September 17th - September 22nd 2002
Sunday Nutter
Saturday More caffeine
Friday Illustrated Books
Thursday Love
Wednesday Urnings
Tuesday My first job
Monday Smut
Sunday 22nd September 2002
I don't imagine anybody takes the Daily Star seriously as a newspaper these days, but in the unlikely event of your ever being tempted, I urge you to consider this:
Saturday 21st September 2002
Do you know Sir Peregrine Worsthorne?
The highest of high Tories, 'Perry' edited the Sunday Telegraph at a time when it was still posible to treat post-fascism as a quaint radical affectation, and to get patted on the back for sudden swerves of political allegiance - as when he announced that, actually, he didn't think The Bomb was such a good idea after all or, later, when he went to some pains to meet some young black people and professed himself delighted by their company.
You can get a taste of his style from Why gay sex was good for me a piece he wrote in the wake of the Portillo revelations: it's nonsense, but it's very elegant nonsense.
These days, Sir Perry seems pretty much reduced to writing an occasional diary piece for the Spectator, the Telegraph's sister publication. Physically, the years have taken their toll: think Quentin Crisp as conceived by Anthony Trollope and portrayed by Sir Ian McKellen: concentrated high camp.
Now nerve yourself for the revelations in his latest diary:
Put on coffee enemas as part of a cure to help me break a hellish addiction to the anti-depressant Seroxat, I have accidentally discovered, a bit late in the day for me, that they are a sure-fire remedy for hangovers. No, the cure is not worse than the disease. After the coffee, taken without cream or sugar, has done its detoxifying work - which takes 15 minutes - you resume life feeling as fresh as a daisy.
Friday 20th September 2002
One of my current jobs, each week, is to collate the book reviews from two newspapers and wave my wand over them to make them into a single web page. The biggest challenge is to choose one review or feature to head the page, where it will be accompanied by a graphic. I get paid a minimal amount of money to do this, so spending anything longer than half an hour finding this graphic makes no sense at all.
If I'm lucky, I'll find an illustration with a search through the paper's own photo archive - as with a couple of weeks ago when, to illustrate a feature on Elvis books, I got to use a nice shot of Elvis on a wall poster looming over a solitary reader in a bookshop.
But I'm rarely that lucky - the things that interest news photographers rarely coincide with what authors are writing about - so I'm usually forced back onto Google's image search, frantically searching for something relevant that you can quickly mess with in Photoshop.
You'd think that biographies would be the easiest to illustrate: just chuck in a picture of the person in question, right? Unfortunately, the size of the graphic - 277px wide by 150px high - is distinctly letterboxed in shape whereas people, most people, have roughly square heads and/or oblong bodies. You end up with a lot of blank space surrounding the hero or heroine.
Sometimes I have no choice but to go ahead and create my own illustration from scratch, and needless to say it usually takes a lot longer than half an hour. That's a lot of unpaid effort, so I reckon I'm well within my rights to share some of them with you here. (NB: there are no prizes for working out which paper I work for. But, y'know...discretion, discretion.)
But first, a challenge. How would you illustrate the following articles? Remember, you don't have all day to do zis.
A history of a group of seventeenth century scholars who met each full moon (so as to be able to see their way home afterwards)
A biography of Napoleon, written by the paper's proprietor, notoriously right-wing, notoriously anti-Europe
Children's Books - Then and Now
A book about poison and poisoners, headlined 'Poison in the teacup'
"Summer reading"
A survey of all the books written about September 11th
I'll show you what I came up with some time next week.
Thursday 19th September 2002
Love will tear us apart was always a great song. But I don't think we ever expected to hear it adapted as an anthem for Anglican church?
Heard on Channel 4 at around 3am this morning, a link for their coverage of the MTV Video Awards: "And now, for the girls, and for the boys who go to the Vauxhall Tavern on a Sunday afternoon - Best Male!"
Imagine my astonishment.
(Mind you, the winner turned out to be Eminem rather than Nelly, so..)
Wednesday 18th September 2002
Admiral Sir Sandy Woodward displayed the subtlety and tact that we've come to expect from British military men when he defended British Nuclear Fuels shipping arrangements yesterday: "You've got to put a bloody great bomb under that ship to make anything come out of it." Thanks Sandy.
BNFL's attempts to reassure us about the safety of the five-tons of rejected plutonium they've been fruitlessly ferrying from one end of the earth to the other were apparently further undermined by an offstage explosion - as the tea urn in the press room blew up.
Sadly, I can't track down any on-line pictures of Big Brother Alex Sibley modelling cashmere underpants for Scott Henshall at London Fashion Week. Nice thought though. (Or is that just me?)
Elsewhere on the planet, Independent Television Commission have cleared Channel 4 of accusations of racism - but only because Tim's 'joke' failed to reference any particular ethnic group by name. So that's all right then.
Tuesday 17th September 2002
My first job
When I was told - long after the event - that my mother's deathbed wish was that I should be send to boarding school, I put it down to lower middle-class snobbery. (Many years later, when I discovered that my father had also lost his mother as a young boy, I realised she'd merely been seeking to shield me from his total ineptitude as a loving parent.)
Any illusions I had about snobbery soon faded in the face of the school itself, an institution which, far from aspiring to breed the future Leaders of Empire, turned out to be nothing so much as a finishing school for middle management wannabes.
So it still puzzles me that, when it came to careers advice, they were totally apathetic.
The 'Careers Room' was a beaded-glass cubicle, key on request, containing a couple of shelves full of dusty brochures from major multinationals. Presumably, as we reached the sixth form, we were occasionally despatched on day-visits to various organisations ('work-experience') but I remember none of that - quite possibly because, like every other sixth-former, I was far too busy working out how to slope off to some pub.
What I can be certain of is that nobody, at any stage, discussed my future with me. Nobody gave me even the faintest idea what it might be like to hold down a job as, say, a fireman, or a vet, a graphic designer or a pediatrician: children these days can at least catch glimpses of some of these potential careers on tv - our access, needless to say, was strictly limited.
So, in 1969, having managed (to my complete satisfaction) to fail to qualify for access to yet further education, I found myself stranded back at home without the faintest idea what to do next or, indeed, any real desire to do anything at all, other than lie in bed till noon and sulk.
My father, in one of his biennial accesses of child-management zeal, announced that I was getting a haircut and moving in with some friends of his in London whence, it was assumed, I would somehow magically gravitate into some worthwhile vocation.
He also pulled some strings to procure me an interview for the management training course at ShellMex, where the not-entirely-tempting prospect of running my own service station by the time I was twenty-five singularly failed to enthrall me.
Eventually, becoming bored with trying to find things to do in London on half a crown a day, I took a desultory leaf through some directory or other that I unearthed in the local library. Accountancy? No! Addiction counselling? Not yet. Advertising? Oooh.
In mitigation I must remind you: this was the beginning of the Seventies. Advertising was the cutting-edge technology of the new mass market. It was cool, it was trendy, it was entirely groovy. Best yet, it was an industry that appeared to put more faith in native talent than in redbrick university degrees.
I sat down and wrote a series of hand-crafted hire-me letters to each and every one of the agencies listed in the Advertising Annual. The idea of selecting a short-list of companies that might best suit my particular native talents (whatever the hell they were) never occurred to me - how could it, when I knew not the first thing about what actually went on?
I slowly amassed quite an impressive portfolio of rejection letters, each impeccably typed on embossed letterheads and signed with a flourish. I imagine I even went for a couple of interviews. The only one which I remember, however, was at a company called Walter Judd Limited, who turned out to operate from a dusty grey Edwardian office block just off behind St Pauls.
The man who interviewed me, known then and thenceforward as 'Mr Brockwell', explained that Walter Judd was a 'financial advertising agency'. Oh, right, I said. The post under discussion was as asssistant to Mr Julian Judd, himself the assistant to Mr James Judd, the managing director. My role, said Mr Brockwell, would be to liase with senior City people as and when they needed to advertise their most recent financial results, or publicise a new share offer, that kind of thing.
They were looking for someone upright, biddable, intelligent, presentable. Oh, right, I said. And agreed to a starting salary of thirteen pounds three and six a week.
Somewhere between the interview and starting work, inscrutable wheels spun. Even now I have no idea what happened, though I imagine it had something to do with Mr Brockwell's ambition to move the company slightly closer to consumer advertising. Or maybe the Judd family discovered a long-lost cousin whom they trusted more than me not to eat his peas with a knife.
My first day, and every day for several months thereafter, was spent working as a Voucher Clerk.
In addition to their core financial business, and a small Display (i.e. consumer) operation, Judd's had a thriving Classified Department. They catered, almost entirely, to large corporations and government authorities looking for staff, for whom they booked hundreds, probably thousands, of small ads in a range of often incredibly obscure newspapers and magazines.
Beyond knowing which paper was the best place to find, say, an Oceanographics Futures Consultant, Judd's input was almost entirely administrative: they typed up the job ad, made recommendations as to appropriate media, booked (and eventually paid for) the space and, on the rare occasions when the situation vacant merited more than a few lines, created and delivered 'blocks' - the metal plates that enabled the reproduction of company logos and any type face other than Courier or Times New Roman.
The record of this sea of small print was kept on a series of huge paper sheets, with column after column of detail filled in by hand. (I remind you: this was before they invented computers.) And each and every working day, one or other of we three Voucher Clerks had to decipher what ads were due to appear that day, find a copy of the appropriate journal, cut out the relevant few lines and paste them down onto a sheet of paper that would be despatched to the client as proof that the ad had appeared.
Some journals, the ones in which we placed a lot of ads, came into the office automatically. Most had to be sent for. Those who had offices in London were patrolled by one of Judd's most idiosyncratic features, the Messengers, a benchful of phlegmy pensioners who spent their day trudging arthritically from one end of Fleet Street to the other, brandishing the little pink slips we'd filled in for them, returning at tea-time with their hold-alls stuffed with newsprint.
I'd never seen anything like it. I knew how to construct an essay, I was fluent in French, I knew the equations that governed the movement of mass over distance - but no-one had ever taught me how to speak on a telephone, let alone take instructions or make requests of people with strange accents in distant parts of the country.
I'd never worked as part of an organisation, with its own unwritten rules and its own strange code of behaviour. And I had no idea at all of how to relate to a bunch of unknown people sharing a room, the small talk of who's having a baby or who went to the pictures with whom, the rush for the door at five thirty sharp, the individual tics and quirks of character.
For all I knew, everybody's immediate boss unwrapped his home-made sandwiches promptly at 1 o'clock and then put his feet up on the desk for a nap till two. Maybe every organisation harboured a Irish harridan in the corner, wearing rubber gloves and a polyester work-coat to fend off the newsprint. Perhaps all offices had their telephone switchboards manned by an immensely fat woman in a headset, listening in on the MD's calls, and cutting short communications by pulling the plug on people she'd taken a dislike to.
It was totally bizarre.
But I learnt quickly enough, and soon came to relish Friday evenings, counting my wages on the bus home, setting aside five quid for my rent, five shillings for a visit to the cinema. Until one day, Mr Brockwell called me into his office, told me to take a seat, and...
That, however, was my second job...
Monday 16th September 2002
Smut bulletin
A doctor has been cleared of the rare charge of procuring sexual intercourse by false representation. ('Extra well endowed' Gaydar users heave sigh of relief.)
In Edinburgh, a man has appeared in court charged with having public sex with a traffic cone.(Hang on, didn't I see the video of that somewhere?)
The world's oldest penis (only at Blogadoon).
God knows we've been hinting for years, but now it seems that David is finally going to have a wash. Totally naked. In public.
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