There was no early decision
to be a journalist although my mother’s father was one for Northcliffe when the Daily Mail was a newspaper. I was employed, I was not a secretary though for 10 years, it kept body and soul together and some of it was interesting. A moment occurred when I was typing up a discreet ad for the next month’s edition for Forum (who would not let me write for them
– I quickly came to see that omission as a blessing) . I forgot all about insecurity and introspection. I did not care if I had to do it ten times. This was going to lead somewhere. And thank you heaven, it did.
It was my experience that if you let somebody know you could type, you would be asked to type. Like the General Manager of York Rep., in between learning the banal lines of the play for which I was hired. I didn’t make that mistake again.
I spent years being told (in spite of dues to the appropriate union) that I was not a journalist, I was that lesser thing -an agony aunt – so I got stonefaced about claiming journalist as my title. And upon reflection distinguished journalism
– the tribute is always personal – shed all kinds of light in my life.
A neighbour was briefly locked out this morning until her husband and enchanting tiny daughter came along to rescue her and in that time, she told me she read a paper on line and I said “No, won’t do.” I need to look at the page, think and evaluate.
Occasionally (I am a tittle tattle free zone) I spit bullets – as at the lack of attention to the documentary on culling badgers and bovine tb – which directly impacts farmers. Or I find one of those bits of good news so many of us would like to hear. Like a growing campaign to limit the age of the smartphone user, in direct response to the unexpurgated exposure of children to pornography and competitive imagery which directly contributes to the extraordinary rise in mental illhealth and social malfunction.
Or I find something I feel I need to know – a dubious gem as in – The Taliban (may they rot in hell) who have done everything they can to cancel Afghani women.
Women are forbidden education, swathed in voluminous robes, latticed veils and gloves and now forbidden to be heard speaking, singing or reciting poetry from inside their own homes. (That’s how Stalin got Osip Mandelstam, by poetry.)
British cricket engages with the Afghani side, and while the former Defence Attache defends this, he informs us that Afghanistan is top of the list for British aid, some $550 million of it.
48 hours after I read this, the BBC news channel reported that an estimated 2 million children were suffering from several degrees of malnutrition in Afghanistan. So what is that aid money being used for ? (Rhetorical question, weaponry and testosterone going as they so often do hand in hand, particularly when augmented by brainwashing levels of prayer.)
And I remember the locum dispenser in the chemist answering when I asked where he was from “Afghanistan, madam – the land of tears.”
The coverage of war written by Martha Gellhorn sent me off to read all sorts of other things, John Simpson’s spoken coverage did too and I realised the other day that the two books I have offered even people I don’t know are both by journalists – A Bright Shining Lie about the US war in Vietnam by Neil Sheehan (now gone to glory) and Robert Caro whose memoir Working is always on my bedside table – a man who looked and looked and looked some more, and asked questions and went back and asked them again. And again. Not till he got the right answers but until he got as close as he could to the truth. God love the man, inspirational.
“All the news that’s fit to print” was put up in lights over Madison Square in New York in October 1896. It was a gauntlet thrown down when Adolph Ochs acquired the stranded New York Times and set out to prove that quality meant something and journalistic quality something else.
I’ll drink to that.
Annalog 