Bad Mood Rising

A couple of sunny Saturdays ago, the Mrs and I caught up with some friends who we hadn't seen for a while.  The sun was out and we were heading for Syon Park for a picnic and this is usually the sort of thing that makes me happy; some good conversation with people I love, the chance to pig out on food, some booze and the sun warm on my skin.  The only problem was that I was in a funk.  Down days are rare for me (you only have to switch on the news to see get a sense of perspective) but when they come, they're hard to shake.  My usual solution is to be on my own.  That way I can skulk around feeling gloomy and I don't have to risk snapping at anyone and pissing them off too.  Not having this option as the four of us sat in a traffic jam trying to get out of town, I eventually started bitching.
The gist of it was that I didn't really feel like I was living.  Forty hours a week in an office with no natural light moving things around on a screen was doing nobody any good apart from the people who appreciated their TV guide coming out on a Saturday (I'm working on the picture desk at Weekend, the Saturday Mail supplement).  There had been a lot of sunny weather that week and while the blossoms were erupting to soften hard London streets and deliver their lovely scent over the usual smell of exhausts and rubbish, I was inside.  That wasn't living.  I'd been reading Tom Hodgkinson's 'How to be Free' at the time as well and I don't think that helped (though it's a great read).

Your friends have a habit of supporting you, or when necessary, telling you to stop being such a bloody miserable bastard.  In this case, my friend Ali reminded me of something that I'd said to her a couple of years previous when I started thinking about writing for a living. Somehow, the Costa Rica commission had come up in conversation.
'You what?' she said, incredulous, in her no-nonsense Manchester accent (she gets more Manc when she's being forthright about something).
'So, do you remember a couple of years ago when I asked you what kind of writing you wanted to do and you said to me that you'd like to be in the position where you were doing travel writing and that people were asking you to go to a certain country and write about it for them?'
She arched an eyebrow and didn't need to say more.  I got it: she was telling me that I wasn't doing too badly.  It did the trick.  I got over myself and all concerned were able to get on and enjoy the day.

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In other news, the Texas travel piece finally got printed.  You can read it here.  I also got asked to start writing a blog for the Square Mile people which is here.  Lastly Pass Me On continues here.

Pass Me On (and other news)

It's very difficult to write around a 40 hour week job.   What with trying to spend quality time with the love of your life, the gym (for the knee - nearly there now), seeing friends and the temptations of Twitter, the pub and TV, you really have to fight hard to be imaginative and creative.  A blunt person might say that my priorities demonstrate how much I actually do want to write for a living.  If I wanted it more, I'd cut out some of that other shit and just get on with it.  There's a lot of stuff out there written about writers and procrastination and that particular truth does indeed hurt.

But when I can, I'm still doing the writing.  Not for a living so much (although there is a pretty delicious travel commission coming up - more of that in a minute) but hopefully planting some seeds for the future.  Namely, a new blog.  It's called Pass Me On and you can find it here. It's a simple idea - I interview someone and they pass me on to someone else that is famous and hopefully interesting to talk to.  15 minutes on the phone (maybe in person at some point), Q&A.  I like the idea of it because there is such a lot of untrue bollocks that ends up in magazines, so this is all straight from the horses mouth.  I'm hoping that the interviewees will like it for that reason too.  And I'm also hoping that some Commissioning Editor sees it, thinks it's a good idea and wants to pay me to publish it.  It's part inspired by those 'in their own words pieces' you see in supplements.  Pretty sure that 'This Much I Know' in the Observer was the first one, now there is 'What I've Learnt' in the Saturday Times mag and I think the Mail on Sunday mag Live has ripped the idea off too.

Apart from that I've been asked to write a blog for the Square Mile people and I'm off to Costa Rica in the first week of May to write a piece on voluntourism for The Express.  If you're ever in doubt that a blog can be a good idea, that trip came as a result of Pass Me On.  I mailed an alert to every contact I've made to date and Duncan at the Express came back, said he liked the idea and did I want to go to Honduras (later changed to Costa Rica after safety worries)?  Which means I've got Gary Lineker to thank for a trip to Central America.  Bet that's a sentence that's never been written before.