Reading the paper

I like to read the paper in the morning with a cup of coffee before I head to work. I sit in the cafe and watch people come and go clutching their takeaway paper cups and their bags of bagels. I read the paper from cover to cover, lingering over the meagre world section and the comments and editorial.

I do this when I'm on holiday and I once read an article that said one way to extend the holiday feeling was to do the things that you associate with your weeks off. Unfortunately I can't laze in bed for the morning, go scuba-diving with shoals of angel fish, lounge on the deck of a yacht, or cycle through vineyards filling my panniers with champagne and baguettes. What I can do is leisurely catch up on the day's events and it is one of my few simple pleasures.

How I hate it, then, when someone asks if they can 'steal a bit of the paper'. For a start I loath the idiom. It is not my paper - it is thoughtfully provided by the cafe - so you wouldn't be stealing it. This is a Kiwi-ism I have noticed, whereby people try and lessen the impact of what they are doing by referring to their actions in a depreciating manner - apparently they 'swing by' the house to 'grab a feed'. Are they Tarzan?

Leaving the language aside, of course I mind! I don't wish to be disturbed. I wish to read the paper, chronologically, at the pace I choose without being hurried or harried. It bothers me when people fold the paper the wrong way (it's almost bad as realigning maps) or insert sections out of order. I consider it inconsiderate when people do the crossword in a paper that it is not their own, and as for tearing out a section or an article - you'd be surprised how much this can annoy me. Or maybe you wouldn't.