Not Nano 18 November 15

One of the things I always promised myself was that I would never work for a newspaper that didn’t print on the premises. I couldn’t keep that pledge because times changed and printing was very quickly outsourced to other places, some even as far away as the Netherlands because it was cheaper than doing it at home.

However, when I first started working at Lincoln the print machines were still on the premises at Waterside North. It seems odd that the printing system, the network of huge rollers, was called the web. It was because it looked like a spider’s web, and had nothing to do with today’s world wide web. But I find it odd that the same word has ended up being used for two very different forms of communication.

The machinery was actually called web offset, because the printing rollers were inked and then rolled on to an intermediate felt covered one which then rolled against the paper. This means that the original roller is the right way round – you could read it normally. So the offset bit on the intermediate roller was back to front, as if you were looking at it in a mirror, then it transferred onto the paper the right way round.

What you also need to know is that when you create type on a lino type machine you can’t just fit them onto a circular roller. Imagine you have a pack of cards and you try to roll them into a cylinder. Unless they are very well fixed at the central point you will have a shower of cards.  And that’s what happens to the lines of type if you try to set them up then curve them around. So what happened was that the slugs of lead with the words on them were set up into a flat tray – called a form – and then a slab of wet card was pressed onto it to take the shape of the words.

Once that dried it could be lifted off and curled round to create a new mould. That was used to create a curved metal shape that could be fixed onto a roller to begin the offset process. It was a very complex series of actions and it was needed for every page. 

One of the things about ‘hot metal’ was the smell. There was a distinctive aroma around the print works. It was the kind of smell that triggers amazing memories. It wasn’t like any other hot metal smell I’ve ever experienced.  You might be familiar with the smell you get from steam engines and the hot metal print smell was almost but not quite the same. It was distinctive and if I ever smell it these days I will be straight back in the building at Waterside, wandering through the print works.

And something else about having the web on site was the noise. You didn’t quite hear so much as feel the machines starting up. They were huge and heavy and had to start up gradually but built up slowly to a fast, rumbling  spin. Knowing that the web had wound up was a really exciting time. Everything was finalised. It was too late even to add ‘stop press’ by then, In spite of what it was called it never happened. You had to have everything ready for when the switch was thrown.  

It was the final stage of getting newspapers ready for delivery. A proper web offset machine would have cutting and folding systems at the end of the run. So we put news in one end and papers came out the other.  I loved it. And I swore  I would never work anywhere that didn’t have the print works on site.  Sadly, Lincoln was the last place I worked that had printers in the same building. And we soon moved out of Waterside and into offices over a local supermarket. It was never the same and I missed it desperately.

Sometimes we helped ourselves to a freshly printed paper off the end of the web to be among the first to read it, Genuinely they were still warm from the presses.

Not NaNo 17 November 14

So it turns out I’m still about a thousand words behind even though I knocked out 1800 or so before I went to work this morning. I know why. It’s because I gave in yesterday evening and went out for dinner, and by the time I got back I was past doing anything very much except sleeping.  I fell asleep in front of the tv, would you believe?  Hence my word count grew by just the 600 or so that I wrote before we went out. Perhaps I can keep up the totals tonight with another 1000 words.  |Not that I’m sure what I shall say.

I was talking about the courts and I told you the tale of Charlie the shoplifter. Maybe there are a few other characters I can drag out of my distant memory. Strangely the faces that stand out most are all solicitors. There was one guy, not in Lincoln, who represented most of the reprobates in town. In fact you could be pretty certain that anyone he appeared for was probably guilty and his main function was to ensure that the sentence was as low as possible. He could tell a sad tale and pull at the magistrates’ heart strings and mostly got his own way.

He appeared almost every week and we became quite good friends. In fact in breaks between cases we would often chat over a cigarette or two in the waiting area. Then there was another rising star who had his own business with his name over the door. He earned quite a reputation for being able to secure a not guilty verdict and so some of the worst types in town were on his books. There was a huge outcry some time later when it turned out he was making money on the side and he was charged with fraud, found guilty and sent down for a couple of years. Perhaps magistrates have long memories!

One thing I should discuss while I’m writing about Lincoln is the Coroner’s Court at the castle. As I said a while ago, the part of the building that was the court is now the souvenir shop, but back then it was a proper court room with high wooden railings around the sides of the witness box. It felt old and quite depressing really. Over the years it must have heard some horrible stories. Coroners hear some disturbing facts and need to be tough people. That’s why they’re often medical people in their day jobs.  In fact our coroner in Lincoln was a GP and one of the people on his books was a colleague of mine.  She said it was deeply worrying when she went to see him because he recognised her from the court and would sometimes talk about his cases. (Without giving away anything he shouldn’t, of course.) She reckoned he was always measuring her up silently as a potential inquest. I was registered at a different surgery, thank heavens.

The thing about courts was that the press were often allowed to stay when members of the public were asked to leave. It was understood that we wouldn’t ever use anything we heard while we were allowed to stay. But sometimes it helped us understand the background and that helped us to write a better story in the long term.  It also meant that we heard some really gruesome stuff sometimes. actually, swapping inquest stories and trying to out gross each other was a common journalistic past time. The kind of pub conversation that could clear a room! Motorcyclists were always a source of stunning tales.  Like the one who rode into the back of a bus, head down, and caused a lot of consternation among the police who couldn’t find his head.

They took what was available of him to the mortuary where the pathologist began a post mortem while the search for the head continued. The doctor found it for them. When he opened up the chest wall he found the head, still wearing its crash helmet, inside. The impact was so strong it broke his neck and pushed the head downwards. He wouldn’t have felt much, apparently. Unlike another guy who was cleaning out a grain silo when his work mates decided to fill it without checking where he was. The corn was poured in on top of him and he drowned in it.

Then there was another guy who was working in a factory where they boiled down animal waste to make glue, among other things.  He was walking past a boiler when the seal failed and the door sprang open, spraying hot animal innards all over him and boiling him to death.  There were car crashes where drivers were thrown out of their seats, electrocutions, runaway lorries that ploughed into houses .  You couldn’t make these up. Well, I couldn’t, and I’ve noticed over the years that I’ve been taking part in NaNoWriNo that I can dream up some pretty creative ways to kill off my characters.

They weren’t all awful, although obviously they all involved a death, someone’s loved one gone, and there were grieving relatives to be considered in every case. You had to be careful how you discussed the details, nothing too gory and definitely not sensationalist. But you can see why I would spend time staring out of the window at the  virginia creeper on the crown court walls. On sunny days it positively glowed, and it helped take away the pain of dealing with an unpleasant topic.
One thing you had to remember was that Coroner’s Court had special rules. It wasn’t reported in quite the same way. Under certain circumstances coroners had findings, not verdicts. The official terms were different and you had to keep the right bits in the right places.

Not NaNo 16 November 14

Once I started work at Lincoln I realised quite how wrong I’d been about my image of the job.  Far from being an ambulance chaser and dealing with corruption every day, I was faced with a great deal of routine that everyone had to do to make sure all the bases were covered.
For example, one of the first jobs every day was known as ‘calls’ and it involved phoning the emergency services to check whether there had been any incidents during the night. It wasn’t the big stuff: if the cathedral had burned down during the night we’d have been called out to it to watch the flames and gather local response. No, this was the everyday small stuff that happens all over the country. It’s a big thing to the people involved, but to the rest of us it’s just a chance to gloat and think, rather them than me.
It was the small fires like when someone let their frying pan overheat. The fire brigade wee called out, the kitchen’s a mess, but the house is still there. Needs decorating and smells of burned chips, but everyone is OK and there’s no structural damage. Don’t get me wrong – a chip pan fire that someone’s daft enough to throw water on will explode and you’re lucky if all you get is a black ceiling. No, that kind of fire gets out of hand quickly and your house burns down.
 But there are all kinds of other fire that need professional attention but don’t threaten life and limb. Someone has a bonfire and builds it too close to the fence.  Pretty soon the fence catches light and then half the garden’s in flames. That kind of story was a great opportunity for the fire brigade to issue a warning about having safe bonfires. and we’d duly oblige y passing the advice on as part of our coverage. You’ve probably read similar things or heard them on TV: The fire brigade has issued a warning to people who are planning to burn their garden rubbish. Make sure you construct your bonfire well away from fences and other flammable items. Have a bucket of water or sand close by in case the flames start to spread, and don’t try to burn too much at once. I can still write those in my sleep.

Then there’s the ambulance call. They didn’t tell us about the ordinary, everyday crises that people face. No heart attacks, no food poisoning, but perhaps if someone fell off a roof while clearing their gutters. Yet another warning to the public to take care.”If you aren’t confident about heights and ladders, perhaps consider calling in a professional”. That kind of thing.

Of course they’d tell us about car crashes they’d attended, and chances are we already knew about them from calling the fire brigade if anyone had been trapped.  They didn’t call them car crashes, of course.  The official term was RTA or RTC, which stood for road traffic accident, or road traffic collision.  And pretty soon you got used to using the jargon when you spoke to the pros. But you made sure to talk about collisions and accidents when you wrote the story.

Technically a collision is an impact between two moving bodies. So two cars can collide but a car can’t collide with a wall. Not unless the wall was collapsing at the time! So you had to take care how you phrased things just in case it appeared in court later. No word or phrase should imply blame on anyone because if you wrote a story, however small and innocuous it seemed at the time, and you made it sound like one party was at fault when they weren’t, that was libellous and you could face a prosecution of your own. 

Last call was, predictably, to the police. They would tell you about all kinds of things that had happened since the previous morning. They would have been involved in many f the things the other two had already told you, of course, but they also knew about street robberies, shop raids, suspicious looking people hanging around old folks’ homes. Usually they wanted your help. “Police are asking anyone with information...” You know the stuff.  They often wanted witnesses to accidents, because no-one was sure who was to blame and there might be careless driving charges pending.
This was the bread and butter stuff that filled the pages and that the majority of people wanted to know about. Perhaps they’d seen ambulances tearing off along their street.  A couple of days later they read about a three car pile-up in a nearby area and so they know a little bit more about what has gone on in the town.  I’m not sure people still care about that sort of stuff unless the ambulance is parked outside a neighbour’s home, then they want every little detail. But we didn’t tell them that. Calls were very formulaic and mostly you could write them up without much effort. They were good on days you had a hangover. They were also how most junior reporters cut their teeth. Meaty stories but a safe area to learn on.  Most were only a couple of paragraphs long, but they were your copy. You knew you’d done them.  They were also small enough to cut out and send to your parents to say “Look what I did!”
Another easy way to start a junior reporter, or someone who just joined the firm, was Magistrates’ Court. You didn’t need to find your way around town. You just had to turn up, sit down and take notes. Preferably shorthand notes, in case you ever had to defend what you wrote later.  I only ever had to do that once and it was Crown Court and many years later when I was an old hand. If I remember I’ll tell you about it later.

Magistrates’ Court handled small time crimes and petty cases. (Petty is, of course, derived from ’petit’ meaning small in French. ) Sometimes the court sittings were even called ‘petty sessions’ but there’s a whole law lecture on why that happens and I’m not going to start it here. If you really  care, go look it up on Google.

So the stories at Magistrates’ were bigger than calls yielded, but they were rarely page leads. Although they could be, in a slow news week. They were governed by a whole host of rules that we’d learned during the pre-entry course. You had to understand the rules of defamation, of course, because you could defame somebody remarkably easily if you didn’t take care how you write about things. But Magistrates’ Court was a minefield. Accuracy was priority. That’s why they taught us shorthand. If you got the facts wrong you could be in trouble from all directions, including the court itself. Magistrates and judges have remarkable powers if they think you’ve held them or their proceedings in court. Contempt is the only offence left on the statute books that still holds an indefinite sentence. In theory you can be put in jail and left to rot until the offended person decides you’ve suffered enough.  That doesn’t happen, of course. In effect you’re sent down to cool your heels then hauled back before the beak in a couple of hours to apologise. And as long as you are contrite enough you’re sent away with a few sharp words ringing in your ears.

It never happened to me, but I did once see a magistrate lock up a member of the public for being unruly. He warned the guy several times and called the ‘officers of the court’ (that’s a couple of local bobbies in case you didn’t know) to be on hand for the final warning. The idiot continued to shout about the injustice that was going on to his mate and so he was dragged kicking and screaming down to the cells. There are always cells under Magistrates’ Courts and iften they link directly to the local police station by means of tunnels. Sometimes they even are the police cells. At the end of that day’s session they brought the bloke back up, now quite restrained and looking deeply ashamed of himself, and he apologised profusely, admitted he’d been an idiot and promised not to do it again. Heaven knows what they did to him in the cells. I’d like to think that all they did was talk to him harshly and point out the error of his ways but I’m a cynic after years of journalism and I know that police officers are human like the rest of us.  I know I’d have been tempted to give him a thick ear if I’d been in charge of him (which is why I’m a writer and not a law officer!) so I doubt if he got away completely unbruised. He might well have bumped against a doorway or two on the way down.  But I digress again, and risk a charge of contempt of court myself for talking like that!

When you covered Magistrates regularly you got to know the returning customers. In a later job, where I became unofficial court reporter, just because I always enjoyed it,  I found a lovely bloke who was homeless.  Without an address to give he was always remanded in custody, because that was how the world worked back then. I’m not sure if it still would, but there you go. Charlie (Let’s call him Charlie for want of a better name and because I can’t remember his proper one. I can still see his face, but his name escapes me.) would wait till about mid-to-late November and would walk into Tesco, where he would pick up a very large, not particularly expensive item, tuck it under his coat, and attempt to walk out.

He made it so obvious that he was picked up by the store detectives every time. At least I assume he was. Maybe they missed him, or chose to ignore him, a couple of times.  He’d be escorted to the police station and put in the cells, where he was fed regularly and kept warm, then sent up before the bench at the next court session.  With no fixed abode he had to be remanded in custody so he spent most of the winter indoors, warm, safe and well fed, awaiting trial.  Some time in spring his case would come up, he’d be sentenced to three months prison but allowed out straight away because he’d already served his time on remand.

What should have happened is that he should have been helped by social services, but e seemed happy with his lot and went on like that for five or six years that I knew of.

Not NaNo15 November 13

So Lincoln was my first proper job as a journalist.  I wasn’t entirely unfamiliar with the city. I’d visited it a few times in my childhood because it was one of my Dad’s favourite places. We’d seen teh cathedral more than once and I could remember an area called The Glory Hole where swans gather under a bridge in the centre of town.  And no-one who’s ever walked up it will ever forget Steep Hill/. It didn’t gain its name lightly. It even has railings part ay up so that walkers can haul their way up the cobbled street.

But when I moved there it suddenly became a new place. There were lots of little corners that I had no recollection of. There were museums I didn’t know. And perhaps the best thing was that I had a flat at the top of town and I had a picturesque walk through the old town, past the cathedral, under teh medieval gate and down Steep Hill to waterside. Sometimes when I walked past the Minster the choir were singing and you could hear them for quite some distance.

Of all the ways to start your working life there are many worse. It was July and the weather was glorious that year. IT’s on record as being one of the warmest in recent decades. It’s easy to fall in love with a place when you have  great conditions.  Summer, new job, a working income for the first time ever, new places, new people and new challenges.

I quickly made friends with a couple of other young journalists who joined around the same time as me, and we became a firm clique for a number of years. Our jobs gave us a certain status. It was kind of impressive to tell people you worked on the local paper as a reporter.

One of my first stories was the kind that most of us dread. It was an obit about a young man who died after a very long illness. He’d been in a motor cycle accident a few years before and had been in bed in a semi conscious state ever since. Sometimes he could talk to his mum, but others he was more or less a vegetable. He died from complications of his injuries at a relatively early age in his mid 20s. And it was my job to talk to his mum and write his life story. To make matters worse he used to work for us as a printer and so we owed him a good write up.

I was dreading talking to his mother, but the day went far better than I expected. I thought she’s hate me for intruding into her grief, but she welcomed me, asked me in and made me a cup of tea. She took sympathy on me when I said it was my first week and she was almost my first story. She was the first death story I’d ever covered. She was so kind to me and wished me luck working for the company.  She even donated a kettle to me when I told her I’d just moved into my first flat and was having to make tea and coffee by boiling water in a pan.  I kept that kettle for years.  It was a proper old fashioned one that worked on the gas hob. And it had a whistle.

It was so homely and felt such a lovely, welcoming act to start my working life on. I’d been so worried about upsetting that woman, but she turned out to be one of the kindest, most forgiving people I met in my whole career. She deserved better than to lose her son that way.

Not NaNo14 November 12

The first office I worked in at Lincoln was what I call a proper old fashioned newsroom. It was small, and dark. There were no windows and we spent all day in artificial light, unless we had to go out on a story. That was when journalists still went out on stories and didn’t spend all day at a computer screen emailing, phoning and rewriting press releases.  There were six reporters, or thereabouts. I’ve been trying to picture the exact layout of the office to determine how many of us there were.

We all sat round a large table that was divided into ‘personal space’ by means of very low battens fixed to the surface.  They weren’t high enough to stop anything drifting over from your neighbour’s space and there were frequent squabbles over people who didn’t keep control of their paperwork.
Everything was on paper back then, especially the stories we wrote, so there was a great deal of scruffiness going on. Life was quite hectic on the days running up to the deadline. The Chronicle – or The Chron as everyone called it – was a weekly paper, so it went to press every seven days. For a couple of days after that we were reasonably quiet, but the pace picked up as the week went along and the day before deadline was busy. Far too busy to let anyone tidy up.

We sat around the table, two down each side and one at each end, with a typewriter in front of us and surrounded by bits of paper. There were phones on the desk, of course, so we could contact the outside world if we needed to, and there were low-slung lights hanging from the ceiling, with cone shaped shades so they cast all their light downwards towards our work area.

If you needed space to work by hand, such as when you made a phone call and were taking shorthand notes of the conversation, you tipped your computer up onto its back and pushed it towards the centre of the table to make room. Consequently the space between the typewriters, at the centre of the literal ‘newsdesk’ became stuffed with crumpled sheets of paper from a huge variety of sources.

Once in a while we would have a sort out and throw some of it away, but mostly it was a tip. I can’t imagine how anyone would get away with it these days because we all smoked back then. It was common for a work place to be shrouded in a thick fug of smoke. No going outside for a ciggie back then. Ashtrays overflowed into the paper pile at the centre and it’s a miracle that no-one went up in flames.  In fact the only time I ever saw an actual fire was when somebody decided to empty an ashtray into a waste paper basket.  It was a metal one, and some quick-thinking person threw the remains of a cold cup of tea over it and doused the conflagration.

There was another pretty serious hazard in the old days too. Everyone had a lethal piece of kit on their part of the desk called a ‘spike’, because that’s precisely what it was. It consisted of a long, thick wire, sharpened at one end and set into something heavy at the other end. The sophisticated ones could be unscrewed from their base so that you could reach the blunt end easily but others were just set into something heavy, like a lump of lead. The purpose of this ridiculous item was to serve as a filing system. If you had a sheet of paper such as a press release that had important details on it, like how to contact someone, or figures that you’d used in a story, you would slam the paper down onto the spike so it could be stored on your desk.

Sensible people bent the top of their spike over so they had to ease filed papers onto it gently, rather than risk putting the wire through their hands. It also meant that if anyone tripped over something and landed on the desk (not as unlikely as it sounds – we were quite unruly people!) they didn’t end up with a sharp needle through the chest! Everyone’s spike was personal. You wouldn’t dream of filing something you’d used on someone else’s spike, and you wouldn’t dream of looking through the old papers on anyone else’s spike without their permission.  I used to fold papers up before I spiked them and put them on carefully so they didn’t take up much space. Others just spiked them flat, so the surface area of desk they took up was about A4 by A4. To make matters worse we still had a few people using foolscap back then for officialdom, so an occasional piece stuck out even further.

But I folded mine and left them neatly arranged parallel with each other. It meant  that I could find information easily and didn’t have to take anything off the spike to get at what I wanted to know. Letter heads would have addresses and phone numbers and even logos neatly in the  top right corner, so I could sift quickly through the folded bits to get to what I needed.  Of course once in a while you had to get at the rest of the information on the page – especially if it was a letter or a press release. That was when the scruffies had the advantage because they could ease the upper items away from the paper and read across, ignoring the wire through the middle. With my scheme I had to take the paper off the spike and unfold it.

That was where the unscrewable base came in handy, because you took off the base and slid all the papers down the  wire and off the bottom until you got to the piece you needed. (Or you slid them upwards if it was a more recent paper.) But at least with a removable base you had a choice.  If you were really in a hurry you’d just rip the thing away, remembering to ‘keep the place’ by creating a gap where the old thing was. And if you were sensible you put it back when you were done, because you never knew when you’d need that information again!

When you wrote a story back then it was put onto small pieces of paper. They were about two thirds the size of modern A5 and they were used landscape, not portrait. That was to make it easy to fit onto the printer’s compositor machines.  The ‘comps’ as we called them, had clips on their machines to fix the paper at eye level and copy type into the mechanism.  Their keyboards were a mystical arrangement based on the old drawers of loose type from centuries ago when type was first invented. The commonest letters “ETOIN SHRDLU” were closest to the bottom of the keyboard, just as they were in a drawer of type, and the less common ones like Q, X and Z were around the edges.

A modern ‘Qwerty’ keyboard uses a similar system, except the arrangement includes a mechanical dodge to prevent the typewriter from jamming. The keys are arranged so that the commonest are close to the centre, but they are also set up so that the mechanical arms were less likely to get in each other’s way.  So S and H, for example, are on opposite sides of the keyboard so you use opposite hands and they have time to return to their proper places whenever you type ‘sh’, which happens more than you’d think.  None of this is relevant in a modern computer keyboard, but the existing qwerty layout is a throw back to mechanical typewriter days.

So, when you wrote a news story it was set out in a special way to help everyone who handled it after you. If you look at a newspaper you might find that the first word in a story is in all capital letters. If it’s a main story on the page you might also find that the first one or two paragraphs are in a larger type face.  (Font size. That’s another hangover from the old days. A ‘font’ was what they called the complete set of letters in the drawer of type. It’s also why they call it upper and lower case. Because the capital letters, which weren’t used as often, were placed above the little letters. Imagine a type setter having to reach out for each individual letter to set out a line. The ones that were most used were near the front. The lesser used capitals were further up. To save on the arm movement.  This bracket should really have been a footnote because it’s a lot longer than I planned!)

In order for the typesetter to know which font size to use he had to have instructions written on the bit of paper with the text on. It was the sub-editor’s job to plan pages and work out the layout. An upper page or lead story was probably in a larger font than lower down the page. Often the first two paragraphs were in a different, larger size than the rest of the story.  The sub would write on the paper an instruction that said something like “first par 14 point first word all caps” Par 2 12 point”.
The journalist would never put more than two paragraphs on the first piece of paper so the sub had room to write and the comp had clear instructions.  Paragraph three and beyond went on to another piece of paper.

There were two other things that needed to be traceable along the line through the print system. One was who wrote the story, the second was which paragraphs went together, in which order. Your name (in full so that they knew how to spell it if you got a byline!) went  in the top left hand corner. In the top right hand corner you put a single word that summed up what the story was about.  For example, if I was doing it with what I’m currently writing I might use Lincoln.  So, the first sheet was labelled Lincoln 1, the second sheet was Lincoln 2 and so on.  You had to choose a word that wasn’t being used elsewhere, so a four page pull out about the city of Lincoln would get very confusing if everyone used that. So I might use layout, or newsroom, or something like that. If it was desperate I could use Lincoln newsroom, but two word catchlines were frowned upon.

The phrase was set with the text by the compositor and continued the journey until the pages were laid out close to the end of the process. In theory the setter removed them all once the type was in place, but sometimes they were missed. And that’s when you realised why they drummed into you from the very beginning not to use anyting comical, offensive or potentially defamatory. Because you could be sure it would be the one time it got left in and was seen by the thousands of readers.

Not NaNO13 November 11

Once I completed my pre-entry course I found it fairly easy to get myself a job in Lincoln on the Chronicle. I’d secured a place before the end of the year and I even had chance to work on the Lincolnshire Show for a day before I started. It  was a way to meet some of my new colleagues and to find my way into the job in a relaxed kind of atmosphere. Not to mention chance to try lots of great food and drink produced in the county and to get my feet muddy.  It was massive fun, and I didn’t have to do very much. Just follow round one of the others and go with them to cover various tings to do with cows.

I didn’t know about the parade of the beasts back then. Apparently they walk some of the finest animals around a ring on one day and the judges pick the ones they think are ‘best’ for some reason. Then the ‘winners’ are taken off to the slaughterhouse to be killed and brought back to the showground the following day and be shown off as meat. Yes, I know that’s what beef cattle are for. And yes, I’m partial to a bit of steak when I can afford it, but I’m not used to meeting my meat, so to speak. Or at least I wasn’t then.

Douglas Adams did a bit about that in one of the Hitchhiker books. He probably went to an agricultural show before he write it. One of the Doctors Who played the cow in the TV series, I remember. I can remember he, or it, offered Arthur Dent a piece of liver. “Should be lovely and tender by now. I’ve been force feeding myself for ages.”  Arthur declined. I felt a little like that myself at the time.

So I was taken on at the Linolnshire Chronicle, initially based at the Waterside North offices in the city centre, as a junior reporter. We had seven editions and I was responsible for one of the northern ones, so I got North Kesteven Council in my folio as well as the Minster and castle. Back then the castle wasn’t quite the tourist attraction it is today. Back then it was a working court house. (still is, a bit of it.) where I went to cover inquests. The coroner’s court was in the bit that’s now the souvenir shop, if you ever go and visit. The view out of the window was stunning and I’d often stare out in the more boring bits, and look at the glorious Virginia creeper on the crown court building at the other end of the castle grounds.  You could see it turn from light green to dark green and gradually to a stunning, rich red as the seasons progressed from spring through summer to autumn. Magical.  It’s odd the memories you keep,isn’t it? 

Not NaNO12 November 11

Latest update on the word count. I’m still about 4,000 and a few short of where I should be by the end of today.  I’m not sure how that happened. I only missed two days , though I also missed two days before that, but I did my best to get caught up with those, or at least not to get further behind.  I need the calculator again. Four days at 1667 words a day is 6,668. So how am I still 4,000 words short if I’ve written more than 3,000 already today.

Another quick count... IN fact I’ve written 3,398 today so far. So if you subtract that from 6,668 you get 3,270.  Oh well ,it’s still the equivalent of two days writing so I’d best get on with it.  While I’m on the stupid calculating front I might do a really silly calculation. If I’m managing about 30 to 35 words a minute, let’s go for the lower target of 30, that means it’s going to take 1,667 minutes to finish. (Now that’s creepy!) Or almost 28 hours.

So theoretically if I can manage to type for an hour a day I should have it sussed before the end of the month. But I’m not managing an hour a day am I? Today’s gone well. In fact I think I’ve been typing for about three hours today. I could just let it go, I suppose and do more tomorrow. But I want to do things for my life tomorrow.  I have a life, believe it or not, and I want to spend a bit f it on me tomorrow. So let’s not waste any more of today.  I’m counting these progress discussions, even though they’d never form prt of the finished work, even f there ever is one.  But it’s not getting my story told.

Back to my days at Sheffield learning to do this mythical subject of ‘journalism’. They also took us to other places to experience life. We attended a Derbyshire County Council meeting; planning if I remember rightly. I had very little idea of what was going on, considering I studied public administration as part of the pre-entry course. It showed us what we were letting ourselves in for, because I suspect all of us at some point in our careers sat at a very boring council meeting and tried to work out what was going on.

They took us to the House of Commons to see the mother of parliaments in action. It was quite impressive, even if I did decide that being  an MP was a doddle.  The idea was that we were supposed to see how our laws were made. Badly, as far as I could tell.  We had a great day out in London and our soppy public administration lecturer let everyone go off and enjoy themselves if they wanted. Two of us stuck with him all day, though and were treated to lunch in a pub in the City and a night at the theatre. We saw Alan Aykbourn’s Confusions, which was odd because I’d seen it before at the Theatre in the Round in Scarborough, back when it was still over the library in Vernon Road.  I knew that being at the back of a huge London theatre in a box where we almost needed oxygen took a lot away from the performance.  There were so many details you just couldn’t see from there and I was used to being at most two rows back from the central stage where you were almost in the action.  I saw the opening night, for one thing, and Alan Aykbourn uses a lot of local people in his work. One of the characters was actually sitting in the audience that night and not a few people realised who it was based on. We got none of that in London.

But it gave us an experience we hadn’t had before. I’d been to the theatre in London before but only to see big productions and musicals; not intimate theatre. Take my advice – if you ever want to see an Aykbourn play go to a small theatre and sit as close to the front as you can.

That’s what the journalism course was all about. It was to give us as many experiences as possible so that when we finally went out into the great big world, armed only with a notepad and pencil we wouldn’t be fazed by it. It certainly prepared us for the opportunities we would get working in newspapers. The people we would meet; the places we would go. The chances we would have.  They even sent us for a day working at a real newspaper – the Sheffield Star -  with real, qualified journalists, who took us out to do proper stories, or at least to watch them do them.  We were all allowed to write something that had a chance of reaching print by the end of the week. Nothing massive, of course, we weren’t qualified for the big stuff, but a short press release that needed rewriting, an announcement of an event, things of that sort.  I was delighted a few days later to spot my piece on a paper being read by someone on a bus. I wanted to rush up to them and point to the story and say: “I wrote that! Read it now!” I didn;t of course, but I had a huge smile on my face for the rest of the day. What I should have done was go out and buy a copy of the paper and cut out that story to begin my cuttings book.  I didn’t do that either though.

I didn’t get quite the same thrill again until the first time I bought a portion of chips and found my byline on the paper wrapped round them. That was a few years later, when I worked in Lincoln and had taken over the Market Rasen office to prepare for my final exams.

I’ve not explained yet about the qualification system in journalism, have I? It’s different these days. They’ll take on anyone who’s prepared to write for buttons and work long hours.  But back then you were expected to know your stuff. You had to understand people and how the world worked and what would happen if you libeled someone and how you could libel someone.  After completing a full academic year learning the basics of the trade you were taken on by an employer and signed up for a two and a half year indenture, near the end of which you took a qualifying exam called the proficiency test.  It was a tough day. Four exams in 10 hours. And you had to pass them all. You were on something like two thirds of a qualified wage until you passed proficiency and didn’t get a proper wage until you did.

You couldn’t leave in the intervening time and you had to do more or less what your employer said. We had a strong union back then. In fact the NUJ had a long running strike at East Midlands Allied Press in Kettering just after we all finished the pre-entry year and the struggle resulted in much better wages and conditions than before. For example, you used to have to work as many hours as there were stories to fill, so if you didn’t get everything done by five you just kept typing. Often you wnet straight from the office to a council meeting in the evening, covered that, returned to the office and carried on typing till you finished everytign that had been on the agenda.  But the Kettering crew fought for a fixed hours week (well fortnight actually) and a maximum working day. They also got a pretty hefty pay rise.  Once EMAP cavedin it was only a matter of time before the rest of the big publishers saw the writing o the wall and gave everyone the same. The NUJ was a strong group back then, and got what we fought for, even though the printers didn’t back us.

Thing as, the printers held the power back then. If an editor was prepared to break the union agreement and get part timers in it was more or less possible to produce a newspaper, because the printers would still set it and print it. But if the printers went on strike – no paper.  The thing was, when the computer revolution finally hit newspapers (actually it was pretty early on i the life of the work computer.) Journalists accepted something called direct input. It meant that we could put text into the computer, the sub editors (who were journalists) could edit on computer, and then send the finished article through an automatic system to come straight out of the machines and onto the rollers.  We no longer needed the skilled compositors who had been the ones to put our copy into the system and set up the pages.  Their union tried striking, of course, and asked us to support them, but we told them where to go. They hadn’t supported us, so we didn’t really care if they would be out of work.  What’s sauce for the goose, and all that.. Some of them retrained. Most of them were out on their ears.  Serves them right for not supporting their brethren in the earlier fight!

I’ve digressed again haven’t I?  I was talking about what journalism lessons were and then I moved on to the exam system and indentures and somehow got onto unions and sticking it to ‘the man’ to get the best pay and conditions we could.  Some time later we secured what EMAP had started by having a national strike and every local newspaper in the country was affected. By then I was working up in the frozen North for a wholly different newspaper group but I’ll get on to that eventually. Perhaps. If I think it’s relevant to the tale later.  I suppose it might be included in a chapter about meeting famous people. Because that was where I spent an afternoon watching Elton John get drunk, and learned the recipe for a Slow, Easy Comfortable Screw Against the Wall cocktail. But that is another story.

Not NaNo 11 November 11

So by the time I get to the end of this bit I shall have at least written something for every day, even if I didn’t write every day. I’m still four thousand words behind where I ought to be by the end of today if I want to meet the November 30 deadline of 50,000 words.  I’m about 35,000 short to be fair. But I guess I can write something every day so I dn’t  fall too much further behind. I just need to get caught up on today’s total.  So I think I should try a bit harder. I’ve timed myself and I knocked out about 400 words in 20 minutes, which isn’t bad as this sort of thing goes. It means I’m tying at about 20 words a minute (doesn’t it? There goes my maths again. 400 over 20 is 40 over 2. That’s 20. yes. )
I should be able to type faster than that but of course I also have to think of something to write about. And I also don’t realy like typing on a flat keyboard because as I think I already explained somewhere I’m used to a sit up and beg manual machine and I could probably type just as fast on that and be less uncomfortable.  I’ve got myself a cushion to boost my seat because the table’s higher than my chair. I also switched on a the little air bower heater because it’s old in here and our proper heating isn’t due to come on for a few hours yet.  Hence I’m rather hunched over trying to stay warm while I’m typing and it isn’t doing me any good st all. In fact I hurt rather badly.   If my health and safety manager at work saw this she’d have a fit!

I’m also coming down with a cold I think. I had a sore throat during the week and I’ve coughed and sneezed a few times and this morning my nose is starting to run. (The only part of me that ever does!) I blame the children’s swimming lessons that go on at the smae time as i ever go swimming these days. Change of routine means I’ve had to change my swim time and so the little darlings are in the other side of the pool while I’m swimming and they’re wiping their snotty little hands all over the changing room where I have to get undressed and shower. Not good.  But this isn’t supposed to be a rant. This is supposed to be a memoir about my writing life. So here we go.

Moving on from the trip down the mine we were also taken around Tinsley Wire Works, also near Rotherham, I think. It was a huge factory place with a lot of hot things that scared the living daylights out of me. Frankly, I suspect if I’d had to choose between the steelworks and the pit I might actually have chosen the pit.  Fortunately I didn’t have to. My overwhelming memory of the wire works was that everything was very big and very hot. White hot in fact, and if anything had splashed or spilled on me I would have died quickly in agonising pain.

There were also huge hammers that crashed down onto the semi molten metal to begin the shaping. |if you imagine they were trying to make a massive block of steel into a very long, very fine wire, you can see how much pounding and rolling and general brute force was needed to make it happen.  Of course they had to make the steel first and they put lots of stuff into a furnace to create it. I know there was iron in there because that’s how you make steel. and there’s carbon too. I know that much from chemistry and my archaeology degree. Not sure what else went into the mix though. I suppose they told us, but I was too busy being scared to remember. So they mixed everything up in their huge furnaces and when it had boiled for long enough they poured it out into blocks.

I an vaguely remember something from my early childhood about pig iron.  It’s called tat because they used to think the iron ingots looked like piglets feeding from a mother sow. It’s to do with how it’s poured. Into one long channel with side channels so that eventually you get a shape like a huge capital E with extra arms.

So that’s sort of what they did. They tipped the molten steel into the ‘pigs’ and left it to cool. There were sparks. Lots of sparks. I remember them, like massive fireworks going off very close to us. I hated that bit. It was noisy too. Like rockets and Roman candles.  I’ve never liked fireworks that much.  Huge, public display ones a long way off are fine. I can appreciate the colours and the light and the fountains, but I’ve never enjoyed back garden ones that I had to stand within a few feet of and watch them thrown fire into the air. And please don’t ever hand me a sparkler. Those bits might not have enough latent heat to burn you because of their size, but it sure feels tome like I’m being attacked by something tiny that’s armed with sewing pins!

So you can imagine my terror at standing within a few feet of a massive vat of melted steel being poured into a hole in the ground, throwing off presumably large sparks that were all a dull red. Not white hot any more – but dull red was enough to hurt, I’m sure.

and that was just the start.  After they made the pigs they had to bash them out into longer, thinner shapes. They were kind of square in cross section and they started by hitting them under the drop hammers. Each one had to be pounded along its length and then turned through 90 degrees and thumped again to turn it into a  longer, narrower pig. and this went on until they were small enough to fit between the rollers.

Once they were narrow enough they were run through a series of rollers that got tighter and tighter until the slightly longer and slightly narrower block of steel became a much longer (by a couple of miles) and very very much narrower wire.  And at the far end of the factory were huge winding machines that were gathering up the finished product and twisting it onto drums so it could be transported.

The whole place was large, loud, hot and, as far as I was concerned, very frightening. It all seemed to be happening without warning too. At least in teh mine we were told what would happen where, and more importantly, when. In teh steel works it seemed like huge, unpredictable monsters had been let loose and some of them even breathed fire!

I wasn’t popular in a later discussion when we were asked to talk about our impressions of the places we’d been. I said I found the steel works much more frightening than the pit and I think I would prefer to be a miner, if I had to be either. Many of my colleagues were  from mining families and a few had even lost people in various disasters over teh years. Grandfathers, uncles, even dads had perished. Or most of the locals knew someone who knew someone, in that tight community kind of way.

Whatever, the places were both well outside my experience and not something I ever wanted to try again. I’ve been down fake mines and heritage mines since then, always on railways for some reason. Perhaps the old cage idea is too dangerous to turn into a museum – because that ‘s what all British mines are these days, either closed or museums. I’ve seen the sanitised versions that never seem to manage to portray reality. They concentrate on the sense of pride and the skill that was needed. They don’t talk about the dirt and teh cold and the damp and teh coughing diseases. They show the intricate coal carvings that some of the miners did.  You can even buy souvenir coal ornaments to put over your convenient, clean and safe gas fire mantelpiece.  Heck, I’ve got one! It’s a dragon.

But you don’t get the sense of ground in dirt. About however much you scrub in the pithead showers you’re never going to get the coal dust out of your wrinkles and your private places. About the colour of your snot from breathing the dust, and how miners developed a taste for snuff because it was the only way to get the filthy dirt out of your nostrils. And how miners’ handkerchiefs were always brown, to cover up the stains of the coal dust and the snuff.

They talk about the unions and the union bosses who fought to keep the mines open and a fair wage for the workforce, and how eventually the spirit was broken by a Tory prime minister determined not to let the workers win. 

I wonder if others who go down those show mines feel the same way I do. I wonder how many of them look up and think, how thick is the rock over my head and just how much of me would be left if it suddenly collapsed?  Not to mention how long it would take them to dig through it and perform a rescue if I did survive a rock fall.  And I wonder how those men who used to work the pits ever managed to forget the crushing weight of that roof above them.

Let’s just say that I’m pleased I didn’t ever have to do either of those jobs. and in the end I didn’t have to talk to miners or steelmen as part of my job. I left the Sheffield area when I became a journalist and had to deal with farmers and others involved in a rural economy.

Not NaNo 10 November 11

I’m way behind with my writing this week because I’ve been really busy at work and sometimes after you’ve spent hours editing a 14 page document that grew to 28 pages over the space of three days you just don’t feel like anything other than a large gin and tonic when you get home.  Actually it was a grappa or three, but let’s not quibble over alcohol.

A writer’s job is to imbibe. Bck in teh Victorian and earlier times the best writers would all partake of various semi-poisonous substances that inspired visions and feelings of elation. It’s not a new idea for writers to enjoy their recreational drugs. My drug of choice happens to be alcohol. I was a hevy smoker once upon a time and could quite easily type like a mad thing with a cigarette hanging out of the corner of my mouth. You had to develop a kind of squint to stop the smoke getting into the eye above the fag end so you could always recognise other journos in the pub because they all had a sort of lopsided expression and half closed eye.

Actually in your local pub you were almost certain to recognise other journos because you either worked with them or they worked for a rival publication, and you had to know who they are to see what they were up to. Chances are you had already met them in the press gallery at the local court or bench at the local council and you almost always ended up in the pub with them afterwards anyway.  But once in a while you spotted someone with teh giveaway ciggy scowl who you didn’t know and you assumed it was one of the Fleet Street hacks looking for a follow up on something big, juicy and newsy that had happened recently.

Funny how we always referred to it as Fleet Street even after most of the nationals moved to Wapping. The Grauniad was never at Fleet Street anyway, and it didn’t move. Everyone else moved out East and newspapers were never really the same again. It was a sad demise, and it’s gone even further since the heady days of national strikes.  The internet has killed local journalism because nobody wants to wait overnight for their news any more. Where’s the point in waiting for a piece of paper that leaves dark marks on your hands if you can scroll through your phone in front of Strictly It Takes Two and get everything you want to know.

You don’t get the garden parties and the 100^th birthdays any more, of course, but I never thought people actually read them anyway. Even if I enjoyed writing about my little old guy who lived to about 106 in the end and insisted on a birthday kiss every year! Deaf as a post but lovely and still had an eye for the ladies.

Whatever, I was in the middle of talking about Sheffield and learning how to be a journalist before I got side tracked. I get side tracked very easily. You might have noticed by now, but I think it’s a symptom of Nano that every word counts, even if it’s junk and completely off topic!

I slowly got to know Sheffield after that first lonely, cold, rainy night at teh bus station and I gradually made a few friends. We were an odd bunch. There were only about 20 of us doing the pre-entry course and we were tagged onto the end of a secretarial college. (Which in itself was part of a technical college) So we weren’t exactly like the other students. We were all under 20 at the start of the course, but I was the oldest in the group. A couple of other had done some sort of gap year but no-one else had messed up a totally different course and worked for a year. So I had a bit more experience of the world than most did.

I remember one lescture where Gerry came in and said: “Right I want you all to imagine you’ve been sent to a cocktail reception to meet a bigwig. What are you going to order?” Most of the group looked blank but I thought for a moment about a bar I used to work in and tentatively said: “Can I have a Manhattan?”

“Sure you can,” came the reply. And Gerry started making mixing motions with his hands before passing me my imaginary glass. “Do you have any idea what’s in it?”

“Not a clue,” I said. and took an imaginary sip.

“Well don’t have too many,” he replied before going on: “Anyone else?”

Of course some clever sausage said: “Can I just have a gin and tonic, please?” which rather took the gilt off my gingerbread, but there you go.

There were other topics I knew nothing about, however, and the locals were much better prepared than I was when it came to finding out about them. This was all taking place in 1975/6 which was a time of great employment upheaval.  There were strikes in many places and the government  was doing its best to destroy the unions.  Some of the biggest arguments were in the mines and steelworks. And it was clear that some of my colleagues would end up working on newspapers in the local areas that had mines and works.  Those in charge of the course were determined to give us as wide an experience of life as possible.

I can remember one of the lecturers telling us: “We don’t want you to be faced with an angry miner who tells you that you can’t possibly understand his plight because you don’t know what it’s like down the pit.  We want you to be able to turn round and say yes you do know because you’ve been down and crawled along the coal face. ”

So that’s what they did. They arranged for us to visit Kiveton Park Colliery near Rotherham, where we met miners and travelled down in the cage with them to the working galleries where we could experience the dark for ourselves. Except it wasn’t dark. Mines are very well lit places, at least near the entrance they are. They took us on a sort of train that carried us deeper underground until we reached the ‘sharp end’ and they showed us quite how narrow some channels were.

You don’t waste time digging out rock if the only bit you want is the seam of coal running through it. So your tunnel is as tall as the seam you’re mining. And they still did mine by hand for the smallest seams back then. Yes, you can send a machine through, but then you waste time and effort sorting out the black gold from the duff rock.  A man – and they were always men – can choose which bits to hew and which to leave behind.

The tunnel we crawled through was about three feet high; apparently not one of the narrowest.  We were led through by one of the miners, who pointed out that he was going first so that we wouldn’t be in his way if anything bad happened!. “I’ll be faster that you in an emergency, that’s a fact, and I’m not going to get trapped down here because you lot can’t crawl quickly!” Thanks pal!

Janet was claustrophobic and really didn’t want to do it. She’d been incredibly brave even to get that far. It was very oppressive to think about the tons and tons of rock above your head. But, bless her, she did it. She asked to be at the back so she could determine how fast she moved, and not be in anyone’s way if she panicked. And she crawled along the face. That’s guts! 

I’d already faced my own challenge in the cage on the way down. I hate lifts, and ones you can see out of so you can watch the walls going up past you are particularly scary to me. Not to mention that the way they prevent everyone suffocating down there is to pull air up through a ventilation shaft so that fresh air goes through the network way below ground. f course all that carbon dioxide has to go somewhere  and it leaves by means of a narrow channel that comes out near the top of the lift shaft. If you breathe it at the wrong moment you don’t get fresh air, you get stale, heavy air that’s laden with old breaths of hard working men. You feel like you’re drowning. We had been warned not to breathe in at that point, but of course I mistimed it and got a lung full of nothing.  

 As you crawl along the face you realise how horribly dark and restricting the place could be if the mechanisms designed to keep you alive broke down for any reason. The lights, for example, don’t penetrate far into a three feet high tube. You have a light on your helmet, of course, so you’re never in the dark entirely, but the view you get when you look up is of the backside of the person in front of you. So you don’t look.  You crawl, facing down, watching your hands reach out one after the other and you are deeply grateful that you don’t have to work down there.  But at least you can say to a striking miner that you do know what his work conditions are like.

Kiveton Park was also a fairly dry mine. Not all of them were. Imagine adding an inch or two of mucky water to crawl through and you really know that you are lucky not to have had to be a miner. And you appreciate every piece of coal you ever burn afterwards.  These days most of the coal in the UK has been mined in Russia or similar places, by machine, and it’s not such a good quality as the shiny black stuff that used to be hewn by hand in Britain. It’s rarely used to heat houses directly, these days. It’s used in power stations to make electricity. It means fewer of us have asthma and similar lung diseases, not to mention the poor sods who wrecked their insides by digging it up for us in the first place!

Not NaNo 9 November 9

OK I’ll be honest with you. Tonight I’m starting late and I’m really not going to make anything like the word count I need to keep up even as far as I already am behind. So tonight might be a bit of a write off. What I really need though is a write in!  I should be writing about is Sheffield. On my way home from work I was composing in my head. It was a couple of short paragraphs about the city and it really didn’t have much to do with my writing life (which is what I’ve decided to call this epic). 

I went swimming tonight. In spite of Nano I have a life. (I can hear shouts of ‘sacrilege’ in the distance)  I’m also trying to cook a chicken, and it still has half an hour to go so theoretically I should be able to write for that long – which is worth a good few words if I just keep going but I won’t. I know that. I have to clear up after dinner and pour myself the rest of my drink and I also have the TV on – watching a recording, But I still need to manage it.

Of course, every word counts. And I plan to spend a deal of time writing this weekend so I should be able to get caught up ad in front, but I’m making no promises. I also have to go Christmas shopping, not to mention pressie wrapping because otherwise I won’t get my advent calendars done in time. I must be insane to set myself these challenges. It’s a bit of a telling point that I still feel the need to do tis NaNo ting even though my life is already packed at this time of year.

Writng is not just what I do, it’s who I am. I can’t imagine a time when I didn’t write. If it suddenly became illegal to write I think I’d die. (There’s possibly a potential NaNo novel in tat idea. Suppose one day in a dystopian future that writing was made illegal. What would happen?

Not NaNo 8 November 8

And so we come to the part of my life when writing suddenly became serious. Up until this point it had never been potential earning material. I loved it. I did it often and even wrote for fun, but  when I applied to study journalism at college it suddenly meant something. I hadn’t ever considered working on newspapers. In fact I didn’t really think about how the words got into the local rag. It’s strange, because I learned to read on newspapers but I never considered that there were writers behind it. I thought it was automatic somehow. Never thought that there were people somewhere hitting keyboards.

A little aside again here about keyboards. These days most people know a keyboard as the black thing (usually black thing) in front of their computer screen. They are flat, and the keys don’t move very much and they certainly don’t bite back when you hit them. Not so back in the day when I was leaning journalism. We had to do typing lessons. Proper secretarial typing lessons. Over and over, asdf, asdf, asdf, semicolon lkj, semicolon lkj. Pages and pages of it. The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. That way you’ve typed every letter at least once in a sentence. There were several sentences like that but it’s the only one I can remember. And we had paragraphs to copy type without looking at the keyboard at all. We were expected to know where each letter was by rote, and to use the right finger to type with. I don’t ever use more than about three fingers on each hand now but back then I could actually type properly.

And the vast, heavy machines we had to type on were cumbersome and unwieldy. The keys didn’t just dip slightly when you hit them, they had to depress fully so that the arm with the letter on the end of it was propelled upwards and collided with the paper. You had to load paper in the first place, wrapped around a roller called the platen. You had to keep an eye out as you typed because when you reached the end of a line you had to use your right hand to push the carriage back across the typewriter to align the start of line two. As you pushed the carriage return there was a mechanism the turned the roller just far enough backwards to start the next line.

There was no automatic end of line. You had to estimate how many words would fit before you reached the right margin and stop typing before you ran out of space. All the thoughts you needed to keep going were on top of remembering what to write and how to spell it, of course. There was no such thing as spell check. You had to know. Mistakes could not be rectified without a lot of trouble.

Later models had an eraser band on the ribbon so you could backspace and delete the error then return to type over it. There were also strange pots of thick white paint called Tippex and Snopake that you could use to paint over the mistake then type again on top of it. You could never cover it up completely, of course because the Tippex was never really flat. (You applied it with a mini brush.)
Did I explain the ribbon?  Typewriters worked by hitting the paper with a metal letter shape on the end of a long arm. To make a mark there was a ribbon between the paper and the letter punch, and the ribbon was soaked in ink. This meant that a letter impression was left on the paper. |Then the arm fell back into place. These manual typewriters, as they were called, had a maximum speed, because if you typed too fast you ended up hitting the back of the arm with another letter and consequently typed the ‘front’ letter over and over again. That speed was about 28 words a minute. And that’s a lot slower than a modern day laptop! I was taught to type as part of my journalism studies.

But I’ve got ahead of myself a bit. I have yet to tell you how I got into college to do the NCTJ course in the first place. NCTJ – that’s National Council for the Training of Journalists. They did all the training back then, You could get yourself a job first and do a sandwich course on block release or you could do the pre-entry course like I did. To.get into it I had to do a full application process, including writing an essay about why I wanted to do the course. Obviously I told them all about my history of writing at school, about how I won short story contests when I was very young, but I also said that I wanted to help people and journalism seemed like a good way to do it. I laid it on thick about how the pen is mightier than the sword and that as a journalist I could help the little person beat the power of red tape and achieve great things.

The interviewers called me naive and said I had a very idealistic view of the profession. But I can still remember one of them saying: “But the profession could do with more people like you. We’ll give you a place.” I’ve treasured that comment ever since. It’s good to be told that your character is valuable and that the standards you hold, while innocent, are respected.  It’s been a very long time since then and I’ve not heard the same comment very often.

And so I moved to Sheffield to attend Richmond College and take the NCTJ pre-entry course. The first day they explained that we would be studying shorthand and typing, law – but just enough to understand what goes on in magistrates’ and crown courts – public administration so we could cover local council meetings, and s mysterious subject called journalism. We were also going to have technical lectures in writing skills. They also informed us that we would have homework every day and would be expected to meet strict deadlines. No excuses. Each piece of homework would count towards our final mark at the end of the academic year. Any piece handed in late would not count and would reduce our end of year total mark. Deadlines are important in journalism. and they were determined to teach us that fact early.

They’re called deadlines for a reason. You don’t meet them, your news is dead. Back in my day newspapers came out once a day, or once a week in some places, and if you were going to produce a paper in time for it to be delivered into people’s homes when they expected it you had to work to a pattern. It took a known amount of time to covert the journalists’ words into print and therefore, if you want to get your stuff into that day’s paper you had to finish it on time to get it into the system. And you did want to get into that day’s paper, because otherwise you were old news and you had wasted your day. You were up against local TV and they would certainly cover your story. No-one wants to read about something tomorrow if they saw it on TV tonight. So you worked hard to meet deadlines. Hence the emphasis on it in the early stages of Richmond.

Our first piece of homework sounded simple enough. Go out into the city and gather information to write 150  words about Sheffield.  Sounds simple, but it’s surprisingly challenging when you have to do it. It was a new place for me. I was only just starting to get to know it. I’d moved into my flat just a couple fo days earlier and had spent most of the intervening time settling in to my new home; stocking the pantry, finding out where the local shops were, locating the post office and the bank and which pubs I might be able to use. I knew nothing much about Sheffield itself. Steel, I suppose. I guess I knew it was in Yorkshire. That’s it though. So, after lectures finished I found myself wandering aimlessly around the city centre, as it got increasingly dark, and finding nothing that inspired me. Eventually I found myself sitting in the bus station, cold, lonely and more than a little homesick.

Buses arrived and left and I just sat and watched. Some of the buses showed destinations that I recognised. Distant Yorkshire towns like Leeds; even more distant cities like London and Edinburgh; lots of places I would rather be than Sheffield on a cold, wet evening. Slowly I started to notice another level of buses, the double deckers, rather than the coaches; the local bus service. I didn’t recognise any of those places, but they had strange and exotic sounding names. Abbeydale, Gleadless, Crosspool, Broomhill, Beauchief. (I later found out that one is pronounced Bee Chief) But the ones that caught my imagination were Ringinglow and Swallowsnest. They sounded so much prettier than the concrete desert around me and my depression deepened.

I went back to my flat and wrote 150 words of longing that mentioned all the wonderful place names i’d seen. Convinced I had missed the point and failed at the first fence I went sadly to sleep and handed in my disastrous effort in the morning. Later that day we had our second journalism lecture and our instructor had two pieces of writing in his hands. He read them both to us and asked us to choose our favourite. The first was packed with facts about the city; population, history, significant buildings, local authority structure, everything you could possibly dream of. The second piece was mine.  After reading both our lecturer (Gerry Kreibich – lovely man.) asked us to vote on our favourite. I voted for number one, but surprisingly most of the rest of the group voted for mine. It turned out that the majority had felt exactly the way I had and could relate wholeheartedly to my writing. Gerry pointed out that writing, even for newspapers, isn’t always about facts. Sometimes it’s about feelings. I felt much better after that, at least until a local came up to me after the lesson and
asked if I’d any idea what the places were actually like. “No,” I said, “That’s the point.”

“Don’t go to any of them. You’ll be really disappointed,” she replied.

So that was my first lesson in writing for a living. I realised afterwards that could actually do it. That I was in with a chance of working by doing what I loved. The only bad ting was the price I’d have to pay – grammar lessons!  I’d done them years ago in school, of course, but this was different. I didn’t just have to know how to spell and the difference between nouns, verbs ad adjectives, I actually had to put the rules into practice.

Not NaNo 7 November 7b

I wish I could remember where I got to in the tale I’m telling. I know it doesn’t actually matter in the great scheme of things because this is just an exercise in discipline. I will write the equivalent of a short novel in 30 days even if I don’t want to. You never know, I might edit it one day and turn it into a short memoir. Would anyone want to read it? Probably not, but you never know.

So I think I’ve done secondary school to death and could move on to my later career. I might mention some things that went on before I went away to Sheffield to learn to be a journalist. I was turned down by various universities, for example, mostly because I wasn’t old enough to go, but some because they were in Scotland and I’m English. Scottish universities used to accept people at 17 but most English ones didn’t want you till you were 18. Having passed my 11 plus early I was always a year ahead of my classmates, or a year behind depending on how you looked at it. Most of them were 18 by the time they left upper sixth. But not me, because of my early swottishness. That’s not a word. I know it’s not a word, but I love making them up. It’s part of the creativity.

This leaves me abandoned at 17 with no uni place while my school fellows were off around the country studying allsorts. Liquorice ones.  (Thanks Dad!) I did try to get a place but Nottingham rejected me because my grades weren’t good enough. I can’t actually remember where else I applied. Edinburgh, I think. Maybe Glasgow but I think I’m glad I didn’t go there. Anyway, my UCCA application failed dismally. I thought my life was over, though I didn’t actually want to go to Uni and spend another three years studying at that stage. (That came later.) I also didn’t really want to spend a year doing all kinds of odd jobs across town. There was waitressing, and selling shoes, was that when I worked in the toy shop? Eventually I found a place as a wages clerk as a result of taking driving lessons.

Here goes with another aside. I decided whatever I was going to do in life eventually, a driving licence would help. I began lesson with the instructor from a garage called Parish’s and obviously discussed life in general as I was shuddering around the side streets of Scarborough. I wasn’t a natural driver, though I like to think I’m safer than most these days, forty plus years on.  His name was Bob, if I remember rightly, and he had a rather strong West Riding accent. Well, the day came when he mentioned that he was from Bradford originally and of course I said my mother was too and it turned out that he remembered her, having lived in the street behind hers at Low Moor. He went to school with my uncle Albert. Does everyone in Yorkshire have an uncle Albert?

Well, we got chatting and he came in for a cuppa when we got back to the house and he and mother talked about old times and eventually it got round to did I want a job because the garage needed a wages clerk. Well, I needed employment of some sort because at that time I had no idea what I was going to do. And so I went in to see one of the accounts managers and was taken on rather rapidly. It was an employees’ market back then. I guess they were desperate for someone and it might as well be me, seeing as how I was the only one that offered. I mean – I’m a wordsmith and have never been known for my mathematical ability so it can’t have been for my talent.

It was a good summer and I met some lovely people who were always pleased to see me on Friday afternoons when I went round with the wages packets. I have some amazing memories of the staff but I can’t name names because they might remember me. I remember one of the sales guys showing me a poster one day with the caption “You can do it in an MGB”. I blushed. And I never really lived it down because said sales bod assumed I had done it in an MGB! (Told you I could give Fifty Shades a run for its money….) The car was even yellow.

The only real problem with the job was the fact that I developed a disdain for money. When you were handling a couple of thousand pounds a week and parceling it up into little packets you got so that your own little cash stuffed packet didn’t mean very much.  I can even remember one week when I got to the end of the parceling and there was a fiver missing. I undid every pack and recounted it, to no avail, and eventually decided the only thing I could possibly have done was throw it away. Sure enough I found it, creased up with one of the money bundle wrappers in the bottom of the waste paper basket.

But eventually I realised that being a wages clerk in Scarborough was not where I wanted to go in life. I might settle for it these days because it would be good to be able to walk out to the beach of an evening in autumn and watch the tide come it. Drink hot chocolate at Bonnet’s. Take afternoon tea at the hotel on St Nicholas that I’ve forgotten the name of. All that sort of seasidey entertainment. Anyhow, the dream returned and I realised that I still wanted to be a writer. I was keeping diaries back then, although I didn’t hold on to any. But that was all the writing I took part in. I wanted the real thing. I wanted to write proper stuff. I hadn’t realised that mother somehow knew about all this so I was deeply shocked when I found a press cutting on my bedside table one day. It was about journalism courses. They were one-year pre-entry courses run by the National Council for the Training of Journalists who were a respected organisation back then. One of the locations was Sheffield. So I applied.

Round about the same time a lot of things I was reading about celebrities said that they’d started life in journalism. Most had given up and gone on to better things. So it seemed like a good place to start on the launch of my career. Or rather the relaunch, because shoe selling and waitressing were technically the start.

Not NaNo 6 November 7a

This NaNo thing makes you quite creative, not just about the actual writing, but also about finding time to do the writing and places to do it in. For instance, this piece is being written after breakfast and efore I have to leave for work. I’ve got about a quarter of an hour so I could write a fairly long bit of creative flow but I’e also got the TV on and I’m being distracted.

Back in the past I used to be able to write at work because my employers frankly didn;t care what I was doing most of the day. I should have left that job earlier but somehow there was always a reason to give it a few more months. I was convinced that things would get better if I just hung in there. Never did, of course, and eventually it became so awful that I gave up altogether and took voluntary redundancy.

Here I go again, muttering about things that really aren’t relevant to this narrative. I’m supposed to be writing about my writing. I suppose that telling whoever reads this that I’m writing in brief stints whenever I can is about my writing isn’t it? I could actually do a whole section on where I’ve written in the past.  After all, I’e had a long enough history of this writing thing to have a variety of interesting places and methods.

Does it count as writing if you don’t actually have a pen in your hand or a keyboard at your fingertips?  Back in the old days of journalism before the world went electronic we sometimes had to phone in copy. When we were close to deadlines and didn’t have time to get things back to the office we ad to find a phone. Remember those days when we didn’t all have phones in our pockets? We used to have to watch out for the big red boxes on street corners and we had to make sure we carried enough change that we could make a call.  Lots of 10p pieces rattling round in our purses . When we were out in the field we had to gather the information then call up a copy taker in the head office and dictate the story down the phone line.

Sometimes it was so tight that we didn’t even have time to write anything in our notebooks. We just told the tale off the top of our heads. It wasn’t easy, but we could all do it. You have to come up with a sentence before you write it down. You might think you’re composing as you go along but you usually know what you’re going to say. Might not be obvious. Anyway, we had to dictate our story down the line and someone at the other end would type very quickly to put it all on paper so it could go through the print system.

You had to remember to give full instructions. Let the copytaker know when you wanted a capital letter. You ended a sentence with stop. stop. all punctuation all difficult spellings had to be explained carefully to make sure the story was what you intended when it finally saw light of day in the papers. Of course you knew that everything you did was eventually destined to become chip wrappers and fire lighters, but that didn’t mean there wasn’t a sense of pride!

Not NaNo5 November 6

And so we continue with the story of my writing life. I’m currently a day behind with Nano. I’ve done four pieces but we’ve had five days. I wrote two yesterday, so I am slowly catching up.  Maybe I can write more than the regulation 1667 words tonight, which would help build up my total. I’m not good enough at maths to be able to work out how many words a day I have to do this week to catch up by the weekend.  Let me see. Five days till the weekend (counting tonight ) and an extra 1667 to make up. It’s not, of course, because I’ve over written slightly every day so far but let’s say it is for the sake of arguing.  If we divide 1667 by 5 we get  five into 16 is 3 and one left over, five into sixteen again is another 3 and one left over ad that leaves five into 17 which is another three and a bit.  So that’s 333 extra words a day, making nought on the end, carry 1, six plus four is another zero, oh I think it makes 2,000 words a day till Friday.  OK. There’s a challenge.

Of course I probably wrote a couple of thousand words at work today. I’m working on an awards submission that’s a thousand words and  200 word summary to go with it. Then there’s a couple of letters as well so yeah, I have taken all day to write as many words as I hope to do tonight.  Silly, but there you go.

So what were we going to talk about today? I did primary school yesterday, and a thing about Glastonbury that was mostly waffle but there you go. I’m currently running at nearly 300 words of waffle tonight too. I’m getting good at that. It would make sense if I went onto what happened to me at secondary school to follow that, wouldn’t it?   I started secondary school early because I had spent a lot of time in hospital and mostly I read books and learned tings. It didn’t take long for me to get ahead of my school friends. I’d already been pushed by my teachers, as I wrote a couple of posts ago. It was clear at the time that I had more hospital time to come, so mother pushed for me to take my eleven plus early. I didn’t think much about it at the time because I’d been pushed to be a swot for as long as I could remember. I had to be top of the class in everything. That was ow I’d been brought up. So I didn’t question it when the school put me forward for the 11 plus. I knew I’d pass it too. There was no doubt in my mind. I knew  i was as good as anyone else at school.

I wasn’t prepared for the outpouring of bullying that happened when I passed.  Another girl who was the right age to take the 11 plus (der – 11!) didn’t pass. My pride at getting through was knocked back by the barrage of accusations that I had robbed her of her ticket to high school.  I took her place, apparently. All my class knew it. And I suddenly became very unpopular. As usual when life gave me lemons, I read. Books and books and books. I’d had an operation the year before and someone bought me a copy of The Hobbit to pass the time while I was in hospital. But I never read it. I couldn’t get into it because I was quite distracted and I needed to read things I already knew. I couldn’t handle a completely new species off on an adventure in a mythical land.

However, when I found myself alone after the 11 plus, when the entire street blamed me for the fact that the girl from number 3 wasn’t clever enough to pass her exam, I turned to The Hobbit. I read it more or less in one sitting when I finally got into it. About seven years later I did the same thing with Lord of the Rings. I read the whole thing in the space of 24 hours with only a short break to eat dinner. I’ve digressed again.

When I started secondary school I went from being top f the class, goody goody swot to just one of the cream. Not top any more. I always ended up in the top half of the class. I was about twelfth in a class of 28 or so. Good, upper middle class stuff, but nowhere near the crème de la crème! It was a disappointment for my mother, and quite a disappointment for me. I was used to being top and getting praise from my teachers but it didn’t transfer to high school. I was just an also ran. My reading habits changed by force as I was given te classics to study. Shakespeare and Dickens and the bloody awful Bronte sisters. Not to mention Jane austen who had an unhealthy fixation with who married whom. Yes I know it was important to her and her kind and her class because women needed to make good marriages if they were to have comfortable lives. At my level of society the best you could hope for was not being beaten up or dying of exhaustion after having a dozen or so children. That’s probably why Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility never appealed.

Eventually, when I started getting interested in social history I began to read Dickens for what I could learn about poor Victorian people but I still never took to the upper class twits and Misters Darcey however good looking they were in wet shirts. That was a long time after though.  I remember one of the first books we were given to read was about a Greek boy called Theras and the first chapter was called Theras in the Agora, which means market place in Greek.  One of the first things we had to do with the book was cover it in brown paper to protect it. We were expected to cover all of our books in brown paper. We actually hd to take them home and do it. Can you imagine today if you sent kids hoe from school with a pile of books and the instruction to make dust covers for all of them? Oh yes parent, you’re paying for the paper and the sellotape. You’d have a riot on your hands. You can’t even tell them off if they rip the covers off these days.  Not that kids want books any more. They want electronic everything. But I’ve digressed again. So Theras was my first experience of reading t secondary school and let me tell you it was enough to have put me off for life if it hadn’t been for my settled love of books that Dad had instilled in me.

I think we also had A Midsummer Night’s Dream that year too. Not the best  of Shakespeare’s plays. I think it’s hard for young people to get the comedy out of The Bard just by reading him. You need to get used to the language and it’s a lot easier to get sense out of it if you hear him spoken out loud, rather than translating him in your head. Either way it was about four years before I had experience of a Shakespeare play that I enjoyed when we did Julius Caesar. I quite liked that one.
At the same tme as this I was also being asked to write, but the sort of stuff they wanted wasn’t my whimsical, creative writing. I was expected to do a thing called comprehension. Read something then answer questions about it. Not complete the story the way you tink it should go, like I was used to. But actually answer questions about what the text means and what te author intended. My English teacher was called Mrs Cross, and she and I never seemed to agree about what the text meant n a comprehension exercise.  I never had good marks from Mrs Cross, which is odd really because many years later when I took the JMB Use of English exam and got a grade 2 she apparently told someone she was disappointed because I should have got a grade 1. Bless her.

She was also our librarian and, when we reached sixth form and were given a list of classics we ‘should have read’ by now she was extremely understanding after I said I really didn’t want to. I asked for recommendations for things I might prefer and, after a conversation that rather reminded me of the things Dad and I discussed, she came up with Mistress Masham’s Repose by T H White. She was right. I loved it.  But my writing didn’t impress her.

Some time after Theras I studied Wuthering Heights for O level and was taught by a Miss Addinall. Just as an aside here she was actually a very good teacher and was one of the people who inspired me to read poetry. She awoke my senses to the music of words – the poetry. Before her I’d really only taken in the story of poems. Mr Wilson with Lochinvar and how the knight rescued his lady love; Hiawatha and Nocomis; The Highwayman and so on. Although I could appreciate the rhythm of poems I still didn’t really get the music. I can remember learning about Hiawatha rhythm: By the sores of Gitchee Goomi, By the shining big sea water etc. Every line of Longfellow went dardy dardy dardy dardy. So I could pick out the rhythm. I could pick out rhyme schemes. Which lines rhymed with which, and why. But still no real beauty. Then along came Miss Addinall and that lovely onomatopoeic line about the skaters: all shod with steel we hissed across the polished ice. I must look that up.
So she was an excellent teacher. She never tried to teach through fear or embarrassment like others did. \It wasn’t her fault that when she came in one day and wrote on the blackboard ‘gambolling’ I blushed like a tomato! As soon as she wrote it I realised it was my mistake. I had, of course, meant ‘gambling’. The essay was about Heathcliffe winning the house by playing dice against one of the Lintons. He didn’t, as Miss Addinall was kind enough to joke, skip joyfully across the moors like a spring lamb. I’ve never made that mistake since!

So secondary school almost killed my writing bug. I always wanted to be a science writer. I had dreams f joining the staff at New Scientist or Scientific American, but my forward thinking, blue stocking school wanted me to be a scientist first and a writer second. I was taught by women who mostly had sacrificed a marriage and family for the sake of their career and who felt we should do the same. (It was a girls’ grammar school) Science was a respectable way to challenge male supremacy but I didn’t really want to do it. I took science A levels but my best result was in general studies, where I was expected to write something creative.  (It was an essay about ‘natural’ countryside and humankind’s effects on the world. All about how the so-called natural world was actually the result of millennia of crafting by farmers, industrialists and gardeners. Hedgerows, fields, ponds, ditches, all created for some purpose to make life easier for humans. Not natural in any way since prehistoric man cut down the virgin forest to create fields for his new activity of agriculture. )

So my best exam result, when it counted, was for creative writing. That’s why, when I messed up my post school science course I redesigned my career and trained to be a journalist. Because I could do it. I wanted to do it, and I realised it would help me start my dream career as a writer.

Not Nano 4 November 5 b

So at this stage I’ve covered November 5 totals and I’m ever so slightly ahead if only it was still last Friday. I guess I could talk about all sorts of things to try to get caught up. If I could just do another 1,000 or so words I’d be catching up. But if I’m honest I need closer to 3,500 to be right. That’s not  going to happen today. But I can write anything I want, of course, nobody is saying I’m writing a novel and no-one is pretending this is going anywhere except on my blog. It’s an exercise, nothing more. It’s like being at the gym. It doesn’t matter whether I’m on eh cross trainer or in the pool. It’s exercise. And that’s what this is. I need to make sure I can still write quickly and create something to fill a page or three.

OK, so the word count currently says 155 and it’s 12 minutes to six.  So if I type about something for 12 minutes I’ll be able to see how much I’m writing at any time. Not sure what I should write about though.  Jut recently we went to Glastonbury .It’s one of my favourite places ever. I’ve been interested in prehistory, and indeed history, if it’s early enough, for a very long time. I can remember when I was a kid I wanted to see all the archaeological sites in the country. Back then I thought archaeological site meant prehistoric site, but it doesn’t does it?  But when I was about 12 I thought that archaeology meant the stone age. It’s all to do with the school I went to. Not my secondary school but my second primary school (if you can follow that) where my teachers were interested in good stuff. We had to learn maths and English and all the basics. We were taught that the ‘standard’ subjects were tools. They were what we needed in order to study the things we enjoyed. If you can read you can learn anything. If you can use a dictionary you can understand anything.

These days everyone thinks the internet is the answer to everything, but you actually can’t browse information on the internet. You might think you can. Because they call it browsing, but you don’t actually browse. You go to the point you ask about and then browse various versions of the answer. You don’t flick through pages and catch sight of things you never even dreamed of. You can catch all sorts of stuff along the way when you look stuff up in an encyclopaedia. Sometimes the things you encounter are more interesting than what you set out to study. You can follow up a trail that leads from one place to another. Between H to He, (who am the only one) you could find hairdressing, helium, head lice, hawthorn, happiness, handicrafts, and heaven. Of course you might have been intending to study hallmarks.

Just as an aside it’s now six and my word count is 506. That’s 351 words in 12 minutes. Or just shy of 30 words a minute. That means that I should theoretically be able to complete my daily total in an hour (or my lunch break for a better way of describing it.) Never happens though.  OK. Back to the narrative.

I was talking about research and how proper books are better than the internet. But what about being up to date?  Yes, the internet might be more immediate,  but reference books are more fun! Specially reference books with pictures. although there are some fun books that don’t have pictures. There’s a great thing called Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable. It’s full of all kinds of fascinating but useless information. I love looking things up in it because I always end up following trails through its cross references. At the bottom of every entry there’s usually a collection of words in bold that tell you to “See October” or whatever, and so you head off to October, where you find out all about  hallowe’en traditions and it’ll say ‘see jack o lantern’ so you go to that and it’ll tell you all about how they’ve been made from every kind of vegetable you can imagine including mangold worzels and so you head off to the page on mangold worzels and find out they’re grown in Lincolnshire so you look that up and before you know it you’re looking up the Lincoln imp, and that leads on to green men in churches  which wasn’t your intention but is a fascinating subject.

Then people ask me why I know so much stuff.  It’s a trick, of course, and it’s down to reading again. A long time ago when I was first starting out reading my dad used to talk to me about books. Every morning he would question me about whatever my latest book was. I have such fond memories of it. “What are you reading? Who wrote it? Tell me the story so far” and I would tell him what had happened. Describe the characters and  outline the narrative. He’d ask about which characters I liked and who I didn’t like and why. If I ever got the story wrong he’d tell me, gently but firmly, that perhaps I should go back and read that section again.

I was convinced that my Dad had read every book in the library because he always knew when I’d got it wrong. It was years before I realised that he was reading the book along with me, after I went to bed, so he’d know what it was about. He could question me about it and hold a meaningful conversation with me. At the end of each book he would then ask me if I enjoyed it and why. It meant that for ever afterwards he’d be able to hand me a book and say ‘ you’ll like that’ and he was never wrong.  It also meant that ever afterwards I would remember whatever I read in case Dad asked me about it. He’s been dead 18 years but I still do it. I even talk to him in my mind sometimes about  the book, why I enjoyed it, or not, and whether I thought he would. I miss him desperately.

I can remember a time on the run up to Christmas when I visited my parents and mother said Dad had insisted on buying a book for me but she didn’t think I’d like it.  When they told me what it was I said I’d already bought it, read it and loved it. Sure enough Dad did his usual thing. “What’s it about? Who are the main characters?” So I told him.  Then he asked me an odd question that he’d never asked before. “Does it have pictures?”  “Yes” I said, and described them to him. Half page black and white line drawings. I could see them in my head. Clear as day. So he suggested I should fetch the book and show him. I was stunned to discover that the pictures didn’t exist in the book. Only in my imagination. I can still see them in my mind’s eye.  I know the scenes so well. But they still don;’t exist! That book was Duncton Wood by William Horwood. How did he know? How did my Dad know that the story was so clearly embedded in my mind that I had created illustrations? Had we really formed such a strong bond that he could read my mind like a book? I think so. I just wish that I could draw well enough to make those illustrations.

How on earth did I get here from starting to write about Glastonbury? It’s the way my mind works. I wander from topic to topic, like the route through Brewer’s Dictionary. It doesn’t make a lot of sense maybe, but it’s interesting nevertheless. It also means that I’m very good at general knowledge quizzes as long as I’m not pitched against the clock. You see my brain has to follow similar lines in order to bring something out of my memory. I can’t take a direct route to a fact. I have to track along the line that put the fact in place originally. I follow a trail from fascinating idea to fascinating idea until I eventually reach my destination. Once in a while, particularly as I get older, I don’t actually reach my destination. Sometimes I’m close but just can’t remember that word or that fact or that memory that I’m trying to access.

So should I stil try to talk about Glastonbury? It’s a magical place and it’s been on my list of favourite places for years. I first went there as a child and remember going to the Abbey wth my parents to see the tomb of King Arthur who is reputedly buried there. He’s not real, of course. So he can’t be buried anywhere, but Glastonbury has been cashing in on him for years. It’s supposedly the place that Joseph of Arimathea took Jesus during the bit of the Bible that’s missing, between arguing with the elders in the temple and turning up to preach as an adult in his late 20s. There’s a myth about Joseph touching his staff to the ground and a white thorn tree sprang up. Several generations of tree later and they’re selling seedlings from the ‘original holy thorn’. Yeah right.

But I’ve been back to Glastonbury several  times since and it isn’t for any Christian purpose. It’s spiritual alright but it’s the natural spirituality that’s grown up around the town that attracts me. Tales of th goddess and the green man and loads of other gods and spirits who belong to the greenwood and the wild. The sight of the huge hill called the tor in the distance, with its tower at the top, lifts my heart and gladdens my spirit. And so I return when I can. For hares and dragons and incense and candles and the weird costumes in green and red and blue, and the ribbons and the lace and the light and the crystals and all the rest of the strange and mysterious things that make the town unique.