What do you mean ‘no wine for me thank you’ ???

I wonder if there comes a time in every journalist’s career when they are hit by the crashing realisation that they’re about to vomit on an interviewee’s head.

Perhaps it comes to them the morning after a particularly heavy night of alcohol-fuelled lamentation that they didn’t become a doctor or a plumber or professional dog walker. Perhaps it’s after a spot of dodgy egg mayo at another barely relevant event minuted in hastily scrawled notes that they will only realise, some weeks later, are in a shorthand with logic unique to the ‘of course I’ll know what I mean’ moment. Or perhaps, like me, they will have recently discovered themselves inexplicably with child in the wrong place and at the wrong time.*

It was February 10^th. I had woken up at the crack of a sparrow’s fart to drive from Guildford to Coventry via my broken-legged-editor’s house (she happily oblivious, at that point, to the hormones scrambling my brain into a squashy mess of questionable driving ability). The night previously I had returned home from a week-long skiing holiday, which had mainly consisted of me channelling my lower limbs into the most controlled parallels turns in the history of conscientious skiing, my mind torn between inanely repeating the chorus of Homer Simpson’s Baby on Board and sending subconscious fuck-off vibes to all beginner skiers and boarders within a 10 feet radius. Bean-sized baby intact, my sister and I had returned to the UK, freshly grey with what was to be the first of many sneezes of snow, and here I was, for the second time, covering the industry’s biggest trade show of the year. I had been pregnant for just under nine weeks.

For the most part, I hadn’t been feeling too bad. Sure, there had been a wobbly moment on a train a few weeks earlier when I very nearly did faint on some hapless commuter’s shoes, but otherwise it was mainly an ever-present lurk of nausea. A bit like the sound of cheerful relatives on a hungover Christmas morning, or the pink stuff you keep spitting out whenever you brush your teeth. More irritating than inconvenient, really, particularly as munching on plain cream crackers seemed to knock it on the head quite nicely. But I was beginning to realise, that day in Coventry, that sitting at one’s desk nibbling a cracker whilst surreptitiously congratulating oneself at being the master of deception among one’s unaware colleagues was not quite the same as wincing about on decent-work-shoe heels, trying to keep up a coherent conversation about the state of the garden market while the swimming white noise surged ever closer round the corners of one’s ears.

Luckily, I didn’t actually vomit on anyone’s head. I wrapped up the interview pretty quickly, hoping my face wasn’t going quite so milky on the outside as it was on the inside, and made my way back to our exhibition stand. A few crisps and a chug of orange juice later and I was ready for round two.

I hadn’t really thought at any point in the lead up to the show that I wouldn’t be able to do it. I was nine weeks pregnant, for goodness’ sake, not 39! But I did have my concerns that my colleagues might realise that something was going on when I didn’t accept my usual bucket of wine as soon as the earliest decent drinking opportunity rolled around. That evening, as we regrouped in the Premier Inn bar, and I opted for orange juice for the second round of drinks in a row, my editor raised her eyebrows at me and asked if I was on some sort of detox health kick. “Just trying to cut back,” I mumbled in reply.

“Yeah, either that or you’re pregnant!”

Well, it was nice being a master of deception for those nine short weeks.**

 

 

*I don’t mean to imply this pregnancy was unwanted – spectacularly unplanned and ill-timed in terms of life/career plans, yes, but never for one second unwanted.

**Technically only three if you don’t count the first six when I too, was counted among the happily oblivious and therefore perfectly eligible to drink half a bottle of wine while blearily deciding that Tyrion the Imp from Game of Thrones was quite hot actually.

Running in the Park, a.k.a The faces and the simple goodness

It’s hot and undignified and there is a level of ornery endurance which is not quite pain but is too close to be called anything else, and once you reach it you truly don’t give a shit what you look like. It’s not particularly freeing because you then realise you don’t care and start to worry anyway. It’s not about the endorphins or the tight feeling in my body all day afterwards. It’s not the glorious stretch of hot muscles. It’s not a flatter belly, a guilt-free pile of hot buttered toast.

It’s the faces and the simple goodness of them. The stumbling man in his too-big sweat-stain of a shirt which wasn’t designed for cardio but is the oldest, plainest thing in his wardrobe. He lumbers on at barely a trot and grimaces if you catch his eye, but he’s there and he’s doing something better than lazing on the couch with a fry-up.

There are the groups and classes of runners whose constant determination ranges from competitive to agonised. There are the dog-and/or-kid runners, stop-starting along the outer paths, bodies constantly lopsided as they squint over their shoulders.

Then come the wobbling warriors who grit their teeth past the sweat-stained stumblers. Their running clothes are new and already loose, their limbs flab beneath the vast, angry rashes of skin, but you can almost see the fat melting as they pound the pavement one jiggle at a time. Their faces are the most open because they are engaged with the best of themselves, they wear their pride in all its extra pounds of glory.

There are the gliders. The svelte tans and jiggle-free thighs, running shorts clinging lovingly to their pert bottoms as if to say yes, this is where I belong, back on the model, back on the runway. Ears beneath styled, sweat-free hair are wired to iPod armbands and beady eyes rake your body, assess your fitness and thinness and smugly look away. But let’s face it, we don’t look them in the eye much because as soon as we’ve lumbered our way level with the gravity-defying incredulity of their lower bodies, they glide themselves off into a beautiful sprint.

Leaving us. The rest of them. Plugged desperately into our iPods because music is the only thing that keeps our feet pounding onwards, distracting us from the fact that we are running and we’ve got miles to go before we can stop. Our running clothes are the right size but somehow there’s always something that goes wrong around mile two – something slipping down or wedging up where it shouldn’t, an uncomfortable jiggle or pinch of pain somewhere deep and unreachable. We’re lone and in the zone, but not quite enough not to notice the stumblers and gliders and the dogs and kids, the wobblers and the groups we’d join if we thought we could commit to doing this on a regular basis. We admire the stumblers and the wobblers – most of them are fitter than us. We are wary of the kids and dogs. We hate the gliders. They are who we could be if we did this everyday. They are who we fail to be because we have a weakness for our sofas. But we tolerate them because they push us and even though we know their perfect arms and non-stomachs will glide on and leave us in the shadow of their beautiful bottoms, we will still grit our teeth and our arses and try, try to catch them.

It’s the faces and the simple goodness of them. Of being one of them and knowing that even though we judge and we stumble and we smell, we’re all here and we’re all moving. We’re linked in this inherently human thing, like ants in ranks, our bodies our own for the good and the bad. We might be lawyers or mothers or jobless or journalists. We might be cheaters or monogamists, liars, beaters, bullies or saints. Stumblers, gliders, wobblers, groupies, kid-and-dog owners, loners. We’re all here, doing something simply good.

One f*ck up after the next

I f*cked up at work. Not devastatingly. Not enough to have serious repercussions on my life or my job (I hope!) I’m not going to share what I did, not because I’m ashamed, but because this is the internet and I don’t want to make a bad situation worse. But needless to say, I wrote something which royally pissed off a very respected client and source.

I think it’s great that at journalism school we’re taught about what we can’t broadcast, what we shouldn’t write, who we shouldn’t quote. It’s great that we graduate knowing exactly what happened in the case studies that make up our legal yesses and epic nos. But it doesn’t change the fact that when you’re working, there will come a time when you will read what you have written and either say “NO” and hit that delete button, or say “F*CK IT” and hit send/press print/open your mouth and start reading. Sometimes it pays off to take a gamble, and sometimes it doesn’t.

I felt terrible about the mistake I made this week, until I talked to some of my colleagues, and remembered stories I had been told by past colleagues and journalist friends. Then it got me thinking… A true, respectable career in journalism seems not so much pitted by these f*ck ups as paved by them. I’m not saying it’s good to repeatedly piss people off and alienate important clients, listeners, viewers, readers; but there’s an undeniable glint of pride which creeps into a seasoned journalist’s eye when they tell you about the time they had to take out an affidavit to ensure their back was covered with a slightly dubious source, or how relieved they subsequently were when their byline was dropped from the finished article.

I may not be willing to share the latest f*ck up of my progressing career as a journalist, but there are other stories. Seasoned readers of this blog will know of postal-worker-gate. That was probably the earliest… Then there was the time I wrote about a drugs bust, quoting (rather too heavily as it turned out) from the objecting onlookers rather than the police presence. A week later I was summoned up to the station for a ‘friendly chat’ with the chief inspector and sergeant. Terrifying. There were countless misquotes surrounding village shops and local committees. I recall popping into a farmers’ market, introducing myself to one of the stall-holders and then getting a rather stern telling-off from a member of the WI for some long-published discrepancy about coffee mornings or jam jars or something.

Then there were the emails. The lovely, sterile typefaces forming caustic judgements on your ability to listen, to recount, to talk, to tell… to write. I was told I ‘lowered the tone of the Gazette’ because in a reply email – yes, EMAIL, not published article – I used the word gotten. (I resisted the urge to point out my occasional lapse into this so-called ‘abhorrent Americanism’ was not in fact due to the influence of modern television on my language choices but the fact I’d had, until very recently, an American father) I’ve been told – sometimes nicely and sometimes not so – I’m not very bright. I’ve been told I’m a horrible writer.

There are other stories. The worst stories – the ones where there is no gleam in your eye or belly-rippling giggle under your words – are those mistakes that hit you like a punch in the gut. The blade gripped in your hand, cleaving an insouciant tattoo into your own back as you press send.

In July 2009 two teenagers and a nine-year-old boy died in a car crash in my reporting patch. I covered the story for the paper.A week later one of the victim’s family members came to see me in tears because of an implication taken from my recounting of the events. An implication that their boy had not been acting responsibly. When I realised what I’d done to them, the bottom dropped out of my world. It was a level of shitty feeling equal to finding out my dad had cancer. You don’t hear so many of those stories, but they are there, behind the tobacco stains and the fatty livers, lying at the root of what makes journalism a crappy job.

But, on balance, it’s those gleams and those stories – those indignant phone calls, impossibly stupid decisions made in those squeezingly-urgent moments of deadline – that makes the job balance out. Because, when it pays off, those f*ck ups can make you.

Hey world, why all the tradge?

“Adele wrote 21 when she was in the depths of break-up despair and a little bit fat. She’s now happy, in love and getting fit… Her next album won’t be half as good.”

If I’ve overheard it once, I’ve overheard it a million times. And not just about Adele and the beautifully melancholic whine-fest which I can only listen to if I reeeeeeeeally want to that is 21. I don’t remember a time I didn’t know because it was constantly drummed into me that tragedy is easier to write than comedy. Is it because the world is sick with cynicism? I learned at the age of 15 in a very poorly-executed GCSE Speaking and Listening presentation that you can’t, for love, money, or the desperate pitch of an eraser at an over-achiever’s head, MAKE an audience laugh. So why is it so easy to make them cry? Or, should I be asking, why is it so easy to make them want to cry?

As a journalist I have always found the most popular stories – whether that’s measured by website hits, comment, or even ye olde letters to the editor – are negative. Always. And I don’t have to link to a pyscho-babble article in the Guardian to say why: People love tragedy because it makes them feel better about their own lives. It’s why EastEnders is still going after nearly 30 years, it’s why the glossies and the red tops are always searching for that one in 10 billion shot which’ll make Cheryl Cole look fat and why that story probably got more hits than any government budget updates over the past 5 years combined. And it’s probably the reason why Someone Like You, in all its wailing glory, was the best-selling UK single of 2011.

Today I found out that my last post, that heartfelt, yowling whine from one of the most teeth-pullingly frustrating times of my life was one of the deciding factors in my current employers offering me a job. A job which I love and which has given me everything I so wanted for so long. There’s a lot to be said for tragedy.

The Five Stages of UNEMPLOYdenialMENT

So forget grief a second. (And the running… my legs are on hiatus) Here I am, four months post last exam, every day I basically do the job of a broadcast journalist at a very nice, local radio station. But I’m not paid, I have no written agreements and I can’t afford to move out of my mum’s house. It’s a strange and unnatural state, this unemployment. And I’ve come to view my own experiences in five phases – not so much the stepping-stone progression stages like the Grief journey, more like a haphazard cycling of which lottery ball is going to spurt out of Lancelot today…

1. Determinedly Blind Optimism.

Symptoms:

• Innocuous thrill at the send of CV, Cover Letter and demo to job adverts
• Belief of Smug Employed (S.E.) words of encouragement (incl: ‘The right job is out there, I KNOW IT’  Of course you do, you’ve bloody got it.)
• Refusal to accept that that well-known media group really did make you spend hundreds of pounds getting your butt up to London for an interview on TWO DAYS notice, PLUS overnight stay, PLUS awful cold of the sandpaper-throat, dripping face variety just to Not Bloody Bother Contacting You Despite Follow-up Nag for three weeks and counting thereafter.

2. Anger of the Face-Mutilation Persuasion

• This comes courtesy of a former classmate of mine, whose frustration about the well-meaning encouragement of S. E.s (see above) she likened to wanting to stab said S. E.s in their eyes.
• Mainly when you’re unemployed you spend a lot of time alone with your anger. This can lead to it turning inwards, which is, let’s face it, not an unreasonable direction for it to choose.  After all, most of the people you went to school/university/old job/university again with have great jobs now, what’s wrong with you?  To avoid this turning into Phase Number 3, I would revert back to Number 1.  Or at least direct anger at the Philistines mentioned in 1.3

3. Oh Dear Misery and/or Depression of the Much Woe Is Me variety

• One can only take so much rejection after application stage before one begins wondering whether it was something one wrote.  And conclude one is a terrible writer with no business calling themselves a journalist. Add alcohol.
• One can only take so much rejection after the face-to-face interview stage before one starts wondering if it was something one said, unwittingly inferred or, in my recent case, facially leaked. And conclude one is a social miscreant with no business calling oneself a broadcast journalist. Add alcohol.  Add chocolate.
• Age can be an issue at this stage I think.  Especially if you’re a 24-year-old Work Experience Girl constantly being asked what you want to do when you’re…er… finished.  Ok, it could be worse. I turn 25 in 2 months.
• Living at home = major exacerbation of this stage.  Especially when your hairdresser, age 20, tells you she’s been living in her own flat since she was 16.
• Alcohol makes much better… then much, much worse. Unless it is a Friday, then all the S.E.s become your lovely friends again.

4. Consideration of Career Change

• In the past four months I have thought about becoming: a chef, an actress/singer, a dog-walker, a ferry attendant, cab driver, bus driver, pilot, policewoman, fire fighter, paramedic, doctor, nurse, architect, archeologist, painter, plumber, milk lady, teacher, lollipop lady, lecturer, author, paid blog-writer, inventor who goes on Dragon’s Den and discovers elusive Pathway Into TV, local politician, helicopter engineer, royal marine/army officer, naval officer, sailor, shop keeper, night watchman, lifeguard, priest
• In the past four months I have done some semi-serious research into how one would become a: pilot, policewoman, fire-fighter, paramedic, archeologist, author, paid blog-writer, army officer, priest (if you count googling How To Pray during one dark depth of Number 3)
• In the past four months I have taken steps to launch my new career path in:

5. Utter, Humiliating Desperation

• See above for example of Google search provoked by such.
• This stage can lead to those fateful additions to your Cover Letter which tip you over the edge – beware any sentence bearing the words ‘I know the job description says I need to be a qualified …. but….’  Also to be avoided is the classic: ‘Salary expectations? Well, to be honest, I will work for anything.’ Can lead to the fielding of some rather awkward questions.
• Unfortunately this phase can also lend itself to Self Sabotage, and not in the Meredith Grey sense of the phrase.  This one applies to interviews.  You can find yourself gabbling on and on and on about how paranoid local people can be about their post offices closing while your inner voice is saying Dear God Shut Up He Only Asked You How You Got Here This Morning.
• I should perhaps, given my current situation, offer a cautionary about the words ‘I’ll work for free’ but to be honest, I’m not going to rant about the work I’m doing because I DO love it and it’s not the money thing that drags me through these phases over and over and over again.  It’s the ego thing.  And that’s one thing my CV could definitely do without.

So there you have it, my Unemploydenialment Cycle of Me.  Learn from it if you will.  And if you’re lucky enough to have a job you love, well good for you.  Just wear sunglasses the next time you take your poor unemployed friend to lunch.

Week Six; Slapton Ley: the Beast of the 6k.

Last Thursday and yesterday I ran this route along Slapton Ley for the first time, clocking up a surprising 6.1k, according to my pedometer.

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Yesterday’s run was by far the harder of the two on this stretch.  I don’t know if this was because I hadn’t run for two days, had drunk a couple of glasses of red wine the night before or simply because I was feeling particularly tired but it was the first time I was running along and having to talk myself into carrying on.  It didn’t help that I did something incredibly stupid when I was stretching after my warm-up first k.  See, I love this run along the Ley BUT I have to drive to get there, which means aside from my water bottle I have to carry my car keys and 7 million key rings in the other hand.  I put my left foot up behind me to stretch my quad and instead of grabbing the foot with my left hand, which was holding my keys, I grabbed it with my right.  OW!!!  It felt like I’d literally ripped the muscle in half!

My first thought was that I wouldn’t be able to walk back to the car let alone finish my run.  But then I remembered the phrase ‘run it off’ when football players get all twisted up on the pitch so I stretched the muscle again (OOOOOOW!) and lolloped away.  After a few hundred metres, it was only giving me the occasional twinge and today it’s fine so, thank goodness, lesson learned and no harm done.

It IS a gorgeous run though, and it combats the problems I was having with the fiendishly steep hills in my town as it is a mainly flat stretch.  When I can go a little further (I’m hoping to do 6.5 tomorrow and be up to 7/7.5 by the end of this week) I will perhaps park at the other end and carry on along the Strete coast path.

I never realised how much more fun it is to run a new route…  I think to avoid feeling the same sinking I’m-not-having-fun-anymore feeling I had yesterday I’m going to try and come up with a new route every week.  The challenge will be accommodating the increases to my distances, and trying to find new circular routes so I don’t have to double back all the time.  Game on.

Racing for Life into Week Five…

After a dogged struggle from last Tuesday’s agonising first-run-after-holiday all the way to a much more confident (but still a bit slow) 5k by Saturday, I went to the Exeter Race for Life event on Sunday feeling like I would at least be able to stagger my way around the track.  Maybe it was all the hills I’ve been struggling up round here, maybe it was the fact that there were so many runners and joggers all around me (as opposed to The Only Runner In The Village syndrome I get when training) but I actually found it quite easy and really good fun.  The route was fairly flat, and a lot of it passed over rocky or grassy terrain which meant I had to hop, skip and jump a few times to avoid getting my foot stuck in a rabbit hole or knackering my tendons by springing unevenly off random grassy mounds, but all in all it was a much easier path than the runs I do around Dartmouth.

Me and my running buddy Fry at the Exeter Race for Life

Above is a pic of my running partner and old school friend Helen Fry and I as we were about to set off.  I know hot pink isn’t exactly my colour (and after I’ve been running a couple of k it REALLY isn’t my colour) but vanity isn’t exactly high on my priority list when running.  For someone who never left the house without a full face of makeup since the age of 14, the freedom of being in a situation – training, I mean – where it genuinely does not matter at ALL what you look like is so freeing.  Having said that, I don’t understand what it is about a runner that makes people stop and STARE, like I’m some freaky rare species of elephant that’s sprouted a pneumonic drill from its bottom and tunnelled, upwards, to burst through the tarmac in front of them.  I mean, really.  I’m just running.

Anyway, back to the Race for Life.  The experience taught me two main things – one is that I am fitter than I thought and if I keep up the training I might just be able to do the half marathon in a few months.  The other is the totally humbling realisation that I have some of the most generous friends and family on the planet.  I launched my fundraising page 6 days before the event with the very hopeful target goal of £150 and, thanks to them, entered the race on Sunday with more than £300 sponsorship.   THAT is what I’ll remember about this Race for Life, for me it just completely outstrips any part of the race itself.  Well, maybe except for the giant, cottage-size mound of manure on the 1k hill.