Late on a Wednesday evening in maybe 1999 or 2000, I had the closest thing I\u2019ve known to an epiphany. I want to share this with you now in 2017 partly in order to to remind myself of it, to stoke up the fire for me, but also because after all of these years, I\u2019ve only now realised why it worked.<\/p>\n
Here\u2019s the thing. I feel that I haven\u2019t started yet: I\u2019m not the writer I aim to be, I haven\u2019t done anything, I\u2019m still only just beginning. Unfortunately I also feel that time is roaring away and this is a truism that burns me: there are fewer days ahead of me than there are behind. Probably.<\/p>\n
I may even have chronophobia: the fear of time passing. I suspect not, given how long I spend re-watching Columbo episodes and the number of times I can\u2019t separate my back from my bed at 5am. But I\u2019ve thought about it and it fits a lot of things about me.<\/p>\n
So, okay, I\u2019ve done bugger-all and I\u2019m too late to do anything about that. That isn\u2019t the cheeriest position to be in and certainly not to be in continually. I did have one moment of lightening up, however, and it was this aforementioned epiphany. I like the word aforementioned. I don\u2019t know why.<\/p>\n
Anyway, I\u2019m pretty sure of the year but I know for certain what day of the week it was because for a long while around then I used to do the late shift on BBC Ceefax\u2019s Entertainment desk on Wednesday evenings. <\/p>\n
This is all so long ago now that I struggle to remember how the evenings went but there was one requirement of the job that I do recall. Not only was it something you had to do, it was required to be the last thing you did before you closed down the desk for the night.<\/p>\n
You wrote a handover note.<\/p>\n
Actually, you emailed it. Just a note from you on the late to whichever colleague was going to be in on the early shift the next morning. You\u2019d tell them if there had been any technical problems they need to watch out for; you tell them if some news came down the wires and they should look for updates. I don\u2019t know, all that kind of thing.<\/p>\n
And I can see myself on one Wednesday night. I can see where I was in the newsroom, I can see the very seat in BBC Television Centre, when I realised that a handover note is a pretty good analogy for life.<\/p>\n
Think about it. My job was to run that entertainment desk, writing news, updating stories, doing anything and everything to make that the very best place I could. My job was to live up to what every other journalist did there, my job was to keep the standard up.<\/p>\n
But then I\u2019d finish.<\/p>\n
I would finish my shift and leave the desk in hopefully as good a state as I possibly could, most definitely as good a state as I found it. You do everything you can and then you hand over to the next person, knowing that they will do the best they can.<\/p>\n
And shortly after them the entire day shift of journalists would start and they\u2019d all be there to do the best they could. Okay, maybe not all of them. But this was a particularly good team.<\/p>\n
So, okay, I could measure my evenings: I could see that nothing had fallen over, I could see how many stories I\u2019d written, I could see whether entertainment news coverage felt complete. I can\u2019t do any of that with my writing since: I\u2019m clueless whether it\u2019s complete or has fallen over. But still, you work to your best and then you accept that you\u2019re handing over to someone.<\/p>\n
I feel this may all sound silly \u2013 let\u2019s please just keep it between the two of us \u2013 but it helped me. <\/p>\n
And now, 17 years later, I was thinking about this and, okay, needing it anew, when I made this rather late realisation. I\u2019m embarrassed to have taken so long to join a dot since I\u2019ve often thought about both dots, just not in connection with one another.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s just this: the show comes first.<\/p>\n
I\u2019ve always believed that and I always will. Whatever the show or the project or the news desk or the book or the article or the website or the TV show or the event is, it comes first. My job is to do it, to do what is needed for it.<\/p>\n
And so I don\u2019t matter. It doesn\u2019t matter that it\u2019s me, it only matters that someone does it. <\/p>\n
Nobody\u2019s going to carry on writing my books after I\u2019ve gone but someone, actually many someones, will write on these topics, will explore these things, will press forward. <\/p>\n
So my dying off before I\u2019ve written a fraction of what I want to do is not something to fear, it is not something that means I\u2019ve failed. It means I did my shift to the best of my ability and now I can hand over to someone else. I don\u2019t matter, they don\u2019t matter, but the show does and the show goes on.<\/p>\n
If I could just pull my bloody finger out and get things done a bit more.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Late on a Wednesday evening in maybe 1999 or 2000, I had the closest thing I\u2019ve known to an epiphany. … Continue reading