So I read City AM, but I need to keep the review to myself.  The writing, the striking imagery and flowing, transcendent descriptions of everyday humanity has turned my hate-fuelled liver into more than merely an organ spewing bile, but into something pitch-perfect, humming with life and spreading nothing but rainbows and joy.  I love City AM, and you can’t ever take that away from me.

I went to a ‘not-for-you-proles’ branch of Citibank today to try and coerce some money from one of their machines.  It was unfailingly polite – the machine greeted me with a ‘Good Morning’, and then, when I put my card in ‘How may I help you?’

There’s something about polite machines that make me very nervous. I guess it reminds me of ‘HAL’ from 2001 Colon A Space Odyssey which scared me shitless as a child.  So I blame Stanley Kubrick for this particular phobia. I had a Texas Instruments ‘Speak and Spell’ as a child too but that didn’t scare me at all, because everything that machine said was with an air of digitised superciliousness, a voice that made it perfectly clear ‘I am cleverer than you and I am giving you the answers simply because it suits me to.’  Fine. At least I knew where I stood.

This Citibank cashy though – well, this one could charm you out of your Calvins in ten seconds flat, and then devour you while you slept, sucking first your soul and then your very flesh into its smaller than letterbox sized cheque-depository slot, crunching your bones into its innards and then spewing you out in mirth every time someone hit the ‘GBP 5.00’ button.

I hit the ‘GBP 10.00’ button, more in hope than anticipation, and another message came up ‘Please wait a moment!’ Now on this one, it was the exclamation mark that gave me the shivers. This machine is trying to be light-hearted. Either that, or it had already read my balance and just wanted to let me down slowly.  This message was followed by the cash sliding out of the slot shaped like the mouth of a blank-faced emoticon, and a further message ‘Can I help you with anything else today?’

Of course you can’t. You have given me cash - the sole purpose of your existence - what else could you possibly do for me? This is the ultimate question - what, after you have received the cash you have requested, could a cash machine possibly do for you? Cheque deposit? Don’t be ridiculous, no one uses cheques any more and if you do, then wake up buddy, its 2013.

I took the situation in hand and jabbed the ‘No’ button in irritation, taking the money and then my card, feeling more in control.   ‘See you next time!’  The machine bid me a cheery goodbye. I turned my back on it, ignoring the twinge of guilt that nagged at my conscience, and left to buy a filter coffee and an egg and sundried tomato breakfast baguette from Pret. Nearly a fiver down already. I guess I’ll have to face the politeness machine again tomorrow.

Speaking of machines, here is a list of my Top Eight favourite Nokia Handsets:

8. N-Gage
7.  3210
6.  1100
5. 6210 Navigator
4. N900
3. 8210
2. 9210i Communicator
1.    7110

So this morning something really strange happened to me on my commute to work. It started off normally enough - I sat on a bus for 45 minutes before getting off at the bus station and boarding a Docklands Light Railway train that takes a further 20 minutes. That’s the way it is, and has been for a couple months now, give or take a minute or two.  I have never really known why the Docklands Railway has a ‘Light’ in the title. Is it ‘Light’ because there’s no driver? There is a conductor which really should negate any extra advantage gained by not having a driver, and quite often the conductor has to drive, using a really tiny joystick thing and six buttons, three red and three green, all contained under a beige lid in the front of the first passenger compartment, the front seats that everyone makes for first, presumably because it’s a nice view and Look! No driver! If you have a 2 year old who likes sitting at the front because trains and cars and different transportation is everything his world is really filled with, you’d better be prepared to barge some grown adults out of the way to get that front seat.

Anyway, I was on the interchange between the bus and the Docklands ‘Light’ Railway – a short walk next to the canal in Lewisham. At least I think it’s a canal, it’s hard to tell with all the shopping trolleys and corpses floating in it. During this interchange – a matter of seconds - I was offered a ‘City AM’ paper by a short man wearing a high visibility jacket with ‘City AM’ printed on it. The high visibility jacket was a light blue colour, to match the font colour of the title ‘City AM’, so I am unsure as to its efficacy as ‘high visibility’. 

The man thrust out a ‘City AM’ towards me, and I smiled at him slightly, my smile indicating a tinge of regret and a certain warmth, and I coupled it with a slight shake of my head to communicate to him a gentle but firm negative response to his offer - and he ‘harrumphed’ at me, and threw the paper on the floor, taking up the next one in his pile to proffer to the person behind me. There were no other discarded ‘City AM’ papers next to him, so I can only assume that this annoyance was directed solely at me, and that nobody else had refused his offer.

The ‘DLR’ is absolutely littered with unread copies of ‘City AM’, despite running all the way through the Docklands, London’s Second City, and into the main City itself, presumably London’s First City, although nobody has actually made that clear.  Form this man’s attitude, I can only deduce that everyone who takes that route to the ‘DLR’ (a lot of people) takes one to avoid the discomfort of his rejection before discarding it in favour of everyone’s favourite fictional, simplistic and factually inaccurate rag, the ‘Metro’.

Every single day on this route I have seen an empty handed commuter pick up a discarded paper to read, only to re-discard it because it happens to be ‘City AM’. Even people who look like they work in banks, for whom the paper is presumably intended.

I can only admire the tenacity and attitude of ‘City AM’ distribution executives to find ways to hand out all their papers before the rush hour is out, hundreds of papers that nobody wants, filled with words no-one wants to read.  Seems a waste of effort for everyone involved really…

On my next blog: ‘ Twelfth Post Part 2 - City AM’ – The First Review'.  I will read 'City AM' cover to cover, and let you - all of you, all of my loyal followers, if it worth the paper it is printed on.