To Subscribe - or not To Subscribe?

I’ve always loved magazines. When I was younger it was the glossies - the glossier the better as far as I was concerned. Vogue. Harpers and Queen. Tatler. CountryLife. It didn’t matter that everything in them - the lifestyle, the cars, the clothes, the houses - oh the houses - were (are) all totally beyond my means, I could spend hours dreaming and saying ‘what if?’ 

Then, newly married and not having much spare money, my guilty pleasure became hiding a Woman’s Weekly or a Family Circle in amongst the supermarket shopping, telling myself it was for the recipes. For years I struggled with my obsession with magazines when they became labelled a ‘luxury’ in our money-strapped house, sneakily buying them and reading them in secret - in the bath usually! 

My love of magazines was really what started me off wanting to be a writer. Writing a novel was, I thought, way out of my league but I thought I could perhaps be a journalist. So, as I struggled to become ‘a writer’, I found the writing magazines. Writers News; Writers Forum; Mslexia: to name but three I have subscribed to regularly over the years. Bought to learn from and to keep me in the loop with publishing news etc. But these days I have a problem: do I really need to keep buying the actual magazine when I can read and learn everything I need to know, on-line? All with the added bonus of not paying a subscription to a dedicated magazine.

Well yes I’m afraid I do! Social media takes up a lot of time for writers these days (well it does for me as I don’t really have a clue as to what I’m doing!) and I already spend far too much time in front of my computer, writing. Switching off the computer and sitting on the sofa reading a magazine at the end of the day is a high point for me. 

Living in France I don’t have ready access to newsagents selling magazines in my mother tongue so friends are cajoled and bribed into bringing me their finished with copies of Good Housekeeping, Red, Marie Claire - or any other magazine they’ve finished with when they visit. My subscription to Writing Magazine is automatically renewed each year (I’m pleased to say over the years I’ve had the odd feature and mentions in there). This year I’ve even taken out a subscription for the French answer to Country Living - Campagne Decoration.

My large coffee table bears witness to the amount of magazines currently in the house.

So, do you subscribe to your favourite magazines or simply grab a copy off the shelves when you see them? Or, do you never bother with magazines?