Planning a last-minute getaway? Don’t forget to cancel the milk and papers! When I was growing up in the seventies, families went on holiday without the internet or GPS to guide them, as bold as pioneers or settlers – how did we ever manage? – but a terrible fear hung over these hardy folk of coming home again to find a pinta (yes, a “pinta”!) curdling on the doorstep and last week’s yellowing newspapers crammed in the letterbox. I don’t have to tell readers of the Press Gazette that times are very different now. Milk comes from the supermarket, and no one has their papers delivered anymore.
Except that that’s not entirely true. Thousands of newspapers still make their way up the streets and down the lanes of this country every morning, a welcome part of the daily routine for many, as well as an important connection for the elderly, the housebound and the isolated. In my part of London, outsize youths who look too big for their newspaper bags can be glimpsed making their rounds. When one of them is unavailable for some reason or other, our newsagent Raj fills in for them. He stays trim by taking their routes at a steady clip.
My son, who recently turned 13, has a taste for trainers and high-end streetwear. The solution to Gabriel’s expensive wardrobe habit was to find him a job in the school holidays. Few opportunities are available to children of his age but delivering papers is one of them.
I decided to accompany him on his first shift. I’d have to get up early in any case, otherwise he almost certainly wouldn’t, and I wanted to keep a fatherly eye on him while he got the hang of things. But there was also an element of old times’ sake about it.
In a tragic inversion of the superhero narratives beloved by my son, in which a youngster has a brush with something toxic and is immediately set apart from his happy-go-lucky peers by his special powers, I took up a newsboy’s satchel at his age – and was immediately and irrevocably impregnated with printer’s ink. No shooting webs or swinging from towerblocks for me; it was the beginning of a career, or at least a life, in the media, first in papers and later in telly.
Saturday is the new Sunday
Gabriel and I couldn’t have picked a worse day to start: a Saturday, when the paper bags groan with the buxom weekend editions. Saturday is the new Sunday, I discovered. People get their fill of magazines and supplements then and require nothing further until Monday at the earliest. One of the first houses we called at took four papers alone (though admittedly it turned out to be the home of a former Fleet Street editor).
While others were waking up and drowsily reaching for a smartphone on the nightstand to glance at the headlines, Gabriel and I were taking part in a ritual which has been going on for a hundred years or so, since the boom in mass circulation newspapers.
And it was being recreated at that very moment in neighbourhoods up and down the country.
NewsTeam, the country’s biggest deliverer of newspapers to homes, says it serves more than 65,000 addresses, reaching 74 per cent of the UK’s postcodes. The company aims to bring readers their favourite paper by 8am on weekdays and 9am at the weekend. Self-employed drivers are responsible for its deliveries to customers.
In its job ads, NewsTeam says they work in the timeslot fondly known as sparrowfart: from 3am to 8am. They own their own cars and must be “able to provide a cover driver on any days you cannot cover the round yourself”. Not much scope for kids of my son’s age there. NewsTeam doesn’t see its business as a threat to newsagents. The company prefers to present itself as operating hand in print-smudged hand with Raj and others: “We offer a range of options to newsagents that are looking to either stop or expand their news rounds”.
Newspaper deliveries still thrive in Japan
In some parts of the world, home deliveries are thriving. In Japan, for instance, workers little older than Gabriel make their rounds on mopeds and motorbikes, some of the 365,000 ‘delivery agents’ dropping off morning papers in the land of the rising sun. A survey by the Japan Newspaper Publishers & Editors Association estimated that total daily newspaper circulation reached about 47 million in 2013, with over 95 percent home-delivered. As the Press Gazette reported this summer, “Japan’s high newspaper circulation appears to be due to a heavily ingrained culture of daily newspaper reading based around home delivery of morning and evening editions.”
When I had a round of my own, I called at about 80 homes every day, though it seemed more like 200. It took me two and a half hours and invariably left me late for school. For six mornings a week, I was paid £2.25. Mind you, this was back in 1975, when £2.25 was a very considerable waste of time, even then. And I did it for years: why?
Perhaps because I was a first child: we’re high-achieving perfectionists, apparently. The fact is that I had a job in the media and didn’t know what else to do or how to exit it with dignity (nothing’s changed). My younger brother wasn’t cut out for the racket at all, though. His first round was on a winter’s morning. After he failed to return home, Mum went looking for him and found him on the doorstep of the first house on his route. Apart from climbing into his bag and huddling down in a nest of newspapers, he hadn’t moved.
‘I felt like a sweep or knifegrinder’
As I pounded the streets with my son, the early indications of his own aptitude for the game were discouraging. “Why couldn’t the newspapers staple the pages together?” he asked crossly. “Or they could tie them together, like pairs of socks.” As he struggled to coax a floppy broadsheet into a door, I thought of Martin Amis’s line about disappointing sex: “like trying to fit an oyster into a parking meter”.
We went back to Raj’s to reload. Each time we left his shop, we appraised the heft of the bag with an increasingly seasoned savvy: like poachers, or a golf pro and his caddy.
It was the bulkiness of the papers that weighed us down, not the number of them. We stopped at barely 30 homes. It made me feel like an old school tradesman, a sweep or knifegrinder. Walking to the end of a long street for the sake of a solitary housecall, I saw myself as a hunted priest of the old-time religion in the reign of James I, keeping faith with the recusant families of England. Blasphemously, the tabloids in my son’s bag became communion wafers.
By the time we finished, I’d clocked up more than 8000 paces on my steps app and it wasn’t even breakfast time. Doing a paper round seemed like such good exercise I decided to go out with my son every morning from then on. But there weren’t many more of them. He went into semi-retirement as a paperboy on the fifth day. “I’m getting too old for this,” he deadpanned.
Gabriel took home £21 and change for his pains. He won’t get many hoodies out of that. Still, this was his first experience of work and his dad was impressed. He showed up, took it seriously, grasped the route very quickly (and without the aid of his phone) and was polite and friendly to the few householders we met. On the ground floor of a mansion block we delivered to, a door opened as we were walking away from it. I recognised a man from our local swimming baths. He has to have someone with him and appears to be incapable of speech. Now he was smiling broadly and giving Gabriel the thumbs up from his wheelchair.
Newspaper deliveries are an anachronism in our wired world, where we are endlessly interconnected and yet increasingly isolated. They’ve been a thing of the past for years, and yet somehow here we still are. We wait to see if the industry will take my son’s advice and thread newspaper pages together on a piece of elastic like socks. But for as long as paper boys and girls shoulder their bags every morning, they’re an increasingly rare link in the real-world ties that bind.
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