shinytoaster | What the papers say ... aka ... the inevitable downfall of Lucy Mangan, part the third

Don't click the headline: 'Thatcher faces renewed police investigation' on the Grauniad website today. The article is cruelly, cruelly misleading.

It's also Lucy Mangan's last column today, but sadly, only in the fitness section. She uses it to waffle on about how keeping fit is really kind of crap, and given the columns she's produced on the subject over the past few months, I'd wager it's this opinion that has got her put off the job.

I'm imagining an office filmed in black and white, with a fosted glass door with the words Grauniad Tabloid Section Editor picked out in flaking black paint. There's a miasma of Woodbine pervading the air, a candlestick phone, and a hat-stand with a trenchcoat and fedora hanging from it, and the broad - that'd be Mangan - is sitting on the desk with a pillbox hat and a fox fur wrapped around her shoulders, and the seam in the leg of her nylons is painted on and behind the desk sits The Editor.

"You're off the fitness case, Mangan."

And Mangan crosses and recrosses her legs, and if she was wearing nylons the air would be rent with static. She removes the cigarette holder from between her lips and pouts.

"I'll want your badge back. I need someone on this job who can actually write a column about keeping fit instead of whining about the gym fees, and you, baby-doll, you just ain't cuttin' the Colmans."