. I don't want to read about this, and neither do you, presumably. Sorry!