sofa

Lying on my sofa with my left foot, still swollen but not hurting, high and tightly wrapped in an elastic stocking, I wonder what I can do with the opportunity of an entirely wasted day. Rest is my motto today, a motto that suffered a difficult birth because I was out for victuals this morning and also searching for something to read with breakfast.

My grocer had heaps of papers with pictures and reports about yesterday's earthquake, but this was not what I was after. For breaking news, for the addictive but futile immediacy that goes stale after an hour, I turn to the radio or the internet. Traditional printed media I value for altogether different reasons. I look for profound analysis and contentious but well-argued opinion, pieces that surprise and challenge me.

One of the great strengths of newspapers is static content. Once it's printed, it can't be changed. It's on the table before me and defies me to read it, whether I’m interested or not, whether I agree or not. I can't navigate from it at the click of a link and I can't ask a search engine or a feed aggregator to take me to sites that I know I'll agree with. So tend to skip the current-events coverage and be ambushed by the unexpected.

There's no better provider of the unexpected than The New Yorker. If the name weren't so fitting for a magazine devoted primarily to the goings-on in the Big Apple, The Non-Sequitur would be even better. Its assays seem to sprout out of nowhere – you can imagine the hard work it takes to give them this appearance – and cover every topic of interest, however obscure, under the sun. No two issues are alike, always creatively novel and delightfully insightful.

Printed it is thus nearly perfect and far superior to The New Yorker's annoying website that blinks with dynamically updated content and dishes out inconsequential blog noise of the kind that already pollutes the internet wherever one looks. So it came to pass that I spend a good hour this morning ambling through a surprisingly primaveral Fulham, giving my ankle more of a workout than I had intended for the entire weekend, hopping from newsagent to newsagent and searching through their shelves. No one stocked my favorite printed fix. I returned with yogurt but otherwise empty-handed, to a sofa that had almost given up on me already. But now it's my home for the rest of the weekend.