iPad

Finding your real calling

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The moment I’ve hit Send on this to you, I am out the door and driving to a school. I go in to schools sometimes as a visiting author and the conceit is that I am there to talk about being a writer, sure, where the truth is I instead make ’em write. I have no intention of telling school pupils about me, chiefly because I already know all about me, I was there, I saw me do it, let’s write something brilliant together.

Only, there’s a small difference today in that the school I’m visiting is a secondary one and although it’s still a writing day, when you’re with people who are soon going to have to pick subjects and choose career paths, there is the question of whether you recommend writing as a career. I won’t discourage anyone wanting to write, but I won’t insist that it is anything other than the greatest job you can possibly have — if it’s right for you. And I will insist, on the slightest excuse, that being able to write is enormously useful regardless of the career you go into.

Be the footballer who also writes and you’ll be able to convey whatever it is that’s apparently so interesting about kicking a ball about. Plus that communication skill – look, you know this already, being able to communicate and convey helps anyone.

Only, I have this week discovered that I’m not supposed to be a writer.

To be fair, I’ve suspected it often and occasionally been told so by a reader.

But this week I got the email from LinkedIn. If you don’t happen to use LinkedIn or if you do happen to ignore its emails, what you may not be aware of is that it will tell you if someone has been searching for you on the service. It tells you specifically so that you will spend money to find out more, but even without doing that, you get some details. Plus it’s rather nice, to think someone out there you’ve probably never heard of, is looking for you.

I write that and it sounds ominous.

But you get the LinkedIn email and it has a subject heading like “You appeared in eight searches this week.” It is quite possible that I even preened.

Only, among the detail that you get, there is this. How they found you. Apparently in my case, none of the eight people sought me out by name, which is obviously fine, and not one of them considered me to be a writer or anything even vaguely approaching that. Instead, all eight found me by a keyword search, which is illuminating.

Because – truly – the words these people used to find me were: “food source”.

Funny, again it’s only when I write that down that it seems deeply ominous.

750

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Possibly I’m wrong here because you do seem more organised than I do, but I am pretty sure you have never counted how many conversations you’ve had with someone. And apparently I have, because it turns out that this is the 750th Self Distract blog I’ve written.

If you’re going to count something, I feel you may as well do it thoroughly so after some poking around, I can tell you something. Over the 749 Self Distract posts up to this one, I’ve written 587,160 words, including several good ones. I mean, I’ve written the word “myriad” and used it correctly 24 times.

Self Distract in any recognisable form started in February 2006, which is frankly another country. It didn’t become a weekly natter with you until after I left Radio Times in 2012 or so.

I’d like to say it’s been an unbroken weekly blather every Friday, but that’s not quite true. The result of the Brexit vote was announced on Friday, June 24, 2016, for instance, and I was too paralysed to move.

Then there was pretty much the whole of December 2017 when my website was broken. But apart from two total failures, then, it’s been every week for a decade, so an otherwise unbroken run of 521 Self Distracts.

Some 500 posts ago, I told myself I was writing this because I missed having the deadlines I did of a TV history column in Radio Times and a DVD review one in BBC Ceefax and BBC News Online. They all seemed to end at the same time and I do miss them, but really I was writing Self Distract to write to you and that’s done me a lot of good over the years.

Often it’s been the one quiet, still moment in my week. In bad weeks it’s been the one quiet refuge. It’s continually been a lagrange point, which is something I apparently first mentioned as being on my mind back in 2013.

Other times what I’ve written here has been indirectly responsible for my being commissioned to write various things. And once it was directly responsible for my being flown to California, where I got to meet a couple of my writing heroes.

But looking back over half a million words, I keep seeing times when I was trying to describe something that I didn’t understand. And the action of trying to describe it to you visibly helped me see what I meant, helped me see why I felt the way I did about something.

Self Distract is about writing, about what we write about, and what we write with when we get around to writing. It is inescapably a journal of what is on my mind, yet it’s not a diary. I am not writing it to me, I’m writing it to you, specifically you, and whether I’ve done that well or poorly, the focus has helped me. Thank you.

Don’t tell

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There is a moment in the 2002 film Kissing Jessica Stein that I think is all the more exquisitely well done because it doesn’t happen.

Helen has placed a lonely hearts kind of ad in the newspaper — this was 2002, there were still newspapers — and has had a couple of phone calls in response to it. So we’ve got how it works, what’s supposed to happen, and we’ve also been set up for half a dozen other issues that will play out over the course of the film, but the kicker is how perfect the setup is that takes us to the point where Jessica phones Helen.

Except she doesn’t.

Or rather, she must do, but we never see it. We are delivered to this moment when the call is certain and then we’re with them on their date. Despite the eleventy billion people telling you that showing something is better than telling it, this film is better because it does not do that.

I wouldn’t know from watching the film, but apparently the budget was very low and very tight. So it’s possible that there just wasn’t time in the schedule to shoot that phone call. But I think it was the decision of writers Jennifer Westfeldt and Heather Juergensen. They also star as Jessica and Helen respectively.

I do have a thing against characters asking questions in drama, but I’ve not had a problem with showing things instead of telling them. But don’t tell. Don’t show, don’t tell, don’t ask. Not all the time, not when it isn’t necessary.

All of which seems obvious now I’ve written it down, I mean I can see you nodding, wondering when I’m going to get to a point you don’t already know or can’t already see.

But maybe what I’m thinking is that this phone call that we don’t see really works because of everything that leads up to it not happening, and everything that results from it. Much as I just singled out one tiny moment in a film, maybe you just cannot do that.

All of this is on my mind because I’ve just rewatched the film, and I’ve just rewatched it because I read that this year is its twentieth anniversary. There’s a lot being written and said about it, and I can’t decide whether I’m more startled that it’s two decades or that anyone but me knows it.

Kissing Jessica Stein is one of those films – or books, TV, radio, theatre – that intellectually you know has been seen by millions, but it feels like it’s only yours. I’ve never been in a gay relationship, never had the string of bad dates Jessica does, never lived in New York, yet a chiefly lesbian romcom set in Manhattan is mine.

I can see that I am drawn to yearning, I’ve spotted that in other favourites like Hearts & Bones, and I am definitely a romance fan. Even in a comedy, the stakes in a romance are so tall that I think all romances are secretly thrillers.

And some of them have great titles. I just don’t know why I think Kissing Jessica Stein is such a good title, I don’t know why that is what made me watch it on TV close to two decades ago, but I love that I did.

Relax, don’t do it

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I have no clue what you do to relax but that’s fair enough, I don’t have the faintest notion what I do either. Yet for some reason, and who knows why, just lately I’ve been worrying about it. I’ve been conscious that I don’t know how to do this relaxing thing. What with one thing and another, it could be 5am when I start work, then 8pm before I sit down to dinner and I spend the rest of the evening wondering what to do.

I did fall asleep in the bath the other day.

I’m not interested in work/life balance, I don’t see them as two different things because everything I’ve been able to take everything I’ve ever enjoyed and make it be part of my work. Hmm. I am interested in how saying that 5am to 8pm bit sounds simultaneously like a boast and a whinge. Either way, it’s not good, so let me reassure you that the real problem is that I’m getting so little done in that time.

Although this is relaxing me, actually, writing to you right now. You’ve got a look in your eye and I’m warily wondering where you’re going to go with that, but talking like this is definitely relaxing.

Also reading, that’s good. I read a script every day and yesterday’s one was utter bliss. I can’t tell you what it was because I got it through a job I’m doing but it was an 45-minute TV script so, being a fast reader, for about half an hour I wasn’t in my office, I was in Derry in the 1990s.

Just thinking it through, that was also about the 11th hour I’d been in front of a screen yesterday. It’s startling how you can physically be in one place, physically using one Mac, and yet it feels like every hour is completely different. Scriptwriting, video editing, article writing, project management, watching a snippet of TV over a very fast lunch, audio editing, research, and countless conversations over email.

I say countless, the truth is that there isn’t that much, I just don’t count it.

Somehow I also don’t count it as work, nor as relaxation. Maybe I’ve got the wrong idea of what the word means. I might ponder that, although some fifteen years ago now, my therapist told me that I overthink things. To this day I wonder what she really meant.

Maybe I should just relax.

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?

Owed to a fallen iPad

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You’re looking different today. Brighter, sharper, somehow higher resolution – it suits you.

And that is you, all you, it is not anything to do with how we’re talking over my 2021 iPhone instead of our usual 2015 iPad Pro.

Ah, I remember those days as if they were just last Friday. Before a long and sometimes extremely long day at the keyboard in my office, I’d sit right here, just here, with a mug of tea, my faithful old iPad and you. I thought we’d last forever. I mean the iPad.

Instead, we lasted 2,007 days. Two thousand days in which I doubt more than five or maybe at the very most ten went by without my entirely draining the battery from so much use. Two thousand days since I bought it despite not wanting to.

I don’t want to think about the cost of iPads just now, though inescapably I know that my one worked out to 40p per day and I’m suddenly harking back further to when we just used pencils that cost so little we can’t remember.

I’d rather think about how we met, my iPad and I, even if the start was a little unhappy. I hadn’t wanted it, I didn’t have the money to casually spend on something that I didn’t realise I would use so much. That I would both spend so much and depend on so much. But it was directly tied to work and a client that I needed. Plus, I paid for it in monthly instalments and if I did the work at just the right time, invoiced at just the right time, and the client paid at just the last possible minute, I was covered.

I can still remember how incredibly nervous I was carrying a 12.9-inch iPad Pro around for the first few weeks. What I can’t remember is quite how quickly it became indispensable. I keep saying 12.9 inches because that was in the name, it’s not like I measured it. The slightly longer-winded way to describe it is to say that it was exactly like having two regular iPad screens side by side. You’d be working that screen with both hands and it would feel like you were inside it, that you were kneading bread, that you were really getting work done.

I remember the day when it first went wrong. It was certainly after more than four years of very heavy use and travelling a lot around the UK with it in different bags, but one day I touched it and it didn’t respond. It was like a partner who has already decided to break up with you and just hasn’t said it yet.

Over time, whole sections of that 12.9-inch touch screen stopped responding to touch. It got so I would very often have to rotate the whole iPad in order to get an online button under an area I could tap.

But if it were awkward and peculiar, well, so am I and this is how you and I have talked on Fridays. Actually, on every weekday morning, I got into the habit of being on it in my living room, writing ahead of the day’s writing, getting things done, talking with you, reading, working. And then in recent months stopping after two hours because a) it is important to take breaks and 2) the iPad Pro’s battery died.

On Tuesday this week, the whole thing died too.

I sat down right here, had an idea for a title for something, and never got to tell it to my iPad.

You’d have liked my iPad, I just know it. And when we can all get out to travel as freely as once we did, I will take it to Apple and look at them with puppy-dog eyes. From all I can find out, though, when they’ve gone the way mine has, they’ve gone.

So.

Here’s to 2,007 days, here’s to something of the order of 20,000 hours, and here’s to my old iPad.

I don’t remember being this sad about a typewriter. I don’t remember noticing a pen or a pencil running out. But there was something so good about that huge screen and then there was something so charming about how the screen wouldn’t always work.

Anyway.

As I say, you’re looking brighter, sharper and in higher resolution on my phone. Specifically 460 pixels per inch instead of 264 ppi. And 900 nits of brightness compared to something like 500.

It suits you. But I miss rotating the screen in order to push your buttons

Not what I was expecting to talk to you about

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Grief, I need tea. Would you like one? I think there’s two teabags left, though oddly they’re called “tagged teabags”. I don’t know if that means they bleep when you steal them from the hotel or whether they’re just really well catalogued, but let’s have them anyway.

Slightly dizzy. I’m in a Manchester hotel and there was a fire alarm: did you hear it? So loud. Made louder by it being at 06:25. Made louder still by the klaxon being joined by an automated voice shouting that we had to evacuate the building, this is no drill, warp core breach in thirty seconds. I may be exaggerating.

Actually, that’s a horrible thought. I grabbed yesterday’s clothes and joined the crowd going down the stairs. Before I’d finished dressing, though, another – er, tenant? Member of the public? Civilian? I’m not sure what to call her. Another hotel guest, thank you. Another hotel guest was coming back up the stairs and calling out that it’s okay, apparently this was all a mistake. What if she were the one exaggerating? What if she was out and out lying – and we should all have continued to go out?

Why didn’t she tell me this four floors earlier?

I want you to know that I was very good and I left all my luggage in the room as you should. (What if she were working with a team of hotel thieves?) I don’t want you to know that my first thought was that I could be outside for hours and would be writing to you on my Apple Watch. No, actually, do think that, do know that: my potential last thoughts were of you.

And of the workshop I’m doing at 10am.

I did one here yesterday for the Federation of Entertainment Unions: about twenty people from Equity, the NUJ, the Musicians’ Union and the Writers’ Guild. I’m doing another one on a different topic today, different set of people, also for the FEU. I think yesterday’s went well, certainly I had a great time, but I know it went easier than ever. The venue, Band on the Wall, has the regular projector and screen I need for presenting but they also have an Apple TV.

Now, that’s two references to Apple in one go, so I’m improving. Yesterday was only the second time I’ve presented via one of these boxes – and the first time was the evening before. That was a practice run in the hotel room: I brought our own Apple TV, meaning Angela couldn’t watch Netflix at home, sorry, and tried it out on the hotel TV set.

If you’re interested in this stuff then I’ll tell you this is my new ideal and I will always bring an Apple TV with me: it beats having to hope you’ve brought the right cables for a projector you’ve not seen before. It also means I could roam the room with that iPad. All really useful stuff for me, so useful that I love it. That the venue had its own, just icing.

Only, the hotel TV set. I am a TV drama nut and yet this is the first hotel I’ve stayed in for about the last three years that I’ve even switched the telly on. The last time was also in Manchester, I was appearing on BBC Breakfast and switched it on so I could watch the start of the show in my room and get even more scared.

It’s even longer since I used the phone in a hotel room. That used to be the thing, didn’t it? Get into a new hotel room, phone home or phone wherever you’re going next, then one of you checks out the bathroom and the other tries the TV. Face it, when you’re in Stereotype City, it’s the man who switches on the telly and the woman who checks out the bathroom. Both use the phone.

Or did. Now look at us, at all of us. We bring our own phones with us. We don’t bring our own TV sets, except we do. When I’d finished rewriting the first of these two presentations on my iPad, I kicked back and relaxed – by watching the same iPad.

I watched Lou Grant on it. This is the journalism drama that made me want to be a writer and I can quote you lines, I accidentally use lines from it, 35 years after it aired. Lou Grant has finally come out on DVD. This was the one show I longed for the most when I was reviewing DVDs, when shiny discs were a thing, and now it’s out as nobody’s buying DVDs anymore. I bought it. Of course I bought it. And I’ll buy season 2 when it comes out in August.

Only, I’m doing that because it’s Lou Grant and it’s special to me and I want it to be a success, I want all five seasons released. When I was doing the disc reviewing lark, I would regularly hear from people who said they refused to buy a TV show until the entire series was released. They didn’t want to spend their money buying season 1 if season 2 were never brought out. People are idiots. You like the show enough to buy it, buy it. You don’t buy it because you hope the studio will release all five seasons first, you’re not really attuned to how this works.

I’m buying the DVDs to do my tiny part in making the sales enough to warrant doing more. This is a genuinely special show, not just to me, for all manner of television history reasons and for how tremendously well done it is.

But it’s special to me. I watch the show now as a writer with, if not experience then at least age behind me, I watch it now having been a professional critic, but I also watch it as the 13-year-old I was then. My job today is standing up in front of established actors, musicians, writers and journalists. I watch Lou Grant in this hotel room and there is an extra commentary track in my head with my 13-year-old self wondering at how I got here.

My 50-year-old self is wondering why it took me so long to get here but that’s another story.

God in heaven.

I’ve just realised, saying this to you I’ve just realised: I am now the age that the character Lou Grant was at the start of this series.

Anyway.

Here’s a thing. Lou Grant is at last out on DVD, right? I’ve already got the first three seasons on iTunes. (They didn’t release the fourth and fifth: I check regularly.) It came out on VHS once: about three episodes and I have two of them. Speaking of VHS, I have a huge filing cabinet draw with about 30, possibly 40 VHS tapes that I recorded off-air or that friends did. It’s missing one episode: Violence, from 1981. That missing one killed me, for years.

It doesn’t kill me now because I’ve got it. I will buy the DVDs as they hopefully continue to come out and I will buy the iTunes versions if they do, but the hunt for this missing episode took me down some interesting alleys. It’s a fourth-season episode so it has not been released officially in any form and consequently I don’t feel 100% bad about this. But that interesting alley has the whole season 4. And 5. And 1, and 2. It only has about half of season 3, but that’s okay, I’ve got all of that one on iTunes.

So I’m in a hotel, drinking tea with you, head still a little fuzzy from the fire alarm, and in a moment I will have to work on my iPad. But at this moment, right here under my fingers, right here in my possession, this one device has all 114 episodes of Lou Grant on it.

Call me ridiculous, because I am, but I left my luggage but I grabbed this iPad.

Lou Grant on iPad