I was booked to do a quick thing on a local BBC radio station yesterday and obviously whenever you do this, if you can, you listen to the show. Tune in a bit early, which is now amazingly easy because of live streaming over the internet, hear how your bit is being promoted, hear what else is going on.
It’s not always possible, you can be bouncing from station to station with no time in between. But I love it when I can do this because I think it makes my bit better. I can more engage with the show and the presenter and the listeners because I can do a callback to something they’ve just heard or said.
Fine. So far, so obvious. Only, this time as I’m listening away, it felt like I short-circuited. There was a fella on before me doing a review thing and it was abruptly like I’m simultaneously at my desk now and I’m sitting in a radio studio years ago. I used to do that, I said aloud.
There must’ve been at least a pixel of regret that I wasn’t still doing it, surely, but after the jolt of remembering, the main feeling was relief that I didn’t have to do it any more. It was something that took a hell of a lot of time and effort, time and effort that today I’m not that interested in. Not for that job, that role.
I am a lot older than the keen little William Gallagher who used to do those things, but I wonder if the difference is more than age. I wonder if it’s that I’m more selective. Back in the day, you say yes to everything or you do everything until someone says no.
Now I have a better idea of how much time and effort something is likely to take, and I suppose I can triage. You would hope so after a lot of years working, but sometimes I think things that are obvious still need saying, still need being brought to your own attention.
Such as this. I work early mornings, I would work late night except I crash out asleep, and I typically work through weekends. I’ve known for a long time that I need to give something up.
But it was listening to this fella that reminded me that I have given things up, that I can give them up, that we can move on.
I’m conscious that I think I’m juggling a lot and then I look at you and all you’re doing. I feel a bit feeble. But I am feeble, then, and I should own it. I need to focus more, stop spreading the effort and concentrate it better.
My first book was about the television drama “The Beiderbecke Affair” and it was for the British Film Institute. It was in their range of TV Classics and naturally, when you’ve done one, the only thing more likely than the publisher asking if you’d like to do another, is you asking the publisher if you can.
Even more than Beiderbecke, I wanted to write about “Lou Grant”. It didn’t fly and it didn’t fly for a dozen reasons from how the range almost never did US shows, to how the range wasn’t making money. But to make a pitch, I had to do a little bit of research.
That’s chiefly because if you are a publisher and you go to check whether there’s already a book on the proposed subject, you very quickly find that there is. My job was not only to convince the BFI that the topic was of value and that the chance of anyone buying a copy was good, but also that there was a reason for anyone else to do another book about this show.
To my mind, that was damn easy. This 1990s book about the making of “Lou Grant” is really an academic treatise. It sets out to explore whether the show and its “Los Angeles Tribune” newspaper setting was an accurate representation of real journalism at the time. The answer is: more than most. I’ve just saved you reading the book, although I’m denying you some fantastic access the writer had to key people involved.
As part of my own little initial stab at research, though, I created a few Google alerts. Any time something came up about “Lou Grant”, it would be added to the newsreader app I use constantly on my iPhone.
I think I originally created some alerts specifically for certain writers, but I would’ve abandoned that quite quickly. One of my favourite writers on the show is April Smith and if I remember getting alerts about her new novels, I know I got more news stories that contained lines like this: “In April, Smith said…”.
Forget setting an alert for Michelle Gallery. For a brief time I knew more about the opening hours of US art auction houses than is sensible.
But if I dropped those off after the book project failed to go, I somehow left the “Lou Grant” alert in place.
Consequently, over the years since, I have been alerted to the odd thing that some of the writers are doing now, and sometimes various television executives. There’s an excellent series of interviews with Grant Tinker about the show, for instance, and I’d not have found it otherwise.
Mostly I hear about cast, though. It’s through a Google alert that I got to watch Linda Kelsey performing a drama reading somewhere. Apparently it’s through a lack of Google alert that I can’t find that again now I want to show you. Bugger.
But if I found that a couple of years ago and if the Tinker interview is further back than that, there was one thing I could regularly count on my “Lou Grant” Google alert to keep turning up.
Ed Asner.
It seemed like very other week, it cannot be more than every other month, but I would get an alert of a news story about him performing a one-man show on stage somewhere. Or going to perform somewhere. Or maybe campaigning, or doing voiceovers, or just being interviewed an awful lot about the sheer volume of work he had done and the seemingly even greater volume of work he was now doing.
So it was a more of a jolt than I would have imagined to find out this week that he’s just died.
Just died. That’s like yeah, yeah, he just had to go do that dying thing, he’ll back in a minute. And there is a bit of me that would entirely believe that.
When I think about “Lou Grant” it’s usually about the writing, which I loved so much then that it made me want to become a writer. And which I admire so much more now that I am one. But back in the day, watching this series in the late 1970s and early 1980s, it was of course the whole I was enjoying. The writing, the acting, the directing, the production, all of it.
Now I look back at it, I’ve a new appreciation for the set design. But I most definitely have a greater appreciation for the acting. It is all so naturalistic that I forgot then and I can still forget now that it is acting at all.
Tell a lie, it isn’t all so naturalistic. Ed Asner is far from that in the first episode. He’s so far from it that you feel he’s in a different series to everyone else. But then for that first edition and perhaps a few after it, he was.
Never before –– and significantly, never since –– has a half-hour sitcom spawned a one-hour drama. But that is what happened. Ed Asner played grumpy Lou Grant for seven years on “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” and then he played the more layered version of him on his own show for five.
So if Asner thinks he’s still in a comedy in episode one, you can understand it. Or you can now. Back then, I may not have consciously registered the different tone between him and the rest of the cast, but I felt it and wondered what was going on.
Oddly, “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” never really played in the UK. Even more oddly, one of its sitcom spin-offs did: “Rhoda” was a hit here. So when this “Lou Grant” show started, I hadn’t the faintest idea that this character had any history.
I sound like I’m criticising Asner for how he performed in those early episodes and I suppose I am, but really I’m appreciating what a giant and unprecedented job he was in the middle of pulling off.
There’s a lot else to admire about the acting in the show, but that’s the element that sticks out at me. I thought that this and those constant alerts about new shows was the specific reason that I was so startled by Asner’s death even at age 91.
Here’s the thing, though. I’ve been thinking about this for days and the reason I’m jolted by his death is bigger than I thought. Any time anyone you’ve even heard of dies, of course you’re sad about it. When that someone is a direct connection back to your childhood, it’s of course more, even when that person has never heard of you.
But beyond that, there’s this. There are actors I like, actors I don’t. Certainly there are performances I relish and ones where I’m glad they didn’t do that to my script. I would not have said that there is any actor who has inspired me. I would not have said Ed Asner has. This show’s writers, certainly. I’m so single-minded-focused on writing that it’s writers or maybe certain producers I know enable certain writers who I credit.
“The Mary Tyler Moore Show” was beyond a hit in the US. It was such a success that – cutting a story at least in half – CBS gave an on-air commitment to a spin-off for the Lou Grant character. You could dream of such a deal now, but such was the popularity of the comedy that CBS bought 13 episodes of “Lou Grant” straight off.
It was called an on-air commitment, but it was really pay or play. If CBS had aired the first couple of episodes to disastrous ratings, I’m sure they’d have pulled it and just eaten the enormous cost. Whatever their thinking was, the drama that made me a writer got on air and had 13 episodes in which to shake out things like that naturalistic versus more comedic acting.
I owe a debt, then, to the writers of “The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” a series I’ve barely seen and certainly hadn’t the slightest notion of back when I was starting to mount up this bill. Creator/writers Allan Burns and James L. Brooks became familiar names to me on screen through creating “Lou Grant”, along with Gene Reynolds. But CBS had such faith in writers that it had tried to fire Burns and Brooks when they were developing the Mary Tyler Moore series and it was only Grant Tinker’s intervention that prevented them being out on their ears.
Which means score one to Grant Tinker, but this also tells me that really CBS gave an on-air commitment to Ed Asner.
So a show that meant this much to me exists because of an actor’s performance in a series I didn’t know.
I struggle to bring myself to say that therefore I am a writer because of Ed Asner, but it isn’t half looking like that. I thought it was unusual enough to be able to pin one’s career down to a single moment like a TV show, but to pin it to a performance I hadn’t seen, that’s just eye-widening.
I’ve been having trouble with a script I’m writing. It is partly because I appear to be in it and while my cold writer’s head can see that’s necessary to tell this particular story, even I wouldn’t watch something about me.
But then there is also this. The script is about real people. I am a real person, I’m a real person who hasn’t had breakfast yet and is having difficulty remembering whether he’s shaved this fuzzy morning, but I don’t interest me. Beyond wondering why I’m writing my own dialogue, and then why I’m reading it back, I don’t concern me. Instead, it’s everyone else I’m worried about.
I have more research about the two other real people in the story than is even really feasible. Plus above all the facts and the documentation, they were my friends. No question, I’m armed and ready in that sense, but I’m a writer who’s also a journalist: I would give up an eye faster than I would make up a quote for a real person.
And now I’m going to have to make up entire speeches. Ouch, that’s revealing: I’m hiding in tenses and presumably because I am tense. The truth is that I already have made up entire speeches. I’ve written a two-page argument between me and one of these people. And that fight cuts into me, it hurts me, yet still I look at the page thinking he didn’t say that and nobody cares what I didn’t say back.
Except I had a dream the other night in which the late Alan Plater told me, in these precise words, “as long as it’s true, make it up”.
Then it’s like I planned what happened next. The reason I’m telling you this today, apart from how it’s pressing on my mind and I tell you everything, is that a play of Alan’s is to be re-staged at the Hampstead Theatre in London later this year. “Peggy for You” is about Alan’s first agent, Peggy Ramsay, and I read the script last night. Re-read: my copy of the published script turns out to be 21 years old.
It also turns out to be the true story of this eye-poppingly wild and wonderful woman, except it isn’t true at all. Except it is. It is an account of one day of her working life in the 1960s, completely made up, and therefore completely true.
I know because Alan’s introduction to the script says so.
“When I started writing the play, I heard her voice saying: ‘Just make sure it’s a pack of lies, dear.’ And it is. I did no research, but relied totally on a blend of memory, anecdote, myth and legend. The few elements that can be clearly identified could not possibly have happened on the day in question.”
Since Alan is one of the real people in my script, I think I should keep listening to him.
If there is one thing I wish I’d written, then I’m a rubbish writer who pays no attention to how much fantastic writing there is in the world. But definitely one of the things would be this line of “Brevity. Soul. Wit.” which used to be on my favourite mug, which made that mug my favourite, until I lost it somewhere.
It was a mug from the Royal Shakespeare Company and maybe you need that context to recognise what it’s after saying, but I think you get it. This is the six-word quote “brevity is the soul of wit” reduced to three words.
You can always reduce anything. I once read a commissioning document that, by way of an example, cut the whole of Hamlet down to about 100 words. Small problem: if you read those 100, you would never take a single look at Hamlet again. You can edit text and make it more effective, you can edit text and make it crap.
I was in a discussion this week about whether one should edit one’s writing at all. Ever. That if you edited it, maybe you could ruin it.
Intellectually, I get the argument, and I could even make a decent fist of arguing that uninhibited stream-of-conscious writing needs protection.
Except it’s bollocks. People who don’t want to edit for fear of ruining their work really just don’t want to edit. Editing is hard. It’s heavy lifting, it’s deep examination instead of just merry typing.
There’s an older, if similar argument that asks whether writing is an art or a skill. I’m just not sure how this can count as an argument when the answer is yes.
Not quite true, or not quite the full answer. I was once in a pub discussion where the answer was actually “Yes, and it’s your round.”
Of course, if I really wanted to edit this down to its core, I’d just point out that the mug concerned is not the RSC one.
Last night, YouTube offered me up Cyndi Lauper’s “Change of Heart“, a song that comes from – and instantaneously took me back to – about 1986. The music did and I can see your face, you’re not exactly looking surprised. Music does this, of course it does. I don’t know how, but of course it does.
Only, the video didn’t take me back one inch.
That song, and the True Colours album it comes from, are part of my skin but I had never seen the video before last night. I don’t think it’s an especially brilliant one, it’s not that I’m urging you to see it, but I can’t stop thinking about the disconnection of music and video, skin and surface. Each note, each syllable, as familiar as if they were my very own, and the video completely alien.
It was riveting, somehow like suddenly seeing the back of your head and realising you’ve always had a bald spot.
Presumably the video was filmed in 1986 and these people were doing that filming, were performing, no more than shortly before I was first listening to the album. So that video shows reality – I mean, okay, people don’t tend to run over London tourist spots singing, but those spots looked like that then, those crowds were there, this was reality.
And from the perspective of 35 years later, that reality seems so innocent.
It makes me feel old, not least after I just worked out that 35 figure on my fingers, but I can’t decide whether I miss that time or not. Knowing all that was to come after it, I don’t know if would like to be able to step back to then.
I just know that I cannot avoid stepping back when I listen to the music. And that this – to me – brand new video for it has thrown me.
Maybe I’m wondering what the next 35 years will bring and, time being what it is, also thinking of just how soon it will be 2056. I’m definitely thinking about whether we like or dislike music, we assess it now, in the moment we hear it, and we entirely miss that is forever welded to that same moment.
Sometimes I’m wondering whether we can actually assess whether something is good or not, assess it at all, because nothing is entire of itself, everything is bonded to its time. Except screw assessing anything, it works for you or it doesn’t.
Maybe I’m just saying that it would good if everything old were new again.
There must be something awkward about me because last time I fair raged at you about how writers shouldn’t ever ask questions in articles and now I want to at least enthuse about not writing answers.
It’s a different rant. Questions in articles and features tell me the writer couldn’t do their job whereas answers in a script tell me the writer isn’t great at dialogue.
This is very specifically something I feel about scriptwriting, but I feel it so strongly that I apply it in fiction, I apply it anywhere I remotely can. And it’s this: I will eat glass before I allow any of my characters to answer a question.
Respond, yes. React, absolutely. But actually answer what they been asked, as close to never as humanly possible.
Here’s an exchange of dialogue from a script. I need you to play the first part, I’ll play the second.
FIRST PERSON: What were you doing in Tesco this morning?
SECOND PERSON: Um, buying bacon.
You read that very well, thank you. I need you to do it once more, maybe with just a tiny bit more anger.
FIRST PERSON: What were you doing in Tesco this morning?
SECOND PERSON: Were you following me?
You see the difference immediately. The initial exchange about bacon was domestic at best, flat at worst. In the second one, these two characters feel like they’re on their feet, that there is some life and verve and history here, that they’re going to fight.
I grant you, we’ve lost the information that I was buying bacon. It’s possible that bacon plays an important part in the story, but you suspect not. So what the bacon line really accomplishes is confirmation that I was in Tesco. We already knew that from the question, so that answer was in all possible ways worthless. It was a dead line of dialogue. Dead and therefore deadening.
When you see an answer like that in a script, it is alway deadening, and it always means the writer is trying to write naturalistically. In a real conversation, it’s more likely that I’d say bacon than I would get in your face about it all, but this isn’t a real conversation. Drama does not have natural, real-life dialogue, it has dialogue that sounds as if it’s natural.
That’s a gigantic difference and it’s how dialogue carries infinitely more than the information in the words. You delivered your line about why I was in Tesco with some gusto there, but I could’ve asked about your following me in a light, jokey way. I didn’t, though, and you knew I didn’t, even without my writing it like this:
SECOND PERSON: (Angrily) Were you following me?
Last week I said that to me, a question in an article is a brick wall that stops me reading on unless I have to. An answer in a script can be a stumble, to my mind, and it breaks the flow, it takes me a little out of the story, because an answer is usually a bit of dead air.
If I feel strongly about this, though, it’s not that I’m against writers having their characters answer. It’s that doing so without being this dead pause, without reminding me that this isn’t naturalistic dialogue, is beyond me.
Whereas the reason I’m a writer at all is a show called Lou Grant which basically had an ensemble of journalist characters constantly asking each other things, and then spending half the episode interviewing people. Back when I was a teenager, I watched five years of that show without once realising that it was all question and answer, it is done that well.
It’s not very often that something you used to adore stands up a couple of decades later, but in this case I now admire that show even more. I just don’t seem to have learned from it how to ask questions without answers being rubbish.
An editor told me this week to not write questions in a feature and I overreacted. Not at all because I disagree, but because I was appalled at the idea I would ever do this dreadful thing. I explained that questions in feature articles were a pet peeve of mine and then decided no, that’s not strong enough, it’s a pet peeve, a hobby horse and a religious tract.
I feel so strongly about this that it is honestly difficult for me to write you an example. Honestly. But here goes.
So what is a question in a feature?
God, the willpower required to not delete that before you saw it.
A question like that in an article comes loaded with a lot of information and all of it is bad. When you read a question, you know the feature is moving on to a new point, which is fine –– but you also know the writer didn’t know how to do the move. You can suspect that the writer is lazy and you can know for a fact that the writer isn’t very good.
If an article isn’t one of those bullet-point lists, a listicle in which number 6 will blow your mind, then it’s known as a read-through. You’re meant to read it through from the start to the end. That means the text starts somewhere and the writer takes you through to the end.
Each point has to follow on from the one before. The piece has a whole has a lot to say and the job is to say it all in such a way that the article flows, that it carries the reader along without any bumps in the stream. The job is finding the right sequence of points and making it seem inevitable, obvious, easy that they go in this order.
You also have to write well enough that someone bothers to read on, but that’s another story. The reason poor writers include questions in their text is because they can’t take you to the next point in a way that feels inevitable, obvious, easy.
When I read a question, it feels to me as if the article has stopped in a panic. I can see the writer, I can feel the writer, realising they don’t know how to keep the text going. I can feel the weight of the word count on their backs, the pressure of the deadline. I can feel that they don’t read much. And I can sense that they don’t give very much of a damn, either.
A question in an article is a brick wall and if I ever read on after one, it’s because I have to for some reason. I then resent having to, because I already know the writer isn’t any good and so the chance I’ll find what I need is suddenly dramatically lower.
Don’t get me started on questions in headlines, either. Actually, no, do get me started on that because it’s quick. So quick that there’s even Betteridge’s law which states that any headline that’s a question will be followed by an article that answers no.
“Can you declutter in one hour?”
“Is Elvis really teaching PE in Cardiff?”
It’s possible, just about barely possible, that you’ve picked up on how questions in articles and headlines make me a teeny bit unhappy. I told you I overreacted. But I can’t help it: when I see a question in a feature, I am affronted that I’ve been wasting my time reading this crap. So to be told not to do it, and by implication have it suggested that I ever do, it was pet peeve hobby horse religious effigy burning time. And then some.
I’ve read 2,000 scripts. Well, yeah, no, I’ve read an awful lot more than that but in my current reading of at least one script per day, I’ve just read my 2,000th and this was both later than expected and then sooner than calculated.
Not sure there’s much you can say to this other than big deal. I’m curious why I clearly have to tell you this trivial thing, but if I can salvage something useful, let me also tell you this. Of the 2,000, some 361 were on the excellent TV Writing site, which is simply a favourite corner of the whole internet for me. And 117 were from the script library at the BBC Writersroom, although note that their collection includes some post-production scripts that are cut-down documents, made less to read and more for some admin purposes.
The rest, by the way, were predominantly plucked from countless other sites and links, were sent to me directly, or were in the couple of hundred script books I own. Which reminds me, I’ve been meaning to recommend a couple of books to you.
I’m a little torn over Goldman. I was a fan until his profoundly, aggravatingly awful non-fiction book Hype & Glory. (Goldman is famous for huge, huge surprises in his novels, really eye-popping revelations that make you want to go back to read the book again. Something like 90 pages into this tripe, he tries to pull off the same thing by suddenly announcing that his wife has left him. Rather than surprise, rather than eye-popping, it’s a moment that leaves you eye-rolling and realising that’s why this is all so bad.)
Then he regularly described critics as failures, which is harsh but I’ve been a critic, I could see his point, and allegedly called one woman critic a whore, which just pissed me off against him forever. Or nearly forever, I think it was a few years after this that I read his two books of screenplays and enjoyed them as much as I have again in the last couple of weeks.
Except, as well as superb screenplays, each book has thousands of words of background detail about the writing and production of these films. Fascinating, illuminating, compelling, it is like having a friend sitting there telling you these things. These essays of his were so good that a few more years on, I was actually eager to read his non-fiction book, “Which Lie Did I Tell?”
Unfortunately, I already had.
The majority of that book is a reprint of the essays from the screenplay books. I know few people read script books, but you could be pretty certain that everyone who did would read this. I remember flicking through and through and through thinking I bought the hardback of this.
Anyway.
Five Screenplays has All the President’s Men, Magic, Harper, Maverick and The Great Waldo Pepper. Four Screenplays has Marathon Man, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, The Princess Bride and Misery.
They are two tremendous collections and on the page, Goldman’s scripts fly. Some day I must actually see Waldo Pepper; I’ve read it a couple of times and yet never got around to watching.
Howay. That’s nine of the 2,000 scripts I’ve read in this run and if I don’t shut up now, I’ll be telling you about 1,991 more. Well, yeah, no, there have been some incredible stinkers that make you feel a) great that you can probably write better than that and 2) regret the time you spent turning those pages.
Although then there are others that are so good that 3) I want to give up writing.
Also, though, a fascinating number where either the script was a huge slog to read yet the show was great, or the script was incredible and the film was boring. I keep thinking about that.
It might be that a script is just the first, if biggest, if most crucial, part of a production. Might be.
Tell me you do this too, look serious and say it isn’t just me. I measure the passage of time by TV series. I don’t mean to say that you and I should meet for a coffee at a quarter past “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” or on July “24”.
I mean Buffy lasted for seven years. Thriller “24” ran for eight years in its original run. The remake of “Hawaii Five-O” has just ended after a decade. It’s not even as if I followed these shows –– I like Buffy and 24 a lot but didn’t stick with either, I didn’t like Hawaii but the remade theme was fantastic –– yet I am conscious that they came and they went. I talked about “Hawaii Five-O” in my 2005-2010 podcast UK DVD Review and since then, I’ve talked more and they made 240 episodes.
Then “Doctor Who” is heading very close to its 60th anniversary and I remember vividly running across Birmingham because I’d booked the wrong cinema to see its 50th special. Realising that there were two Odeon cinemas and I was not in the most right one, feeling the skin on my lungs as I ran across the city, that was ten minutes ago, not most of a decade.
And speaking of most of a decade, the reason I am thinking of all this yet again now is that “Leverage” ended in 2012 after five years. It’s back today, after what WolframAlpha.com tells me is 3,118 days. What in the world have I done in the last 8 years, 6 months and 14 days? Well, I’ve watched “Leverage” again, I can tell you that.
Otherwise, television drama comes and goes, time ticks on. I think of the immense effort that goes into creating a series and keeping it going for years, and then I think about how quickly that is gone. One moment “Leverage” is a series on US television, the next it was a series on US television.
And now it’s again a series on US television, albeit now called “Leverage: Redemption”. I don’t know when I’ll get to see it here in the UK, but I do know that however successful it is, however many years it runs, it is going to be over astonishingly fast, before I get around to doing anything.
Now we’ve moved from broadcast television to streaming, I don’t get the same thing of seeing a pilot episode one day and hearing the series finale is on ten minutes later. But I do get the discovery that while I was looking away, entire series have come and gone. The other week I came across the script to the pilot episode of “The Last Ship”, for instance. I’d not heard one syllable about this show but it turns out to have run very successfully for five years.
Five years of work and I missed it. But can now watch it anyway, which is what I’m doing while I wait for “Leverage: Redemption” to come to the UK.
We get so little time. I think people who funnel that time into television drama pull off a gigantic feat and I think they make something that lives and lasts beyond its time. In this case, so much so that demand brings it back for another go.
I think you and I should make some television. Waddya say?
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
