I know I'm of a definite minority opinion. I know, because when I explain it to people they always look amazed.

I don't buy newspapers. Um...almost true. I only buy newspapers if West Ham Utd have a surprising win, and seeing as that's not that often, I can practically claim to be newspaper-free.

I used to buy them regularly but they started to become a bit of a liability. Apparently your choice of paper dictated your political leanings. Funny. I always got the Express for the cartoons, puzzles and William Hickey page (that shows how long ago I was a reader). I would be harrangued by workmates who insisted I held certain political beliefs. It was news to me (no pun intended) and I had no idea how they arrived at these judgements, until they pointed out it was the paper I was reading. I still didn't get it, but it made me aware that I was making some kind of social faux pas, so I opted for something more 'highbrow'.

I chose the Times (in for a penny, in for a pound). That just made things very difficult in the puzzles department as cryptic crosswords were never my forte, and I was deeply suspicious that the person who wrote the clues also wrote the unintelligble 3-2-1 questions. You remember those. Sigmund Freud would have been hard pushed to suss out the machinations of the author's mind. But I digress...

I was also finding relying on the actual facts as reported in the press to be something of a hit and miss affair, and seeing as how one of my passions was debating all sorts of topical items, it was getting very irritating to find that the snippets of information you had commited to memory as gospel, would turn out to be pure conjecture. My ego couldn't take it anymore.

I gave up. Simple as that. If I wanted news without political bias or artistic license I could now refer to teletext. Also I could get the latest, most up-to-date information, in order to confound my debating buddies as to
just how firm my finger was on the subject's pulse.

And so here I am years later, with only a few footie-related clippings on the kitchen wall to show my lapses in the cause.

Maybe things have moved on in Canary Wharf (not got the same ring as Fleet Street. Nor as many pubs either, come to that) and I'm doing them a dis-service, but from the amount of libel cases that are won, the spin doctors still clearly at work, the newspapers infuriating habit of assuming what our opinions are and then speaking for us, their intermittent cases of sheer irresponsible reporting on sensitive issues leaves me in no doubt that I've made the right choice.

Hi, My name is Sally and it's been 12 years since my last regular purchase was made...