Ian McMillan: Living with a time machine from the Big Apple

As well as reading the Yorkshire Post and all things Yorkshire, a few years ago I took out a subscription to the great American magazine The New Yorker; it’s full of stories and cartoons and poems and, in the front section, a list of what’s on in The Big Apple. So, when I’m sitting in The Big Potato (as we call Barnsley Metropolitan District) I can read it pretending that I’m going to galleries in Manhattan and sipping a martini (shekken, not stirred up, tha knows) in a romantically-lit street-corner bar in the Bronx rather than walking down to Darfield library after popping into Geoff’s for a trim. Not that there’s anything wrong with Darfield Library or Geoff’s; as locations, though, they don’t have the glamour of Central Park or the Statue of Liberty.

The thing about The New Yorker is that it comes out weekly and it’s got what my mother used to call “a lot of reading” in it, so it takes longer than a week to do it justice. And I’ve been busy lately and so my reading has got a bit behind. It arrives on a Thursday, I open it, gaze longingly at the contents and then take it upstairs to add to the tottering pile of other unread New Yorkers in the spare bedroom.

The other day I had a free hour and I thought “I’ll start to read one and then I can at least begin to catch up”. Over the weeks the pile has fallen over a few times and the magazines have got shuffled into a new and confusing order, so I decided to get them into a chronological pile, dividing them into months on the floor. The results left me open-mouthed in horror. I looked like Munch’s The Scream except that I had glasses on. The oldest unread New Yorker was from March 2010! What I thought was a couple of months’ worth of reading was more than 13 months’ worth, and that’s a lot of matter.

Surely the last year couldn’t have gone by so fast? Should I start reading the oldest one now or cut my losses and start in December 2010? Or last month? Or last week? Then I realised: what I had in the spare bedroom wasn’t an unstable pile of reading material. It was a time machine.

Let me explain: I buy the Yorkshire Post every day but sometimes I don’t have time to read it all. If I’m rushing about it could take me three days to read it from cover to cover. So I would always be three days behind. And if I then got busier it would take me five days to read it, and I’d be nearly a week out of sync. I’d read a preview of a match that had already been won. I’d read that a politician was going to visit the district when in fact he’d already been and gone. And as my reading got further and further behind I would be, literally, living in the past. I’d read Bonfire Night features in the summer, and stories of crowded beaches in mid-December. It would be odd, living a few months behind everybody else, never knowing if your team was up or down, expecting freezing fog in June.

So I’ll leave the New Yorkers where they are, defying time. And if you’re doing the same thing with your Yorkshire Post magazine, Merry Christmas!