Sunday Papers

A friend and I were chatting about this over dinner the other week: that we love reading how the couples met, how they are planning to spend their honeymoons, and where they were planning to live.

They’re such a barometer of society, and maybe even of the economy. I’ve noticed, for example, recently the trend away from holidays in Thailand (very popular a few months ago) to this month’s favourite destination, Hawaii. Every week, there’s always a few of the couples who holiday in Queensland, and you get the occasional honeymoon in Europe (especially when they’re from Italian or Greek heritage), but mostly it’s Hawaii at the moment.

Such honeymoon plans are almost always in stark contrast with the older “flashback” couple they also feature weekly. Almost invariably, there is no mention of a honeymoon for the couple who have been together for forty or fifty years. Instead, it almost always reads they met because they were near neighbours, they got married and then settled close to home, and now enjoy spending time with their grandchildren.

There would have been no thought of an overseas holiday for that generation, and they were always much younger than the couples getting married these days, but there are similarities. The typical scenario, these days, seems to be “they met on a girls night out” or something like that, or were introduced by a mutual friend. Then there’s the often older couple (in their early thirties) who went to school together, but nothing happened until they were re-introduced a few years ago by old school mates. However they met, the profiles indicate they’re still likely to want to settle close to where they grew up.

The only other things that interest me in the Sunday papers are some of the regular columns. I love trying to guess, for example, who Ros is talking about in “Guess Who Don’t Sue” and regularly have some success. I quite enjoy Wil Anderson’s column which is usually quite funny, though today’s column about what he lost when his car was broken into bordered on the banal. Piers Akerman is always worth a laugh, as is Glen Milne, though for obviously different reasons. I also quite like the celebrity photograph pages, though I find myself increasingly unaware of who some of the young folk are, since I hardly ever watch soap operas. Oh and I love the Harvey Norman catalogues.

Yes, they’re good. So please Mr Murdoch, can you just dump all of the regular features and just feature Harvey Norman catalogues and wedding photographs from now on and I’ll be very happy indeed.