There once was a magazine called The Word, although I always called it Word, as that it what it was originally called. Had I never written a single word for Word, I would have been its most ardent admirer (and subscriber), and would have lamented its passing with the same moistened eyes. As it happens, I did write for it, but I looked forward to the new issue arriving every month for 114 consecutive months between February 2003 and August 2012 not just to see how my words looked on the hallowed page, but to read all the other words by all the other smart and witty people on all the other pages.
Records show that I began writing a regular page column for Word at the very end of 2004, initially about TV and called Telly Addict. (Not a bad name.) In November 2006, that column’s brief was expanded to include … everything. It was renamed Whatever to reflect this. Whatever ran until the end of 2010, when it stopped. I was sad about this, but pulled myself together and carried on writing reviews and features for my favourite magazine until its final issue, including the third before last cover story, about the Stone Roses. (My only other cover story was Elbow, both pictured.)
As the magazine did not reprint its articles or reviews on the website (which instead predominantly acted as a water cooler for the Word massive), I find I am sitting on an awful lot of my own published writing that I remain very proud of. With the passing of the years, some of it even takes on a socio-historical sheen. So, without rhyme or reason – and mainly because I chanced up a random column from 2010 about the disruption to life as we know it caused by an Icelandic volcano while clearing out my email’s “sent” folder this morning – I thought it might be fun, if not necessarily an actual public service, to reproduce some of these columns here.
I hope you enjoy them, and that they bring back some fond memories of an era when you could publish magazines and a loyal knot of the discerning would buy them.
An index of columns randomly posted so far:
June 2010 | Memories of the Great Volcano Inconvenience
November 2008 | The branding of everything
September 2008 | Unquestioning TV festival coverage
March 2007 | Health food packaged for idiots
June 2009 | The age of the overstatement
April 2009 | Choosing a daily newspaper
November 2010 | The death of the printed word
April 2010 | 3D or not 3D?
August 2008 | Barack Obama
January 2009 | Grey squirrels
July 2007 | Indie and the charts
Never Knowingly Underwhelmed 
I remember buying this magazine from time to time in my teens. Along with Mojo, it was one of the few magazines where a young person who did not have Internet access could read about bands of the 60s and 70s – the decades i’d missed having being born in the mid eighties, but whose music I was hungrily uncovering by raiding the record section of every charity shop I’d come across.
Obviously I’m saddened to hear of its passing and having not bought an issue for many years, I do feel in some small way responsible for its demise. A fine example of how we don’t often appreciate things until they’re gone.
At least you have all those back issues to enjoy. That must be a great comfort.
John
I’m delighted you’re doing this, sir. I know that subscribing to a magazine is nothing more than a commercial transaction, when all’s said and done, but when subscribing to The Word I actually felt as if I was, in a small way, performing a public service.
The only magazine I ever subscribed to and probably the only one I ever will. Still missed.
After clearing out the garage recently, I’ve started picking up a back issue every week and flicking through. Just last night I was reading a ‘Word to the wise’ column by Max Clifford…