Critical analysis

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I got trolled a little bit this week and the only important point is to stress just how astoundingly tiny that little bit was. I mean, come on, I’m a middle-aged white man, I will never know from actual trolling. Not even when I’m English but just used that American construction, “never know from”.

This is entirely off the point, but there’s just something I like about that phrasing. Also the way Americans might say something “most every day.” Can’t figure out why that pleases me so. I do know, for instance, that I like the word “gotten” because there’s such rage about it in England over what’s seen as the bastardisation of the language — yet in truth the word is British English through and through. It’s just that America held on to it, kept using it, protected it, and somehow we in the UK forgot it ever existed.

Anyway.

I’m obviously thinking about this trolling since I’m here talking to you two days – no, wait, um, nope, can’t be sure: it’s either two or three days since it happened. Might be four: it’s been a long week.

I am perturbed that someone could use my personal email address, the one that I’ll give you if I haven’t already, yet which I never share publicly. But the actual insulting bit, no. Neither now when I am struggling to remember what he said nor in the very moment when I read it, at no point could I manage an entire shrug.

All that happened is that some fella decided to email me to say I am a terrible writer. Finally, I thought, someone who agrees with me.

Yet it was a shitty email in all sorts of senses and I didn’t keep it around to study, but I don’t think a team of linguistic experts would have been able to determine what precisely he didn’t like. I’m saying it was a man although I didn’t register the name, but you know it was a man.

He did specifically mention my blog, but that’s just screwy. This is my only blog, right here, and he definitely cannot have meant this because whether it’s written well or terribly, it’s not written to him, it’s written to you.

So I had a little bump in the road as I read it, trying to fathom what it was about. But if I cannot overstress how little this little bit of trolling was, I also cannot find the words to describe how briefly it was in front of me. I am a fast reader, it was a short email, I took it all in with one glance, registering that there was nothing useful there and blocking the sender before I could even finish thinking the word “tosser”.

Only…

This man decided to write to fill me in on my being a bad writer and it’s that act, that decision, that’s had me wondering. I’ve wondered before of course, whenever you hear of the foul things so many people get sent over social media, but this act of flinging out a quite petulant email put it all back in my head again.

There is not one single pixel of a chance that I would ever email a writer to say they are crap – note, not to say that I think they are, that I don’t happen to like their work, but that they actually are crap.

I wouldn’t do it because I’m pragmatic, I might need to work with them some day. I wouldn’t do it because I’m a professional writer and I know very well what you see on screen or read on paper goes through a hell of a journey to get there and we can never know what has happened on someone else’s journey. And I wouldn’t do it because, I hope, I’m a nice guy.

Yet even though I believe all of this to be true, in all practical honesty, these reasons may not be why I wouldn’t do it.

The real reason might be this: who has the time?

Look closer

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It’s just about forty years since I was a student living in Agard Street in Derby and for some reason this week, I went back there — in Google Maps. I want to say that Google Maps and Google Earth are a metaphor for our modern world, with their unimaginable brilliance in photographing every street in the world being marred only by Google’s unimaginably awful design.

But anyway, for some reason I looked up Agard Street this week and it turns out to be just about the perfect time to have done so. Take a look at what I saw first, please.

Agard Street, Derby

Actually what I really saw initially was way up the other end of the street but this was the point where I first recognised my old place. That building in the middle, it’s three small houses glued together and looking at it, I can picture maybe half the rooms inside. I can remember the party where I watched two men I’d never heard of standing in the back yard, drinking lager at the same time they were pissing into the drains. There was something about the flow of liquid in and out, much the same colour at either end, that made me fine with not knowing them.

But memory is faulty and so here’s Google Maps, showing me exactly how it really is. Until you look closer. Now, this is subtle, I don’t know that you’ll be able to spot the tiny difference that you get when you take one single click nearer to those buildings.

Agard Street, Derby

Told you, it’s a fine difference.

I’ve cropped in the images to just show you the house — or where the house used to be — but if you looked at this on Google Maps, you’d see that the two images were both taken in July 2022. House is there, house is gone. Same month. You’d have imagined the two shots would be taken seconds apart: this one spot in the whole city is not an obvious place for the map photographers to have packed it in for the day. And it’s not as if there’s a lot on Agard Street to distract them while my old house is demolished.

It’s also not as if I miss it. I can picture maybe five of the people I lived with, but I could name only two.

It is the startling surprise of destroying the place with a single click on Google Maps. It’s also the surprise of realising that this has just happened, that I have by chance chosen to look back only a couple of weeks after this part of my past was erased.

The entire world is just a click away, just a scroll away and at most just a desperate search for the right Google button away, too. The entire world is on the screen yet I choose to go where one photo has right now become a Before shot, while the very next is suddenly an After image.

You can imagine how I went wide-eyed as I made that last click to look closer at the house that isn’t there anymore. But I also felt it in my legs. I felt it the way you might when you’re standing on a building, the way there’s a sudden drop in front of you.

It was a house of no importance, no particularly special design, and not even what I’d say was all that significant to me. But still, I wish I could go touch its walls just once more.

Wrap up

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God help me, I’m about to make a metaphor. Anyway, earlier this month playwright Ken Armstrong wrote a blog about Yorkie bars, the UK chocolate that comes in what is meant to look really big and chunky. It isn’t, but compared to some other chocolate bars, okay. Part of his point was about the bar’s original TV adverts in the 1970s and how now it seems casually misogynistic, but also back then it was a big, fat lie about just how big and fat the purportedly chunky bar was.

I remember the ad, I remember how it hadn’t seemed as overtly misogynistic then, but also that the makers went on to label the bars childishly. I can’t remember the wording now, but it was something like a strapline saying the bar wasn’t for girls. Some bollocks like that.

But.

His blog has put me in mind of all the Yorkie bar’s rivals, and it’s this that I want to twist into an analogy for our present times.

All UK chocolate bars that have been continuously made since at least the 1970s, except the Yorkie, now come in really clever wrapping. Rather than tight around the chocolate, they are very loose and there has got to have been some serious thought put into how it doesn’t all just collapse in transit.

But that serious thought didn’t go into, I don’t know, the best practices for preventing chocolate going off in some way. The serious thought went solely into lying.

The job was to produce a wrapper that made the bar seem to be the size it used to be, until you’ve bought it, opened it, and found it’s shrunk. All chocolate bars are now smaller than they were, and probably more expensive even adjusting for inflation, and it’s a shame, but I’m okay with that.

I’m not okay with the wrapping. I can admire the process, it’s engineering and doubtlessly true effort went into consistently achieving the effect as you make literally millions of the things. But it’s the lying.

Whoever started this off knows what a chocolate bar is supposed to look like, so they go to all this effort to make it appear to be that even as it no longer is. The image, the perception, the lie.

These things are not chocolate bars any more, they are present-day politics. Recently, I had a Conservative MP come to my door saying she planned to unseat the local Labour candidate because there was no place in politics for all the corruption that was allegedly going on. I couldn’t help it, I laughed: a Tory saying she’d fight corruption is like a Republican saying guns are bad — and then also doing something about that.

But this MP at my door knew corruption was a bad thing. I’m not going to accuse her personally of any corruption, she may be a fine and upstanding human being. Although if she is, she ain’t going to get far in today’s Conservative party.

Every politician knows the truth and talks about the real issues, then either doesn’t do anything about them, or visibly profits from doing the opposite. The UK has this asinine thing where you can lie your teeth off to Parliament, but if you’re called a liar, I mean if that correct word is said, then that’s what’s seen as shocking and the person saying it is ejected from the room.

Tories and Republicans both have this history of being about business and standing on your own feet, and they both shout about it. Labour in the UK has this thing about being for the workers and it shouts about it. But Tories and Republicans can no longer actually do any business, in the UK they repeatedly do things like awarding shipping contracts to firms that have no ships. Labour should be cleaning up and riding on all the anti-Brexit sentiment here, but instead it’s just talking about how the government should do Brexit better.

Politics has always been short-term and that has always been an enormous failing of every political system. But right now we universally see politicians knowing what should be done, what is true and what is needed, and wrapping up their speeches and their bills in terms that suggest they’ll do it, yet never will.

And we have to swallow it.

Couched in the past

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I don’t know why I’m uncomfortable admitting any of this, but I am and yet I’m going to tell you anyway. Maybe it would help me if you keep in mind that this was thirty years ago and that like most people working for the BBC, I was less than well off at the time.

So far, so common, but while there was a long time when I lived in London, for a longer patch I was living in Birmingham and commuting. I’d go once or twice a week to London, I’d stay overnight there. Also keep in mind that the job meant working until about 11pm at BBC Ceefax and BBC News Online, then from 9am the next morning at Radio Times and BBC Worldwide.

I think you’re seeing where this is going. Or perhaps where it is staying.

There were hotels, although I’d get there around midnight having started out about 4am or 5am, so it was a case of two or three blinks before I’d have to get up again for work. London hotels are expensive, but they seem ever more so when you are in them for only a fraction longer than it takes to boil a kettle.

There was a BBC hotel, incidentally. The BBC World Service used to maintain a house where staff visiting London could stay. It was cheaper than paying for accommodation for producers and other staff from around the world, but there are fewer headlines to be made about fiscal responsibility than there are about private hotels, so it was closed down.

I can’t remember when it ended, but I do recall that at least a dozen times in the 1990s I would stay there. I’ve barely ever worked for the World Service but if there were a spare room, I definitely could book it at a greatly subsidised rate, I definitely was eligible because of being on staff at the BBC. Definitely. Sometimes it would take a bit of work persuading the reception desk security guard that this was true, which led to some wearily heart-stopping moments.

But wearily heart-stopping moments that were cheap. I can’t remember how cheap, I just remember what it felt like climbing seven flights of stairs at around midnight after a 4am start. It felt like bliss. Picture the cheapest place you’ve ever stayed and then downgrade it a few steps, except in cleanliness. The BBC’s hotel, and I just wish I could remember its name, was clean and bright and cheap and if the building creaked, I slept there too well to notice.

Even if the timings meant I’d turn on the room’s TV set and have to go back to work before the screen lit up.

And then there were the times that this hotel was full.

Or things were even tighter.

Then it’s time I started suggesting to you that this is enough, that I’ve shared enough.

Except, okay, there were many nights when I did absolutely and completely definitely stay at the BBC’s hotel, it’s just that the BBC didn’t know about it — and it was less a hotel, more BBC Television Centre. Or BBC Woodlands, where Radio Times and BBC Worldwide used to be based. Or BBC White City where BBC News Online was.

I remember working late at Woodlands, to sometime around 2am, and meeting one of the cleaners. It wasn’t as if she were a doctor in another country and now worked three cleaning jobs in London to support her family, but it was damn close. I can see me there, eyes like pinpricks I’m so tired, listening to this woman who is surely always infinitely more exhausted than I am.

I think that’s the night I found that there was a massage table in another office and that it was pretty good, if very narrow. Not sure why I didn’t use that more often. Conceivably I fell off.

If it were BBC News Online where I’d do all of this, then there was a particular server room I would go into. Grab some cushions off the office couch, line them up on the floor, and get into that room and lock the door before 10:45pm or you’d be caught by the security patrol. With dog.

Just once, I did get caught. Not in Woodlands or White City, but in BBC Television Centre.

There your best option was to find a disabled toilet — because those were much bigger, you could lie down — and probably on the fifth or sixth floors because the fewest people worked there late. Certainly it was the best option for when you would need the loo. Also TVC had a place called the Filling Station, where you could get food remarkably late into the evening.

Anyway, one night I was caught and I remember being escorted out of TVC by security, still half asleep. I’m guessing it was around 5am because I know I spent the rest of the night sleeping sitting up on the Circle Line, just going around and around until it was time to go to work.

As I say, I’m uncomfortable telling you this but actually its discomfort that has brought it all back. This week I’ve been so worn out from COVID that there have been moments I’ll grab ten minutes sleep on the couch and wake up sore and stiff. And for just one moment, I’d be back on the couch cushions at BBC White City, wondering if the canteen was open for breakfast yet.

Bin here, done it

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I still have not one pixel’s interest in sport, but I live in Birmingham – I’m from Birmingham – so you can’t escape the Commonwealth Games that are going on here, even if you only tune in to see your home city being celebrated. I would like, though, to now add my own statistic to the mass of times and scores and medal counts.

Not that I’m saying this should be a competitive sport. But I just put our bins out and it took me 17:44.56 minutes. I’ve never actually timed myself before but I suspect this isn’t a personal best because I did it while having COVID.

I understand lots of people have had this, and I am fully jabbed so really I just need to wait it all out, but I didn’t expect the touches of delirium. Several times now, for instance, I might be on my own but am slipping in and out of sleep, convinced I’m having a conversation. Sometimes it’s a conversation with you.

And quite often it’s a conversation complaining about how I’ve let you down because a particular plate of food isn’t syncing properly between the kitchen and my office.

Oh.

Hang on.

Right, I’m back from the bathroom. I didn’t time what happened, but now I know they call it feeling retch-ed.

Commonwealth Games Bull 700

Oh, one to one, I get it now

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There’s too much in my head. It’s 23:21 on July 28, 2022, and I’m sitting on a security barricade in Birmingham city centre, waiting for my wife Angela to get here on the shuttle bus from Alexander Stadium. It doesn’t seem all that long ago that we were in lockdown and everyone was stuck at home all the time, but tonight I’m outside and easily 150 people have walked by me in the last few moments.

I say 150 people, but they had the energy of about a thousand. All of them coming from the stadium, all of them coming from the Commonwealth Games 2022 opening ceremony – and only a few coming from performing there as Angela did. Dressed in a Peaky Blinders costume, Angela walked behind the athletes from Oceania, and then spent the rest of the night dancing in the centre of the stadium.

It’s not as if this is the first crowd I’ve seen and I’ve even been on these same shuttle buses. But it was heightened because of the contrast to last Saturday when I was fairly near the stadium and very near this security barrier, yet in such a flatter situation.

Those few days before now, I was busy having a stabbing sense of how much I missed just sitting in a Birmingham bookshop, how I missed just reading a book, having a drink, and not having a deadline or a pressure to get anywhere. But the stab was so particularly sharp and tearing at me because I was feeling it while I was actually doing every single one of those things.

I felt it when I was directly experiencing every bit of every thing I was missing so painfully.

I think now that it was the directly bit that was a problem. Yes, I was directly experiencing it all, but it felt forcibly indirect. It felt like everything around me belonged to before the coronavirus, like I was remembering what it used to be rather than feeling what it was. Or maybe it was that it felt like there was a film over it all. Like I was seeing through a glass, dimly.

And yet here I am now, crowds of people walking around me, every one of them coming from the opening ceremony that I just watched on TV, everyone a stranger, and I do not feel the same stabbing separation from what is around me.

There’s definitely an issue that this is a crowd with one tired and exalted mood, and that’s the same mood I have.

It’s the same mood I’ve had for a week, too. Saturday may have been spent examining those moments where I was disconnected from what I was doing, from when I felt like I was kept from my own actions by an abstraction layer. But Sunday onwards was about examining a different series of moments over and over, examining something I truly was just a spectator at, and yet which I felt properly present for, properly part of, properly and rightly proud of.

On Sunday, I was at the first dress rehearsal for the Commonwealth Games opening ceremony. Reality was helped through my being accompanied by an ocean of rain running into my eyes, into my skin, but it was all the deepest of pleasures and excitements and if I came close to being washed away, it didn’t matter.

Then on Tuesday, though, it was all the same again and all totally different because I was back for the last dress rehearsal. And as well as bright-hot sunshine, I was perhaps a twentieth of the way further around the stadium so everything was framed from a different angle.

It was all about watching, until it was all about feeling. I was looking for Angela, I was looking at this mesmerising spectacle. And at points on Tuesday I was also looking through binoculars.

Wait, it’s 23:34 on Friday and I’ve just had a notification that Angela is sharing her location with me. She’s three miles out but heading this way. I’m typing rather slowly tonight because I’m doing it on the glass of my iPhone but also because I keep hearing people talking about the Bull from the ceremony. It is most definitely a Bull with a capital letter. Someone is also saying they’re too young to know who Duran Duran is. I’m so old I’m wondering if it’s who Duran Duran are.

Two miles out.

And I’ve just chatted with a woman who is organising transport for athletes throughout the games – starting at 05:00 tomorrow. Hopefully she’ll still be buzzing.

And now one of the dancers. There was more separation with her, she was giving out the sense that I was audience while she was truly part of the show, yet I enjoyed seeing her pleasure, her satisfaction at a job done marvellously well.

Plus, this is a really good security barrier I’ve picked: people keep stopping to put on coats and arrange bags and talk with me.

23:42. Angela is 0.8 miles away. I’m off to bounce at her. Back in a sec.

00:33. We’re home and Angela is flat-out exhausted but I’m too wired to shut up. So I was saying, throw in the binoculars and also how I spent Friday evening watching the BBC coverage of the ceremony, and I have four vivid, visual memories of the same event from four different angles and in a range of weather from sunburn on the left to snorkelling on the right.

Plus I have what little snippets I’ve managed to get out of Angela over the weeks of her rehearsals. Plus I’m surprised how many people I know worked on the show, including its writer, Maeve Clarke.

And let this be a summary of both my town and her writing. I do not believe there is another city in the world that would puncture its own celebration of itself and its true glories by shining a light on the worst moments in its history. Birmingham did that tonight and Birmingham pulled it off: it made the night stronger, it made the city stronger.

It made the celebration bigger, I think. There was a sense of exhilarated hope for the future and I was moved every time I saw it and from every angle.

I suddenly remember moving to London for a job and being forgiven for coming from Birmingham. The man who forgave me came from Liverpool. Or possibly Manchester, I stopped listening to him mid-sentence. And I remember a woman mocking the Birmingham accent, oblivious to how she had an impenetrably coarse Cockney one and to why I was laughing at her.

So I’ve always been able to get angry when people dissed Birmingham, but I haven’t felt the city was part of my writing, was part of me as a writer. I’ve actually envied writers who have very clear and strong sense of location and of home in their work, and I’ve lamented lacking that myself.

But not now.

Now, I get it. It’s 27 years since the telephone number prefix for Birmingham was changed to 0121, a number that kept coming up in lyrics in the ceremony. Actually, I just checked and, startlingly, it’s 9966 days since that happened. And only now do I see the 66 and 99 quote marks around the numbers, only now do I see that “oh, one to one” that’s right there in my phone number. Birmingham truly does welcome everyone and it’s not in some en masse sense, it’s an individual welcoming, a specific recognition that you are special and that you are wanted here.

And only now do I also see that this constant urge I’ve always had to credit everyone else and downplay anything I do myself is straight-up, full-on Brummie. And I’m proud of that.

But I’m just more proud of Angela, of Maeve, and everyone who made this thing that was bigger than any one of them, any one of us.

Be a fraud

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I am reasonably sure that there hasn’t been a single day in my adult life when I haven’t written. Maybe it’s just a sketchy idea, maybe it’s this right here, writing to you, but it will have been something. Something where I thought by writing, by typing.

Also, frankly, by shrugging. I don’t have “Write Something” on my To Do list. If I didn’t do it, I’d now be a bit surprised, but hardly concerned. There isn’t a rule that writers have to write every day and I don’t imagine you’d think there was, except enough people do that it’s a little issue.

It came up at the National Writers’ Conference earlier this month, for instance. Don’t let me make it sound like the whole conference stopped to gasp, it was just one small moment in a large day — but consequently, it’s also come up in conversations since.

The idea that writers should write every day is the kind of thing that anyone who isn’t a writer would barely register being said. And if they did hear it, did register it and even if they did happen to believe it with a passion, it doesn’t affect them.

Yet there are enough writers who are troubled enough by this idea that it comes up in conferences. I think I’m already making too big a deal of it, so let me just offer that any kind of idea that makes writers feel guilty is bollocks.

All that matters is what lands on the page or the screen, and I don’t see that worrying about not having written yesterday is in any way a help to you writing today. It’s easily the opposite: if you build up this idea that you’re a fraud for not writing every day, I suspect it becomes harder to write any day.

Do whatever you need to get to the finishing line and if that is writing every day, fine. If it’s writing just when you can, well, I’m going to look you in the eye and suggest there’s probably a bit more you can do, but I won’t do that very firmly.

Because if your failing to write every day means you’re a fraud, then be a fraud. Be very a fraud. All that matters is what ends up on the page and the screen, whatever it takes, however long it takes, whether it’s a daily effort or not.

I happen to find it easy and normal and ordinary to write every day, and that’s nice for me. The real worry is whether you or I write anything that’s actually remotely good, and here I need to stop looking you in the eye.

Three increasingly specific rules of writing

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There are no rules in writing, but if you break them, you get a very annoyed reader. Now, I don’t actually mind annoying readers or audiences. Engendering any feeling, even annoyance, is an amazing thing. But just as I wouldn’t sit here trying to think what would be most likely to offend you, I can’t do annoying just for the sake of it.

At least, not deliberately.

When I am intentionally annoying, it should be for a purpose and hopefully you’ll come to think that purpose was worth it. For instance, it must be twenty years since I read Olivia Manning’s Fortunes of War novels and just saying the title to you takes me back to being ferociously annoyed on a London tube train, reading what would then become some of my favourite books.

That’s where I was when I got to the bit where Guy takes that thing of Harriet’s. If you know the books, you know the thing. And if you don’t, I have an enormously recommended solution.

Anyway.

It turns out that there are three things that are guaranteed to make me wish I’d not started reading, and to stop me reading or watching or listening a minute longer. Your mileage may vary, but I propose that the three things that should be banned in writing forever are:

1) Endings where it’s all been a dream
2) Any story that uses multiple universes
3) The finale of Spooks season 1

Granted, that last one is a bit specific. Spooks was a superb BBC espionage thriller whose first run ended with an utterly compellingly fantastic final moment — that was destroyed in the opening seconds of series two.

To say that someone was trapped in a house with a bomb is to so far undersell everything that was happening in the first season finale, to so far undersell the blame and the fault and the tension, that the only reason I’m willing to not bend your ear for an hour about how great it is, is season two.

Where season one ends with that house blowing up, season two begins by revealing no, no, it was this other house that blew up, see? Everyone you’ve ever heard about in the show is fine. It’s okay. Calm down.

I did not even finish watching that second season opening episode.

But if it’s unfair to make that specific example be a rule alongside the dream endings and the multiverse, it’s also completely fair because all three are really the same.

Don’t cop out.

You can take us into tense and frightening areas, but you can’t cop out afterwards. I’m struggling to recall examples where I knew that pulling back at the end was imposed by someone, probably a broadcaster. There used to be a rule in US network television, for instance, that no character could quite aim a gun exactly at the screen, not quite, because that would frighten the poor public. This is about the same level of patronising.

Grief. In this moment, right now, I’ve flashed back to a meeting with some Top Gear producers, possibly solely Top Gear website producers, but I think it was the show. This was back when the BBC was under fire for faking the result of a vote to name a dog in Blue Peter or something. In its thorough way, you cannot count the number of meetings and rules the BBC put in place after that.

But during one of them – I can’t remember why I was even involved and it was certainly just as a spectator – the Top Gear people mentioned that show’s habit of staging races between its presenters. Three presenters, three cars, a race to do something, or to get somewhere, I don’t know.

My producer at the meeting got into an argument with them over the races. I remember this because I didn’t rate that producer and this was the sole time I agreed with him.

His position: everybody knows the races are faked. Their position: doesn’t matter.

They believed the races were compelling because they were races. His position was that if you know it isn’t real, you don’t give a toss, no matter how excitingly edited they are.

Things don’t have to be real, they just can’t be fake. And any cop out, any dream or multiverse or yeah-right-different-house-blowing-up is as bad as fake racing, for all the same reasons.

It comes from the same insulting belief that you can build up tension for the poor public and then take it away before actually doing what you were building to. I’ve seen where writers and producers are proud of how tense they’ve made something, to the point of congratulating themselves, somehow believing they were daring and brave, even though they had then destroyed everything they’d worked to create.

Here’s the clearest sentence I’ve ever written. You can do something or you can not do something, but you can’t do it and also not do it, you cannot have it both ways.

I’ve enjoyed many a moment of misdirection where we were at a different house than we thought — Slow Horses just did exactly that with a rather smaller moment and it was excellent — but for the big ending that’s meant to guarantee we come back next season, then saying it’s fine, they all lived, they woke up. No. Goodbye.

It’s a different house is an insult. It was all dream is another way of saying you just wasted the last 90 minutes watching A Midsummer Night’s Dream, although to be fair there is a clue in the title.

A story where it’s revealed there are multiple identical or very-nearly-identical universes is a story where the writer couldn’t cope keeping it in our one universe. Though to be fair, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine would sometimes play with two universes and cause scarringly deep emotional consequences in both.

Bugger. DS9 pulled it off. Shakespeare wrote dreams.

But that ending of Spooks was still shit, so there.

I think we’re alone now

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Whatever you write, and even whether you do it with a partner or in a writers’ room, there are hours and hours when you are on your own with the keyboard or the pen. Nobody with you, nobody making you write either, and probably every other writer has a new book out, is promoting their new play, is doing all the talking and the socialising that lies the other side of thousands of hours of lonely work.

If you can’t do the time, you’re not a writer.

Only, even though there is no way around the solitude, even though you’d better enjoy it or else, there is a way around the solitude. Hello. As I write this, it’s early on Friday morning but I know you’re there, I know we’ll be talking, I am writing this to you.

But then also tomorrow I’m attending the National Writers’ Conference in Birmingham. (Booking has closed but you can read more about it here.) It’s the first time I won’t be working at the conference so it’s the first time I’m not thinking about the job, not thinking about the writing, just looking forward to seeing writers I know and admire and relish, and meeting writers I’ve not seen before. There’s also an actual programme of events at the conference and that’s the practical, sensible reason for going, but it’s the being with writers and specifically these writers that’s why you really go.

And two days ago, I was in my office alone, but I was also on a Zoom call with, I think, 100 or more members of the Writers’ Guild of Great Britain. It was the Guild’s AGM so again there was an actual programme and the Guild is a trade union, not some writing group, so the order of business is serious. Plus we are in such hard times for writers in the UK and the Writers’ Guild is all that prevents us being screwed over, that the order of business is very serious.

So very serious that you can’t believe how funny and happy the AGM was. We are alone, but we’re alone together.

And as of the end of that meeting, I am one of the two Deputy Chairs of the Writers’ Guild. I take that so seriously, and I am just daunted enough, that you can’t believe how good it feels to stand there with this Guild and to try stepping up to that exceptional team.

It was as I sat down today to write to you that the “I think we’re alone now” song, written by Ritchie Cordell and for me permanently linked to my then age-appropriate crush on Tiffany, popped into my head. But it popped in here not because of the alone part, but because of the we. That song is about sex and I am suddenly blushing as I look at you, but it’s about two people and they are alone together.

Anyway.

Writing is peculiar in that the deeper you can push inside of yourself, the more you can connect to other people. Usually the idea is that you’re doing this to write something that reaches people, but really always it’s about you as well as it is about them and it’s so great, so essential that we have each other.

Only connect, eh?

Unresolved issues

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There are things that must remain secret because they burn. But then there are also things that stay secret solely because they are of absolutely no interest. Two guesses which sort I want to tell you about today.

Here’s the thing. If I’m on my iPhone and start to type out “radiotimes.com”, then before I’m more than a few letters into that, it autocompletes for me. So far, not a shock, not a secret. But it autocompletes as “radiotimes.beeb.com”.

There’s no such site. There hasn’t been for an extremely long time, since at least five years before the first iPhone came out. The iPhone was 2007 – happy 15th birthday, iPhone – and I worked at Radio Times until at least 2010, possibly 2012, so even if I’d never gone to the site since, I have typed or tapped or linked to radiotimes.com just about eleventy-billion times more than I ever did “radiotimes.beeb.com.”

And every single time it autocompletes that and tries to resolve the address, I am back in 1997, crossing a certain road near my then home, reading the new issue of Radio Times magazine. If I picture looking at the cover, for some reason I’m seeing a November 1996 issue with The Simpsons on it, but apparently my vivid-clear memory is out by months.

Because the reason I remember this issue at all, remember this moment crossing a certain road as I read, is that it included the news that a Radio Times website was being launched that week. You’ll never guess the address.

For completeness, let me tell you that it didn’t didn’t actually launch then, there was a week’s delay for some reason that I didn’t know then, never heard later, and/or can’t remember now.

But 25 years ago, the Radio Times went online and what I remember in my stomach is how bad the news of it coming made me feel. Given my drama obsession, adding in my writing and technology background, I read this news about an RT website and felt failure. I should have been working on that, I should have proposed that site, I should have done a dozen different things and instead I was not then and would never be involved in this site.

If only I could remember so accurately when I got involved.

It wasn’t very long afterwards, I don’t think it was only weeks, but it can’t have been many months before I was writing on the Radio Times website and working out of Woodlands, a building near Television Centre. Forget how my iPhone tries to resolve this prehistoric “radiotimes.beeb.com” address, even now, even typing to you, it takes immense effort for me to not write “RadioTimes”, without a space. Because working there, I would write radiotimes.com so very often.

Let me do so one more time. RadioTimes.com is celebrating its quarter century now and if I wasn’t there at the start, I was near the beginning and I’m proud of that. Happy birthday, RadioTimes.com.

Wait.

Okay, no, explaining the radiotimes.beeb.com address is a 90-minute lecture with slides. Let me just skip to the bit that tickled me. Overall, beeb.com was a collection of BBC Worldwide sites including Radio Times, but its longest-lasting legacy was created by staff who needed to talk/meet/vent about it (delete as applicable).

And whoever set up this private staff-only alternative to beeb.com registered the address as peep.cow. To this day I don’t know how they registered an upside-down site name, but good on them.