South Manchester Reporter

Every Thursday this newspaper pops through my letterbox. Without fail, I put it right on the kitchen table, put on the kettle and flick through the week’s ‘news’. This invariably involves hippy campaigners in Chorlton trying to save Chorlton Meadows (which last week I found out that they did — well done guys), a local celebrity’s top 10 things to do in Manchester (and I use the word celebrity very very loosely), a shooting in Withington or Stretford, the opening of a new deli or bar or toy shop and (my favourite) photos of locals celebrating Paula and Patrick’s 50^th wedding anniversary or Steve and Vicky’s wedding or Adam’s welcome back party. All of the photos have captions with the names and ages of the people who appear in them. My boyfriend doesn’t understand this. He even went as far as to say that the photos wouldn’t even be interesting if they were of famous people. But he doesn’t like looking at facebook photos of friends of friends of friends either, so what does he know? In addition to these regular features there are adverts for cars, houses, partners and everything else you’d expect in a local paper. OK, so there are frequent spelling and grammar mistakes, but it’s free and I like it!