I used to look forward to my weekly dose of The Staggers. My print copy of The New Stateman would drop into the mailbox each week, bringing me a mixture of hope, despair and thoughtful distraction. Along with the daily delights from this place, and the music monthlies, my time available for ploughing into my huge inbound paperback stack was heftily reduced, but happily so.

When the Staggers ceased to arrive here at the tail-end of ’23 (despite no emailed or posted reminder) on Jan 5th ’24 I paid to renew my recently lapsed print sub for another full year. But no New Statesman copies subsequently arrived. Braving their dire telephone ‘customer support’ service, I queried this, but they palmed me off by saying I’d subscribed via a 3rd party – I’d renewed via magazines.co.uk the big subcriptions accumulator site, and suggested I raise the issue there instead.

At first I assumed that things were just taking a long time and waited a couple more weeks, yet still no New Statesman copies arrived. So I queried things with the magazines.co.uk people – the third party.

They were super helpful – confirming with detailed evidence that my subscription renewal had » Continue Reading.