God Bless You, Mr Bywater

Read a newspaper for a year or two, and the columnists' voices will move into your head- discreetly, like Borrowers, making their homes in unused mental space. You don't have to particularly like them- you don't even have to believe in them. A friend of mine was convinced that Guardian cookery correspondent Heston Blumenthal was actually an April's Fools Joke that the paper had quietly continued for five odd years. Each week, she'd read about his explorations in food science at his quantum kitchen in The Fat Duck restaurant and chuckle fondly at the geekboy roccoco that resulted. Leather chocolates! Bacon and egg ice-cream! Sardine on toast sorbet! That byline photo! And each week she sighed to think of the drones who stumbled across this batshit monomania in the middle of the style section and just carried on as normal. Even when Blumenthal stories started to move from the supplement to the broadsheet, she was unfazed. If the Guardian reported on its front page that The Fat Duck had been voted the best restaurant in the world, this just meant the joke was moving on to another level- now Blumenthal had become a broader, juicier satire on the cult of celebrity, and it was no surprise that other newspapers were trying to get in on the act. All that was missing was the big punchline- if they'd run a story that Heston Blumenthal had started hiding golden tickets in bowls of snail porridge, she wouldn't have been surprised. It got to the stage where it would have been easier for the Universe to obliterate all traces of Heston Blumenthal than for her to admit he existed- and yet, through all of this, my friend had Heston Blumenthal's voice down.

So even the columnists you resist make an impact. But the good ones, they can end up moulding you. Reading a familiar columnist is a hazy and utterly useless pleasure; the closest an adult can get to requesting a favourite bedtime story. You know pretty much what they're going to say, and can hazard a fairly good guess at the stories they'll weave in and quotes they'll adduce- but still, you need to hear it, in their voice. Over time, you can build up a dependency. So when one of your favourites disappears, with no warning, a gulf opens up between what you're supposed to feel (mild irritation) and what you actually feel (as if you'd called round to a mate's house for a chat only to find the windows boarded up, the furniture ripped out and Dom Fucking Joly installed as tenant).

This is pretty much where I found myself when I opened last week's Independent on Sunday and saw that Michael Bywater's column had disappeared. True, Bywater had written an elegaic goodbye the week earlier, but he does that about ten times a year; you're not meant to take it seriously. The point of Michael Bywater is that he's always saying goodbye to something or other, perhaps with regret, perhaps with bitterness, but most often with a melancholy-mad blend of the two- a terse, conflicted wave out the back window as we speed away from the debris of our past. Towards the end he was producing too many one-note screeds, where the outrage was real and necessary, but he couldn't get purchase; it was like watching a toy car upended with its wheels still spinning. But when he had traction, he was unstoppable: acute, committed and hilarious. More than any other columnist I've read, he was pure voice; everything was done by tone, timing and rhythm. But it doesn't matter anymore; he's gone, wherever it is old columnists go (I wish him well there), and when I rang his doorbell Dom Joly answered instead. I lingered out of politeness, hoping he'd say a few words about the previous tenant, but he just mumbled a paragraph or two of Dom Joly shtick, where what initially appears as outright arrogance gradually reveals itself as good old fashioned self-disgust. After a while, he launched into a long joke about bears shitting in the woods, then broke off, asking loudly why this material wasn't good enough for the broadsheet. Only when I went to turn the page did he try to tie up the loose ends. "About those bears.." he began, but what with the dogs barking and the chainsaws revving in the back garden I couldn't hear a single word he said.

Actually, this is way over the top. Joly isn't the worst celebrity columnist by far, and even without Bywater I'm still a sucker for the Independent on Sunday. True the broadsheet is merely a decoy, a cheerful precis of the week slapped together by someone who's read Heat magazine and half of Wednesday's Guardian. But the arts review is a gem. I think this is partly down to the economy of the format (sure, there's room around the margins for round-ups and snap judgements, but the main article always covers just one film or just one gig), and partly down to the enthusiasm of the writers. Reading many arts journalists, all you sense is their engagement with their own review, their struggle to turn this film or album into a professional piece of writing. This is fair enough, but the crew at the IoS seem to have a different motivation; you imagine they're impatient to push off from their desk and throw themselves at the source material- to do it again, and do it better. This means their reviews never end tidily- they always fizzle out in a sputter of fixes, parallels, possible next steps. The difference between the Observer and the IoS is the difference between Blue Peter and Why Don't You? At its best, the Independent on Sunday offers a vision of a world where everyone is inventive, engaged, bubbling over with ideas; where everyone is Heston Blumenthal.

Now, about those bears...