Verity's constipation

I have a guilty secret.  It's not Geordie Shore. It's not peeing in the shower. It's not wanting just "a milky coffee", not a triple mocha frappa rubber dubber cappuccino.  It's that when I stand in a bar, I find the guy outside smoking sexy.  I don't want to. I actively try not to. And frankly I wish it didn't happen. Not in the least because I end up internally wrestling with this while I'm trying to impress said sexy person. Which normally means I end up looking constipated.

No, I did not write this mindless, tasteless claptrap passing as journalism.  It is written in the NZ Herald (18.10.14) by Verity Johnson under the title: Rebels with a cough - why I find smokers strangely sexy. 

By my count, the first person singular pronoun occurs nine times up to, appropriately, constipation. 

The NZ Herald editors seem to admire writers who interview themselves.  Michelle Hewitson is another.  The culprits include men.   We seem to have a culture in which Ego is best, and with it goes the corollary, the assumption that what happened to me, or to my teenage kids, or what my day was like, or how I am feeling about something, or what food I would die for (or from, hopefully), is an interesting or even informative “read”.   Once upon a time when I was a junior journalist on the late Auckland Star we called it “interviewing your typewriter”. 

The Herald does have some competent and edifying writers, among them Brian Gaynor and Fran O’Sullivan.  Sir Robert Jones is good for a laugh and usually some sense.  There are others.  But surely the Herald can do without the excesses and indulgences of the women’s magazine scene, the fixation on bodily processes and food.  If Verity Johnson can’t stir herself to some real research on issues that matter, she should make way for journalism.