Eva Bradley: There's space for the irrelevant

Sometimes people just want to read a newspaper to relax. Photo / File

Lately you could be forgiven for forgetting that this is (or at least was) a humour column.

Epistles about mental health, climate change, refugee quotas and self-development have left little room for the sort of chuckle one needs tucked in between pages dedicated to similarly serious fodder.

So what's up with me, then?

Why the long face?

To be perfectly honest it wasn't until I was introduced at a Rotary event earlier this week that I was prompted to reflect on my subject choice and writing tone in recent months and realised how much it had changed.

I was at the event to talk about photography but reference was also made to my writing.

The speaker described my light-hearted style about the less-serious aspects of life as a "breath of fresh air" amidst all the doom and gloom.

Either he has skipped a few editions lately or he is aggregating my mood and tone across a 12-year history, because it certainly feels like the air is a little less fresh these days than it could be.

Given as I am to (often irrelevant) introspection, I went home and mulled over his words and tried to identify just when and why I had turned into the Grinch who stole Christmas.

The obvious reason was to blame the kid. There's nothing quite like becoming responsible for the next generation to suddenly make one a more socially, environmentally and morally responsible member of the human race.

Either that or kids just make you so damned tired you wouldn't recognise a joke if it jumped out and smacked you in the face.

The other consideration is that because of online feedback, I have an increased awareness of what people really think about me and what I write about (because according to some of the more trollish and conveniently anonymous contributors, there is apparently no difference).

Once upon a time only erudite members of the community with the time and inclination could write a letter to the editor, and even then only the odd one of those got through the gate and on to the page.

Now with online publication, feedback is instant, often ill-considered, usually unfiltered by both writer and publisher, and frequently brutal.

It's certainly enough to make one think about the wisdom of writing 600 words about my hangover instead of Syria.

Sometimes it's enough to make me lock my doors during the daytime.

But then I have to ask myself: why are you reading a newspaper right now? It's to be informed, sure, but isn't it also because you want to relax? You want to enjoy the simple but beautiful daily ritual of boiling the kettle or ordering the flat white and taking a few minutes out of the routine to a reality other than your own.

Sadly, there is enough misery happening locally and globally to fill up a newspaper several times. And politicians are always happy to step in with a sound bite when there's not.

What there isn't a lot of in the news media is content just for the sake of it - words that won't change the world, but will give a lot of people a little bit of a smile.

And so, while some of you disagree, I'm going to find my way back to write about things that don't necessarily matter, except to provide some colourful relief in a newspaper printed with lots of black and white on subjects that are so often grey.