A way with words: A writing career or a bad case of foot in mouth?

Ted Lasso, an American college football coach who is hired to coach an English soccer team in the Emmy-winning sitcom.

Monday

“It’s nice to follow your passion but believe me, making money from it is an entirely different thing.” 

So says Bernard O’Shea in the copy of this paper I read at dawn, thereby totally distracting me from the job I’m supposed to be actually DOING at dawn.

Bernard has done lots of things in his life, coming only recently to the idea that he would earn a living through writing. 

This great idea came with some grim realities appended, including, as he points out, the fact that “The vast majority of your work isn’t writing at all, it’s looking for work.” 

He’s so right. 

As a writer, you have to market yourself constantly, and you never know if what you are being offered is real honest-to-God paid work, or something to be done for free in the hope of 'exposure' which might get you some real honest-to-God paid work. 

Because most writers live a life of terror and dread, most agree too often to the freebies. They also kill themselves being witty on social media and worry that they don’t get enough “likes”. 

When they’re not flogging their wares, writers are worrying about things like the retirement of an editor.

This possibility terrorises jobbing columnists because the editor they know and love may be succeeded by Vlad the Impaler and Vlad may eliminate the writer who doesn’t have 40,000 Twitter followers or appear regularly on Brendan O’Connor’s show.

It’s mad myriad marketing instead of the emotion recollected in tranquillity version we all got sold in school.

All of which would seem to suggest I want Bernard to think again about writing as a career. Not so. Nothing beats writing. 

Everywhere you go, everything you do, whether it’s mopping up a feline hairball or listening to a mother on a bus being out-argued by a two-year old, is potential material. 

As you walk or drive, you’re trying out sentences. When the wind is in the right direction, you produce a book or a play or a column and if you are lucky, get to watch someone weep as they read it or laugh as they watch it. (You hope they’re weeping at the sad bits and laughing at the funny bits, but you get so desperate, sometimes, that any reaction is welcome.) 

You get to heft a hardback in your hand, open it at random and find something you’re glad you wrote. It’s the best addiction in the world and nothing equals the moment when the blank screen begins to fill with words. 

Bernard may never get rich at writing, but his financial rewards — or lack of them — will be outweighed by the sheer pleasure of doing the job.

Tuesday

Apropos writing, how can any novelist think it’s OK to describe a meal being “washed down by Pinot Grigio”? The imagery is nauseating, the statement frequent.

Wednesday

I horse half a dozen pairs of trousers onto the counter in the dry cleaners and tell the woman I would like her resident seamstress to take all of them up two inches. 

She looks a “why?” 

The reason is shrinkage. Of me. If I don’t get them taken up, I’m going to catch the toe of a shoe in one of them, fall over, break a hip, enter a downward cycle and die. 

I don’t figure the dry cleaning woman needs to know all of this prospective sequence, so I just shrug.

Thursday

I’m thinking of watching a TV series about a guy named Ted Lasso, who seems to be all sweetness and light. It has some great lines. Like the one that goes “Grief is the price we pay for truly loving someone. And it's worth every penny.” 

Friday

Sarah Everard was raped and murdered by a UK policeman named Wayne Couzens. He used the prevalence of Covid as an excuse to falsely arrest and handcuff her. He will serve the rest of his life in prison after he was convicted and sentenced yesterday. 

In the aftermath of his sentencing, the North Yorkshire Fire, Police and Crime Commissioner made some comments about lessons to be learned. Those lessons to be learned by women. Women need to be streetwise.

They need to know the law about when they could be arrested and when they couldn’t be arrested, because the dead woman technically couldn’t be arrested the way Couzens arrested her. 

Women need “to just learn a little about that legal process.” 

Oh, and think about flagging down a bus if a cop attempts to falsely arrest them.

Within minutes, he was being accused of being tone-deaf. But what he demonstrated was much worse than that. 

He was trying to shift the entire responsibility for a false arrest leading to rape and murder onto the victim, and — despite all the equality and diversity training he has to have gone through —
he clearly didn’t consider for a moment that this was what he was doing. 

Or rehearse what he was planning to say in front of someone who would have the sense and confidence to tell him to get a grip.

Saturday

The docket for the trouser alterations falls out of my wallet and, looking at it, I am blindsided by the obvious. Older people shrink downwards. We may not want to, but it happens. The consequences are much more exigent than the need to take trousers up. 

If I am two inches shorter than I used to be, then I should be three quarters of a stone lighter than I used to be. I should not be kidding myself I am controlling my weight if what I’m actually doing is controlling the weight I was when I was two inches longer. This is so bloody unfair. This very morning the papers were full of health guidelines related to your wardrobe. The new rule is that if you can fit into trousers you wore at 21, you’re healthy as a mountain goat.

I can fit into trousers I wore at 21. I can even button the waistband. Except they now form pleats around my ankles. Horizontally, a perfect fit. Vertically, pure accordion. 

I stand there, holding a little piece of lilac cardboard, accommodating the fact that I should be lighter, as well as shorter.

I think I will give up on this old age thing. If I stop believing in it, maybe it will go away. Like the way those right wing radio presenters in the US stopped believing in the Coronavirus and went on air to say so. What’s that you say?

They’re all dead? You make a fine point. Maybe I’ll stick with the getting old thing until a better alternative comes along..

Sunday

The Sunday Times says the Irish Examiner has received a solicitor’s letter from a person mentioned in one of my columns. 

No matter how long you’ve been a hack, the cold wash of dismay when this happens never diminishes. 

Bernard O’Shea needs to factor it into his thinking.