Magazines are my weakness

Magazines are my weakness.  My love affair with them started  in Year 7 when a gaggle of girls & I clustered around and pored over every page of Dolly magazine at our school swimming carnival.  I went out the very next day to buy a copy of my own and from that moment on I was hooked.

By Year 8 I was buying Cleo and when I moved up to Sydney from Melbourne and started French lessons I graduated to buying French Vogue (I might have been a tad ahead of myself in where I thought my French reading level was at).  Over the years I couldn’t get enough of magazines.  I found that the monthly Australian magazines weren’t enough to satiate me and would often spend my pocket money on international titles – the afore mentioned French Vogue but also US titles like Glamour and Elle.

When I started working in advertising I was thrilled to find out that I didn’t have to buy magazines anymore and every title I could ever dream of (and more) would arrive on my desk ready and waiting for me to peruse.  Over the years I grew complacent and would flick through most of them in 5minutes and then throw them in the bin confident that I would have another to look at the following day.

However now that I’m on maternity leave I’ve had to go cold turkey.  Actually PAY for magazines again!   As going on maternity leave has coincided somewhat with the start of my experiment I decided that not buying magazines at all would be a good & bloody tough challenge.  After all, the majority of magazines are still printed on virgin paper albeit from farmed timber specially grown for the purpose.  (the dominant publisher in Australia of magazines, ACP -with 52% share of circulation, uses farmed trees).  Controversially one of ACP’s titles, Madison Magazine released a “Green Issue” last year devoted to green causes etc which somewhat hypocritically used 100% virgin paper.  But you could argue that at least they’re educating their readers on other ways to be sustainable.

To feed my magazine addiction I’ve been resorting to reading the online versions but it’s like phone sex – fun but not as good as the real thing!   I can also be seen overstaying my welcome in coffee shops, telling the hairdresser to take as long as she wants and turning up early for doctor’s appointments.