Paper Monitor
09:54 UK time, Tuesday, 31 August 2010
A service highlighting the riches of the daily press.
Despite looking out at a clear blue sky, Paper Monitor is nevertheless shrouded in a strange kind of gloom.
The day after the August bank holiday carries the same sort of baggage as mid-January.
But rather than post-festive blues, it is the feeling that another summer has passed by without ever truly fulfilling the potential of those early weeks of sunshine, when the vast majority of us were still at work.
Thank goodness, then, for Britain's tabloids. They soak up every last beam of sunshine from the fun-filled public holiday and reflect it back to help everyone get through the working day.
There are pictures of smiling children clutching ice creams, the inevitable bikini-clad young women and people taking part in all manner of seaside sport.
"Brits are beaming at Bank Hol sun," reports the newspaper of the same name, helpfully forgetting that most Brits will by now be reading those words on the daily commute, behind a desk or during a tea break on the construction site.
The Daily Star goes one better by announcing: "September is set to be a sizzler."
Its stablemate, the Daily Express agrees. It quotes Jonathan Powell from the suspiciously optimistic-sounding Positive Weather Solutions as suggesting England will be "hotter than Barcelona" at the start of September.
"The weather here will probably be equivalent to the South of France and the warm temperatures should hold up well into the second part of September," he says.
The broadsheets, however, adopt an altogether less cheerful tone.
For example, the Daily Telegraph notes with bitter irony that after August being characterised by umbrellas and wellies: "Only now is the sun returning, just as the school holidays draw to a close and millions of Britons head back to their desks after a damp staycation."
Paper Monitor's mood darkens further on reading the word "staycation", which is meaningless to the millions of people who usually holiday in Britain anyway. (Although perhaps not that many of them make up the Telegraph's readership.)
Even hopes of an Indian summer are dampened by the paper, which suggests forecasters expect showers by the weekend.
However, the Times takes the prize for the gloomiest outlook, revelling in misery by starting a new series with the stark title "Back to work".
Its political writer Ben Macintyre casts aside the summer along with David Cameron's Cornish holiday snaps, and predicts "gnarly seas ahead" for the coalition government.
Underneath a huge photograph of Chancellor George Osborne wearing an even-grimmer-than-usual expression, Mr Macintyre writes:
"Looming over the entire political season is the fear of a double dip recession, the monster wave that could roll in and swamp the beast-laid political calculations."
So, it was with a sigh of relief that Paper Monitor turned to the Independent to find its bank holiday coverage limited to a simple report of London's Notting Hill Carnival.
It lists some wonderful statistics. Notably, that revellers ate an estimated five tonnes of chicken and listened to 16,000 records played via 41 sound systems.
However, with the collective consumption amounting to some 25,000 bottles of rum, Paper Monitor wonders whether anyone at all in west London managed to make it to work to feel miserable anyway.
The 
