Pieces written over Christmas

Photo by Green Chameleon on Unsplash

I've been quite busy writing in the run up to Christmas.

Podcast Goddess extraordinaire, Amanda Litherland, refers to the period between Christmas and New Year as 'Crimbo Limbo', and it tends to be a period when people are inclined to spend a lot of time sitting around in jimjams, or other night attire, staring at screens and waiting for the holidays to end. As such, I've always felt that it's a really good time to be publishing a lot of content, if not actual journalism.

The F-Word was a bit dormant last Christmas as, naturally, (we are all unpaid volunteers after all...) everyone had battened down the hatches for the festive period, and wasn't inclined to be on call to edit pieces between the 22nd December and the 4th January. While understandable, I always find this a bit maddening because, especially when I was still working full time at the library, Crimbo Limbo was the period I tended to really get shit done, writing wise.

With this in mind, I decided I was going to do a number of blog posts for Crimbo Limbo over on The F-Word this year, as the blog posts don't need 2nd editing and I could just write and post them unaided. As such, I did three podcast themed posts and the monthly music blog post. It worked a treat until the website died on us. Twice. Over Christmas.

We do have someone who can fix it but, it's Christmas/New Year and they, like us, are a volunteer so it seemed like a bad idea to drag them away from the festivities to try and fix it. Tomorrow though, I will be sending a tactfully worded email...

I've also written two pieces for Medium, both of which have perhaps missed their moment, timing wise, but which I'm still hoping people will enjoy reading.

Photo by Kevin Grieve on Unsplash

The first piece I wrote was a somewhat delayed piece on the lyrical history of Girl Power.

Really, the time to write this piece would have been the day that the Spice Girls announced their return, and while I did pitch the idea in November to The Guardian, Laura Snapes had been snowed under with Spice Girls related pitches by then and they didn't want it. I still wanted to write it though, if only because it would enable me to write about a band I've been wanting to re-visit since the summer: Helen Love. So, I did.

By the time I got around to writing it (bearing in mind that I was alternately poorly and in a highly euphoric post-F+TM gig state for the whole of November) the Piers Morgan/Little Mix/Ariana Grande Twitter spat had blown up and died down again, and that story added a slightly different aspect to the piece. So it all worked out well in the end. Sort of.

Image by Paul Smith. Flickr creative commons licence.

My next piece was also one that I'd tried to get someone to pay me to write. In this case, I pitched it to both The Overtake (who liked it but, what with having a limited freelance budget, couldn't pay me to write a piece they could do themselves in house...) and The Independent (who said they liked it but wanted it done more conventionally, then didn't commission me anyway...)

The pitching process had been OK for this one, with some encouraging comments if not an actual commission, plus I'd had a lot of fun researching figures for the piece, so I decided to go ahead with it for Medium.

This piece was loosely related to the increase in train fares that is coming in on the 2nd January, although my my main focus was on the (obscene) cost of an Anytime fare from Stockport to London, and all the things I could spend the money on instead. A bit irreverent, a bit sarcastic. Not exactly wacky, but definitely not entirely serious in tone either.

In a way, it's the kind of piece I might have written for Too Late For Cake a few years ago, only I'm currently resting that blog until after Brexit and until I finally abandon my (so far fruitless) proofreading business in the summer. I promised myself I'd try to make that business work for a whole academic year, and I'm sticking to that. However pointless it currently feels to do so.

Anyway, having written the train fares piece between Christmas and New Year, the decision then was when to publish it. It's all about timing you see. Too early into Crimbo Limbo and no one would read it. Too late and the fare rise would already be a thing of the past.

So I decided to publish it on New Year's Day.

As it turns out, that wasn't such a great idea given the events at Victoria train station in Manchester on New Years Eve (and, yes, the proximity of Victoria station to Manchester Arena has not been lost on me, or, indeed I expect, on a lot of people). I did consider binning the piece altogether in the light of that, but decided to go ahead on the basis that, even if no one wants to read it today, they might feel like reading it in a month's time or something. There are serious points about the privatised rail industry in amongst the tongue in cheek bits, and I'm hoping that I've struck the right balance of light and thought provoking. It just might be one you don't feel like reading today, and I understand that.

Wishing you all a happy and safe 2019