Never trust a journalist...

You may be wondering why a diabetic like myself is tapping out his Blog entry this morning while munching his way through a packet of Jaffa Cakes. Well, I’ll tell you. It’s all to do with my School Careers Officer.

I only saw him once, but in that short fifteen-minute interview he planted a seed that’s grown into a lifelong vocation.

            ‘Ah, Millard, Millard, Millard,’ he needlessly repeated while shuffling through my paperwork. Then, peering over his glasses he motioned me to sit.

            ‘What do you want to do when you leave school?’

            ‘No idea Sir.’

‘What’s your best subject?’ He looked at his paperwork again and added ‘In your opinion.’

            ‘English Sir.’

            ‘Mmmm, you’re a gregarious sort Millard, and maths is actually your best subject. I suggest a career in the licence trade,’ he then dismissed me with a leaflet.

After reading said leaflet I realised he meant a publican. And to be fair it’s a career I’ve followed with much interest for many years. But only from the other side of the bar…

As careers officers go mine was a good geography teacher. In fact that’s exactly what he was, my geography teacher, and he was wrong about the maths. My English results were always strongest, for which I have to thank Mr Mason, my English teacher.

He would spend complete terms on one subject. Once we spent a whole year on précis. Ironically, he enunciated many thousands of words on the subject of brevity but I loved all of them. The idea of taking a two hundred word paragraph and shrinking it to one hundred, without losing the original meaning was, in my view, literary alchemy.

And it’s never left me. I wouldn’t say I’m obsessive about it, but why use ten words when five will do? Even as I write that last sentence I find myself checking it to see if I can shrink it. Maybe I could drop the ‘about it’ bit?

Nowadays, thanks in no short measure to Mr Mason, I earn a chunk of my living from writing down words in ways that makes them, hopefully, entertaining and easy for people to read. It’s wonderful. You can’t beat taking a blank page and turning it to something else. It’s like a carpenter making a piece of furniture from a chunky piece of wood, or a jeweller fashioning a necklace. I often spend hours every day writing. I hardly know where the time goes. It can be very absorbing.

Take my book, for example. I’m now the proud father to twenty thousand words and the family is growing by at least a thousand a day. Like all parents I want what’s best for my words. When they leave me to venture out into the big wide world I want them to be productive, yes, but most of all I want them to be happy. After all, happy words are entertaining words.

But giving birth to, and raising words can be a lonely occupation. To counteract the loneliness it’s often helpful to speak to someone you can bounce ideas off and get feedback from. Which is why, from time to time, I rely on a trusted source whose opinions are insightful and always welcome. He’s an ex journalist, editor, and erstwhile writer of some repute, and he too has a deep interest in the career path of publicans.

I met him yesterday and set about explaining I have twenty thousand words that are bursting to entertain. As always he offered me his undivided attention whilst simultaneously drinking, smoking and eating.

            ‘The thing is Dave; I get side tracked by the minutiae of life, which I find immensely interesting. But I’m not sure my readership will.’

            ‘Drink? He replied

            ‘Yes, and what about the tense, will the first person present give the book more immediacy?

            ‘Another?’

            ‘I like some of the passages, they make me laugh when I read them back, that’s a good sign isn’t it?

            ‘Shall we go on to wine, all this beers making me gassy.’

            ‘Also what do you think to my marketing plan?’

            ‘This wine’s good, I’ve ordered another bottle?’

And so it was that lunch turned into the 20.12 from Waterloo. We may have had some substantive conversations, I vaguely remember his promise to edit my book, and help me with promotion, but it’s hard to tell, because, this morning my brain cells are too busy dying. Some of them are very important and I can’t afford to lose them. For example, the cells responsible for spelling enebriated have gone.

So you see, I can lay the blame for my sugary indulgence squarely at the feet of my Careers Officer, possibly aided and abetted by my English teacher. Which, when you think about it, just about takes the biscuit…