Letter from the editor: News that took a holiday

Certain members of the i office have returned a little too full of holiday cheer and, as I type, are abusing office hours to test their free subscription to that dating site, which sent us the cupcakes.

Sigh! Perhaps we need a little more stick around here and less carrot. I bet this sort of thing doesn’t happen upstairs at the Daily Mail.

But while Charlotte continues her search for a “proper fittie” to take on her “feeding the ducks” date, life at i is returning to pre-summer normal. Funny how there’s news again now the journalists have come back. That is, if you somehow believe a summer of hacking scandals, the Norwegian tragedy, the shopping riots, and the toppling of Colonel Gaddafi wasn’t one filled with “proper” news.

Summer staples — runaway animals, harmless, freakish weather (not the harmful, freakish weather of Irene) and manufactured outrage over our holdaying politicians — got less play this year. Not least because many of our politicians kept coming back to deal with crises: Cameron, Obama, Boris... all cut short at least one vacation — in Cameron’s case, two. I don’t recall what Nick Clegg did.

So, welcome back to the news that took a holiday: the fallout from the banking crisis and the eurozone debt malaise; the increasingly fractious Coalition; the worsening UK housing market; public sector pension rows; strike threats; the rise of free schools; the demise of care homes; the cost of train fares; the Olympics; heating bills and your food basket — not to mention the Levenson inquiry into what we in the media do. Put like that, there’s so much to look forward to! It is enough to make one wonder what happened to those five migrating cuckoos we were following south?

Oh yeah, that dating site has a “boss button”, that reverts the screen to Excel if your boss walks by. Now, if they did one in Quark for Charlotte…