Paper Monitor
13:10 UK time, Thursday, 11 December 2008
A service highlighting the riches of the daily press.
Form an orderly queue, ladies and gents, there's more than enough of Paper Monitor to go around... if you catch one's drift.
It goes without saying that reading is Paper Monitor's number one favourite pastime, so it's heartening to see a new survey out detailing how this contributes to one's sex appeal. Rrrrrr!
In the top 10 reading materials for both sexes are "current affairs websites" - heading the list to impress a man, and a respectable sixth for attracting the lay-deees - and the Financial Times, the only newspaper to make the cut.
Oh yeah, baby. The FT. It winks in its come-hither way from midway down the pile of papers on a nearby desk. Paper Monitor is drawn, like a moth to a flame. What delights lie between its pink sheets? (Stop sniggering there, you at the back. One's intentions are honourable. Ish.)
There's lots of serious financial stuff, as to be expected. And then, like a cheeky flash of red from under a Savile Row suit, there nestles a film review on page 15. Who knew? And opposite, a problem page with agony aunt Lucy Kellaway (of the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳'s own stable).
"Dear Lucy," a reader writes. "Do I have to go to our hideous Christmas party? - Senior manager, male, 48."
Lucy answers that she too, at 48, hated to mix working and drinking. But then a frosty colleague turned warm, witty and wise with a few glasses of office plonk inside, and this memory made dealing with him throughout the year that much easier. Perhaps Senior manager, male, 48 is the same, she muses?
"To let both your bosses and your underlings see your soft underbelly (assuming you have one) will not necessarily mean that you keep your job. But it might make all the hardness that is to come a little less unpleasant.
"If I have it wrong, and you are beastly even when slightly drunk, then stay home. You won't be missed," Kellaway adds.
Paper Monitor is undone.
The 
