I’m boycotting the London papers. Not because they’re full of celebrity drivel or I don’t agree with their politics, but because I’ve come to the conclusion they’re a waste of time, not to mention paper.

I used to pick up The London Paper every night from the guy at Great Portland Street, but a couple of Fridays back I realised that I’d read all of it that I wanted, and did two of the three Sudoku before getting off about 15 minutes later. That’s not good, is it.

So since then I’ve resolved to use tube time, morning and night, to read proper books, which must have been almost as hard hit as rival papers by the arrival of the morning and evening freebies in London and beyond.

Last week, between Tuesday and Friday, I read The Alchemist
by Paulo Coelho, which has been on my ‘one day’ list for years. It’s not long – less than 200 pages – and it left me wondering why I’ve left it so long to get started. Yesterday I started Eleven Minutes and, 60 pages in, I’m not missing the papers at all.

There must be potential for a campaign here, to get people off the papers, which have very little in them that you couldn’t get from the Internet when you got to your desk or got home, and get them back into books.

If nothing else, it would be better for the environment and for the litter-filled tubes if there weren’t so many free papers around.