The women where I work seem obsessed with the Daily Mail website. At first, when they kept mentioning it, I thought that I'd perhaps started working with a load of hysterical-right-wing nutters. But, as it turns out, the Daily Mail is not just the last bastion of all that is wrong with middle-England, but a treasure trove of celebrity gossip! Who'd have thought it? The Daily Mail writing about WAGs, Hollyoaks, and (shock horror) lesbians. Try as I might to pretend I am above such tittle-tattle, one such article did catch my eye yesterday: Peaches Geldof's magazine column sparks hail of abuse by that old hack The Daily Mail Reporter (have they never heard of bylines at the Daily Mail?!) Ever one to read the misfortunes of someone younger and more successful than I, I read on.
Now, I like Nylon magazine. I buy it at the extortionate Comag import price because it represents the kind of women's magazine that is sadly lacking in the British market. There is real journalism in its pages, thoughtful reviews, some fashion/styling advice but always done with boundless creativity. There are no sex or weight loss tips and they, more often than not, carry interviews with the kind of witty, independent-lady actors and singers that I like. I vaguely remember seeing Peaches' face a couple of issues ago and knew she was involved in their website but had never had the joy of reading her enlightening musings on life, travel, fashion and music.
I tried, I really did, to read her columns (1 and 2) with an open mind. After all, Nylon > Daily Mail in both the cool and sensible stakes. I trust the editors of one of my favourite magazines to exercise the same good judgement they do in putting the rest of their magazine together. But in this instance, unfortunately they have got it so so very wrong.
Granted, she is a teenager, and pretty much all teenagers go through a period of writing cringe-worthy prose that relies on cliches (I know I did). London is all 'cobbled streets', everyone wears 'plaid' in America, all that is cool is 'vintage', everyone cool is her 'best friend', etc. But most teenagers don't get deemed worthy of a column in an uber-popular magazine. Hell, most of them don't even get deemed worthy of making the tea! Then again, most of us don't have Sir Bob for a dad (though I kind of wish I did as I happen to be one of three people who quite like the Boom Town Rats).
This may sound like sour grapes and, in a way, it is. Because, for anyone who has ever dreamed of being a writer, seeing people who can't write very well get published is a tad frustrating. The editors of Nylon should know that a large part of their readership think themselves marginally cool, creative, perhaps even a bit talented, and that they aspire to people with real talent, which is why, I assume, they aren't like every other stupid magazine. Therefore it is obviously going to piss a few people off if you publish some badly written, badly edited fluff written by someone largely famous for being famous.
I'm not saying that she shouldn't be a writer, write away to your heart's content. But take some classes first and practice practice practice. If I submitted such lazy writing on my journalism course I would have been reduced to tears and my work set on fire (only a slight exaggeration about the fire bit, the tears are true). In fact the start of her first article reminds me of my first class on feature writing where we were told to go sit somewhere and 'set the scene'. But then you move on, get deeper, and that's the bit she doesn't seem to have grasped yet.
Perhaps Nylon's editor-in-chief should stop "strumming his guitar" and think about giving opportunities to people with real talent and interesting stories to tell.
I really do hope that Nylon readers know that this so-called 'British Invasion' of Lily Allen, Peaches Geldof, Amy Winehouse, et al is representative of the UK. Cause it's about as accurate as Dick Van Dyke doing an English accent!
Saturday 29 November 2008
Saturday 1 November 2008
Taxisdermaphobia
Happy (belated) Halloween.
The walrus is as tall as the ceiling and as wide as the wall. I am small, tiny, barely five years old and a few feet tall. To this day I wonder whether he was quite as large as I remember for the purposes of my tale, but to my mind he was the largest being that I could comprehend.
He doesn’t say anything but just sits there lazily in his box with that blue lining that appears to wallpaper all similar boxes. Perhaps it is there to remind him of the sea, along with the fine layer of sand and shell scattered about below him like a seaside holiday scene. He stares straight ahead with the diligence of a soldier standing to order, solemnly sworn not to move an inch. Even dancing around in front of him, or breathing on the glass to write ‘hello’, does not raise a reaction, not even a bat of the eye. His long yellowing moustache droops down like an old man’s and his brown leathery skin betrays the telltale liver spots of age. Maybe one hundred years.
I do not think that I truly comprehended that he was dead, because he was sat up with his eyes open, which defied my five-year-old definition of death, and I was far too young to concede such a point. So we sat for a half hour in a harmonious arrangement where I told him about myself and he just listened.
My younger childhood was spent being hauled from one appointment with a walrus (or a crocodile, a polar bear, a gorilla, a sheep) to another in daunting, crypt-like museums and sprawling stately homes. Someone should have warned my parents that such educational generosity was bound to have an affect on the psyche.
Mine finally snapped one day in Noah’s Ark. Two by two of every animal you could ever imagine had been, decapitated, hollowed out, packed with sawdust and mounted on a wall in a colossal homage to the Victorian love of trophy hunting. Giraffes’ necks stretched long and taut with all the litheness of a plank of wood. Great majestic cats, leopards and lions and tigers, snarled sinister sharp-toothed smiles with eyes that lacked all the necessary animal instinct. Antlers protruded in irregular angles from stags, wilder beast, a giant moose, plus the giant spiral horns of the gazelle and springbok. Birds paused mid-flight with wingspans spread in full beat.
But the worst things were always the eyes, eyes everywhere; anatomically correct in the finest minutiae. Those glassy, vacant eyeballs that gaze, into the distance wetly, fearfully, silently imploring you for freedom from their eternal corporeal shell. I would rather think of them fetid and rotting down, full of organs and death, going back into the earth, rather than being reformed in a kind of man-made semi-nature. Some dignified man’s prize reminder of the natural order of things. The ultimate insult is, surely, to not let a thing die a death but to make it live on in oblivious humiliation on your wall, in a place it would never have experienced in its natural life.
This mortal, albeit animal, crisis impacted on my being so much that it all but refused to cooperate with the situation. My body collapsed first. My head curled into my chest and my legs curved up to meet them at the point where my breath stopped flowing and my heart blood congealed in a gooey panic. Then my eyes screwed shut in some kind of ineffectual act of sympathy for all the fake ones that surrounded me. If they could not, I could not see, and I simply would not open my eyes until someone picked me up and dragged my lifeless body away from my waking nightmare and into the light.
In the light I am safe from my fear. These grim beings do not live in the bright or the outdoors. They live in glass cabinets in dimly lit rooms and occasionally on the walls of galleries and bars, waiting to surprise and embarrass me in company with my phobia that has no name and apparently no other sufferer than myself (believe me I have looked).
I search for a name so I don’t feel so... odd. If there were an official register of phobias then I would lobby them for a classification. I would ask them to tell me that I’m ok. But until then I make up my own. Taxis comes from the Greek for "arrangement", Derma from the Latin for "skin". This would mean that I am afraid of arranged skin, which lacks the necessary meaning because I am afraid of death, and fur, and animals and reanimation and size and scale. I am afraid of man’s need to claim what is dead and own its form. I’m afraid of this egotism and its giant hairy manifestations that assume to be something they are not.
In the pub where I sit, there is a small head on the wall, a fox or a small sharp-eared dog. Moths have bitten away its form so much it’s hard to tell. The fur is chafed away almost to skin and stuffing, like a teddy bear worn down to the weft. Loved to death, is the phrase that springs to mind, though more likely shot to death and kept as a bit of fuzzy memorabilia. Or perhaps he died of natural causes and someone thought enough of him in life that they wanted to preserve him in death. Like I say, it’s hard to tell.
I surprise myself because I can look at him; he is the only one I can face off. Though he is wearing a large pair of sunglasses over whatever little beady glass eyes may be fitted into that space where his eyes would once have been, so I am cheating myself.
I feel like I am being strong, overcoming my fear. But I know that if he were to take off the dark spectacles then I would once again stare into the same hollow, viscous blackness that steals my breath and strangles my arteries and makes me ask myself the terrible question, what must they do with all those eyes?
The walrus is as tall as the ceiling and as wide as the wall. I am small, tiny, barely five years old and a few feet tall. To this day I wonder whether he was quite as large as I remember for the purposes of my tale, but to my mind he was the largest being that I could comprehend.
He doesn’t say anything but just sits there lazily in his box with that blue lining that appears to wallpaper all similar boxes. Perhaps it is there to remind him of the sea, along with the fine layer of sand and shell scattered about below him like a seaside holiday scene. He stares straight ahead with the diligence of a soldier standing to order, solemnly sworn not to move an inch. Even dancing around in front of him, or breathing on the glass to write ‘hello’, does not raise a reaction, not even a bat of the eye. His long yellowing moustache droops down like an old man’s and his brown leathery skin betrays the telltale liver spots of age. Maybe one hundred years.
I do not think that I truly comprehended that he was dead, because he was sat up with his eyes open, which defied my five-year-old definition of death, and I was far too young to concede such a point. So we sat for a half hour in a harmonious arrangement where I told him about myself and he just listened.
My younger childhood was spent being hauled from one appointment with a walrus (or a crocodile, a polar bear, a gorilla, a sheep) to another in daunting, crypt-like museums and sprawling stately homes. Someone should have warned my parents that such educational generosity was bound to have an affect on the psyche.
Mine finally snapped one day in Noah’s Ark. Two by two of every animal you could ever imagine had been, decapitated, hollowed out, packed with sawdust and mounted on a wall in a colossal homage to the Victorian love of trophy hunting. Giraffes’ necks stretched long and taut with all the litheness of a plank of wood. Great majestic cats, leopards and lions and tigers, snarled sinister sharp-toothed smiles with eyes that lacked all the necessary animal instinct. Antlers protruded in irregular angles from stags, wilder beast, a giant moose, plus the giant spiral horns of the gazelle and springbok. Birds paused mid-flight with wingspans spread in full beat.
But the worst things were always the eyes, eyes everywhere; anatomically correct in the finest minutiae. Those glassy, vacant eyeballs that gaze, into the distance wetly, fearfully, silently imploring you for freedom from their eternal corporeal shell. I would rather think of them fetid and rotting down, full of organs and death, going back into the earth, rather than being reformed in a kind of man-made semi-nature. Some dignified man’s prize reminder of the natural order of things. The ultimate insult is, surely, to not let a thing die a death but to make it live on in oblivious humiliation on your wall, in a place it would never have experienced in its natural life.
This mortal, albeit animal, crisis impacted on my being so much that it all but refused to cooperate with the situation. My body collapsed first. My head curled into my chest and my legs curved up to meet them at the point where my breath stopped flowing and my heart blood congealed in a gooey panic. Then my eyes screwed shut in some kind of ineffectual act of sympathy for all the fake ones that surrounded me. If they could not, I could not see, and I simply would not open my eyes until someone picked me up and dragged my lifeless body away from my waking nightmare and into the light.
In the light I am safe from my fear. These grim beings do not live in the bright or the outdoors. They live in glass cabinets in dimly lit rooms and occasionally on the walls of galleries and bars, waiting to surprise and embarrass me in company with my phobia that has no name and apparently no other sufferer than myself (believe me I have looked).
I search for a name so I don’t feel so... odd. If there were an official register of phobias then I would lobby them for a classification. I would ask them to tell me that I’m ok. But until then I make up my own. Taxis comes from the Greek for "arrangement", Derma from the Latin for "skin". This would mean that I am afraid of arranged skin, which lacks the necessary meaning because I am afraid of death, and fur, and animals and reanimation and size and scale. I am afraid of man’s need to claim what is dead and own its form. I’m afraid of this egotism and its giant hairy manifestations that assume to be something they are not.
In the pub where I sit, there is a small head on the wall, a fox or a small sharp-eared dog. Moths have bitten away its form so much it’s hard to tell. The fur is chafed away almost to skin and stuffing, like a teddy bear worn down to the weft. Loved to death, is the phrase that springs to mind, though more likely shot to death and kept as a bit of fuzzy memorabilia. Or perhaps he died of natural causes and someone thought enough of him in life that they wanted to preserve him in death. Like I say, it’s hard to tell.
I surprise myself because I can look at him; he is the only one I can face off. Though he is wearing a large pair of sunglasses over whatever little beady glass eyes may be fitted into that space where his eyes would once have been, so I am cheating myself.
I feel like I am being strong, overcoming my fear. But I know that if he were to take off the dark spectacles then I would once again stare into the same hollow, viscous blackness that steals my breath and strangles my arteries and makes me ask myself the terrible question, what must they do with all those eyes?
Friday 26 September 2008
Things I miss
... about working in Higher Education
I recently started a new job (yes somebody finally employed me) as a Content Editor for a company that represents small businesses so now I'm working in B2B communications - that's business to business, for anyone who doesn't understand silly marketing jargon. Thus ending my two-ish years of working for universities (more B2C, if you didn't know).
I have to admit, it's a little different to what I'm used to and as much as I am looking forward to perhaps doing some meaningful, measurable work, I began to realise that for all my moaning about bad organisation, over-management, and never really being able to get anything done... there is a quite a lot I took for granted about working in HE. Such as:
Massive training budgets - Want to go on a £400 one day Flash course? Not a problem. Want to spend two days listening to someone tell you how to write? Not a problem. £900 to send you on a Dreamweaver course when you already know how to use it? Indeed. £150 train ticket to London? Of course! Now I know where my fees went...
Equally big confectionary budgets - In universities every meeting seems to have a biscuit, offices have cake, training courses have numerous tea breaks (what you'd expect for your money!) and complimentary mints. Some meetings I would go to for the biscuit choice alone.
Deadlines that aren't really deadlines - And looking particularly impressive when you get something done, shock horror, before deadline because "don't you know this is a university... we never do things on time".
Meetings about meetings - The main culprit for nothing ever getting done, but a good way to while away a Friday afternoon.
Dress-down every day - I spent two years working in university marketing departments without ever hearing the phrase 'dress code' or the request to stop wearing jeans/take my piercings out/stop dying my hair bright red.
Getting mistaken for a student - Going straight from graduation to a job is an unsettling experience enough, so being mistaken for a student (and benifiting from their numerous discounts) was a nice way of easing myself in to the world of work.
The libraries - Free access to thousands of books... I generally have to pay for them now, or make do with council library offerings.
Full internet access - with Facebook and everything. Not that I'd ever abuse my privileges, of course...
Flexi-time - come in when you want, leave when you want, just make the hours up somewhere in the week and everyone's happy!
Tuesday 26 August 2008
Mind The Gap
My life is in a state of limbo at the moment. I no longer live in Edinburgh, I'm back in South Manchester waiting until I can move into my new house in Cheshire. Being from Stockport I have always been able to claim, postally at least, that I was in Cheshire. However Stockport isn't really Cheshire... it's 'Greater Manchester', that hazy grey area that borders numerous counties but lays unclaimed by pretty much everybody. From the 3rd of next month I shall most definitely be in Cheshire.
I have been spending my half-unemployed days (I have freelance work which doesn't really feel like work as I can stay at home in my pyjamas and do it) re-learning how to knit, filling out a million plus one job applications, contemplating a career change so many times I think I ended up back at journalism, and reading a ton of books I got out on my rediscovered Stockport Libraries card.
The summer reading list looks a little like this:
If This is a Man/The Truce - Primo Levi
The 39 Steps - John Buchan
Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
Dream Angus - Alexander McCall Smith
The Tent - Margaret Atwood
Moderato Incantabile - Marguerite Duras
Weight - Jeanette Winterson
The Life of Hunger - Amelie Nothomb
The Third Man/The Fallen Idol - Graham Greene
Breakfast at Tiffany's - Truman Capote
The Moon Opera - Bi Feiyu
Bitch Lit - Maya Chowdry (ed.)
Eating Myself - Candida Crewe
Man Walks into a Room - Nicole Krauss
When I Was Five I Killed Myself - Howard Buten
The Old Man and the Sea - Ernest Hemingway
I have a pile of about the same number to go.
Because everything is so up in the air , I'm of no fixed abode and half my life is in storage it is hard to know what I'm doing. It's hard to pick one thing that I want to do and run with it. Though one good thing about being back here is the sense of being 'home'. Even if it has involved a nostalgia trip of horrible school days and cringeing at things I wrote when I was thirteen.
Edinburgh was beautiful but perhaps a little too beautiful. Having only lived in industrial northern towns I was a little untouched by the apparent 'culture' of the place. It was like some unattainable level that I couldn't reach, I never truly felt as though I 'fitted in', and the fact that I wasn't enjoying such a beautiful city ("how can you not love it?" people would cry) made me feel worse further still.
So I'm pretty sure that moving was a wise choice, but what now..?! That is the exciting bit I guess. I have a list of projects as long as my arm to get started on. Now if someone would just like to give me a job to fund them, that would be great...
I have been spending my half-unemployed days (I have freelance work which doesn't really feel like work as I can stay at home in my pyjamas and do it) re-learning how to knit, filling out a million plus one job applications, contemplating a career change so many times I think I ended up back at journalism, and reading a ton of books I got out on my rediscovered Stockport Libraries card.
The summer reading list looks a little like this:
If This is a Man/The Truce - Primo Levi
The 39 Steps - John Buchan
Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
Dream Angus - Alexander McCall Smith
The Tent - Margaret Atwood
Moderato Incantabile - Marguerite Duras
Weight - Jeanette Winterson
The Life of Hunger - Amelie Nothomb
The Third Man/The Fallen Idol - Graham Greene
Breakfast at Tiffany's - Truman Capote
The Moon Opera - Bi Feiyu
Bitch Lit - Maya Chowdry (ed.)
Eating Myself - Candida Crewe
Man Walks into a Room - Nicole Krauss
When I Was Five I Killed Myself - Howard Buten
The Old Man and the Sea - Ernest Hemingway
I have a pile of about the same number to go.
Because everything is so up in the air , I'm of no fixed abode and half my life is in storage it is hard to know what I'm doing. It's hard to pick one thing that I want to do and run with it. Though one good thing about being back here is the sense of being 'home'. Even if it has involved a nostalgia trip of horrible school days and cringeing at things I wrote when I was thirteen.
Edinburgh was beautiful but perhaps a little too beautiful. Having only lived in industrial northern towns I was a little untouched by the apparent 'culture' of the place. It was like some unattainable level that I couldn't reach, I never truly felt as though I 'fitted in', and the fact that I wasn't enjoying such a beautiful city ("how can you not love it?" people would cry) made me feel worse further still.
So I'm pretty sure that moving was a wise choice, but what now..?! That is the exciting bit I guess. I have a list of projects as long as my arm to get started on. Now if someone would just like to give me a job to fund them, that would be great...
Wednesday 18 June 2008
Greetings from (Gloomy) Edinburgh
It's sunny here sometimes, I swear!
Well this is very convenient, posting photos from flickr to blogger. Whatever will they think of next? (I feel like some mistrusting technophobic middle aged person, I feel like my mother!)
My flickr account (heavypetal, find me... I have no friends and I'm not entirely sure how you go about acquiring them), much like this blog in fact, has been long established but seldom used. Until now, hurrah, when I have actually got round to uploading some photos. It would seem I only really take pictures of three or four types of things anyway. These are (in no particular order): graves, cats, trees, castles.
I'm not quite sure what the fascination is with any, they just always seem to find their way in front of my lense.
Wednesday 5 March 2008
This is a test
Testing testing, one, two, three...
I have somehow managed to make my blog look (sort of) like my website.
I have somehow managed to make my blog look (sort of) like my website.
Friday 25 January 2008
First Post
Imaginative title, eh?
Well this is a blog I've created to go with my website www.seventeenandinsane.com
About me: I am a 23 year old Edinburgh-based freelance writer and web designer. I moved up here from Sheffield in August 2007. Yes I'm one of those people lured up by the festival and then it slowly dawned on me that 'bugger, I can't actually find a job'. Still, not one to be deterred I have decided that if no one is willing to give me an opportunity I will make one myself. I'm very enterpirising like that. Maybe it's coming from the home of industrial revolution that is Manchester, it's in my blood to be a work-horse.
I guess that this is a way for me to track my progression really and share (or receive, please) any tips on being a jobbing writer/designer and setting up a small (very small, tiny) business. It's also somewhere for me to write, mess around with ideas and post inspiration.
I can't promise it will be very interesting to start with but keep watching, it should get better.
Well this is a blog I've created to go with my website www.seventeenandinsane.com
About me: I am a 23 year old Edinburgh-based freelance writer and web designer. I moved up here from Sheffield in August 2007. Yes I'm one of those people lured up by the festival and then it slowly dawned on me that 'bugger, I can't actually find a job'. Still, not one to be deterred I have decided that if no one is willing to give me an opportunity I will make one myself. I'm very enterpirising like that. Maybe it's coming from the home of industrial revolution that is Manchester, it's in my blood to be a work-horse.
I guess that this is a way for me to track my progression really and share (or receive, please) any tips on being a jobbing writer/designer and setting up a small (very small, tiny) business. It's also somewhere for me to write, mess around with ideas and post inspiration.
I can't promise it will be very interesting to start with but keep watching, it should get better.
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