I recently returned to London after an absence of two years, two years spent living in a Caledonian penury. Have you ever read Cormac McCarthy’s The Road? Exactly.

Only joking! Scotland’s great. Seriously, if you say things like that the Scottish Tourist Board will come after you with their claymores (old Scottish swords).

I have noticed that things have changed while I’ve been away. Where is The London Lite? Where is The London Paper? Where is Metro? Oh wait, there’s Metro. Good old Metro; the turd they couldn’t flush. The light-weight lifestyle freesheets that used to be handed out at every tube stop, and which I pretended not to read, have been swept aside, clutched at only briefly by that famously drowning man, print journalism. But what has replaced them? Well, once a week there is Stylist, and once a week there is Shortlist. Clothes for the ladies, footie for the fellahs, what could go wrong? So the marketing men must have thought. And, to be fair, they may perpetuate some gender stereotypes but I actually think that both are a decent read. Definitely an improvement.

What I find troubling, however, is the new (to me) omnipresence of The Evening Standard, which is now free and run by the well-loved Russian oligarch, and puncher of his enemies, Alexander Lebedev. I dimly remember at the time some vague attempts to rebrand the paper as less rabidly right-wing. Those attempts clearly didn’t take root, because the Standard remains the most gleefully union-bashing, protestor-belittling, Boris-loving rag in town. It seems a shame that the only free newspaper left is so nakedly and unpleasantly political. I preferred the innocent days of watching the drunken children of celebrities fall out of nightclubs. As The Evening Standard shows, when you give your product out free you don’t need to care about the opinions of ordinary readers. Or maybe Londoners really do love bankers and hate teachers.

Anyway, who knows what the future holds for newspapers – I really hope they survive in the wake of all this technology and phone-hacking. Can you do a crossword on a kindle? Well, yes, but it’s not the same. Go paper! A luddite shouts in the brightness.