work

25 Things To Do In A Dull Town: the start of a mission to create some lunchtime entertainment

This isn't Dulltown: Dulltown is even duller than this. Pic: http://www.freedigitalphotos.net

The company where I’ll be working for eight weeks is located in one of those places that was once a pleasant little Victorian town but that has since been subsumed into the dull urban sprawl that is Greater London.

Part of this process has seen the high street stripped of its character and sense of community by the reinvention of many independent traders that once served the community, as bland betting shops, smelly kebab bars, dull financial advisers and soul-destroyingly uninteresting electrical discount stores.

All the locals look rather weary, as though they’ve given up on their aspirations of moving either closer into central London, with its vibrancy and history and busy-ness; or out into the countryside just a few miles away. Instead, they’re stuck in the middle, with nothing to do, in a stream of commuter traffic, amid the unfragrant charity shops, characterless chain pubs and pound stores.

I realised early on that there would be little to do during my lunchbreaks – this Dull Town doesn’t set out to offer excitement and doesn’t really want the visitor to enjoy herself there. I decided I would have to go out there and create my own leisure opportunities.

So, I decided to make a list of Things to Do in a Dull Town at Lunchtime.

I thought 25 would be a nice round number. I’ll be there for about 40 days in total, unless they extend my contract – or get the hump and cut it short if they find out I’ve been disrespectful of their chosen location – so allowing for rainy days spent brooding over a baked potato at my desk, that would still leave me lots of interesting lunchtimes out.

As things stand, I’ve got rather stuck before I’ve even reached the 20 mark, and that’s including a friend’s facetious suggestion “get your tyre pressures checked” and my own – rather desperate – “go and look at the bypass”. I did consider stopping there and starting again at number 1, which would eventually generate more than a month of lunchtime excitement, but then I decided this would be cheating. Somehow, I have to come up with more ideas.

It’s my policy to exclude most shopping, eating and drinking activities, since that would involve spending money. There will be certain exceptions, such as those necessary to carry out Number 8 on my list: “beverage-criticising” (the art of sitting in a café and muttering, in middle-aged fashion, “doesn’t anyone know how to make a proper cappuccino/decent pot of tea?”)

So, here’s the list, in no particular order, each to feature in future blog posts.

1. Have my legs waxed.
2. Purchase three nice things from charity shops.
3. Walk as far as I can northbound in half an hour, and back again.
4. Ditto, but southbound.
5. Visit the church.
6. Walk in the park.
7. Visit the “town farm” – to include finding out what a “town farm” actually is.
8. Sit in cafés, muttering to self about the inadequate beverages.
9. Walk up and down the high street, listing the shops and deciding which I would allow to continue to exist in my capacity as self-appointed Town Planner – and which I would consign to oblivion.
10. Have a manicure.
11. Go to the library and read something educational.
12. See how many dogs I can count in an hour. Breed to be identified where possible.
13. See how many ugly people I can count in an hour.
14. Talk to strangers. On any subject.
15. Ask the chatty butcher (one of the independents the town does boast) for advice on what to have for my tea – and proceed to follow his advice.
16. Ditto the bloke who runs the fruit and veg stall on a Friday. This could turn into a cookery blog before I know it!
17. Walk to the bypass and admire its talent at diverting much of the traffic, making Dulltown’s high street quieter (albeit even duller), so I can stroll around taking the piss in relative peace.
18. Have my tyre pressure checked.

I am grateful for a suggestion for 19 (go and look at the strange outdoor exercise machines in the park) to a new colleague. Our meeting was somewhat of an accident, since we don’t work directly together, but it transpires we share a mutual distaste for Dull Towns with a propensity to publish our opinions on the internet. My fellow blogger showed a great interest in my List of Things to Do at Lunchtime but rather gloomily opined that only disappointment could result – she has tried most of them out during her time working in Dulltown, and said she ended up more disillusioned than ever with “this nothing place”.

My new chum has promised to write me a guest blog about her own experiences futilely attempting to have fun at lunchtimes in Dulltown, so watch this space.

Pic credit: Tom Curtis, http://www.freedigitalphotos.net/images/view_photog.php?photogid=178

I get a job, become inexplicably popular and start a fire in the pub – a week of strange variety

I'm exaggerating - it wasn't quite this bad. Pic: www.freedigitalphotos.net

Imagine eight acoustic guitarists, a bazouki player and a girl on a glockenspiel, all simultaneously doing their thing in the corner of a small-town pub, doing a cover of a Turin Brakes song, when a fire breaks out on the table.

Imagine you weren’t even there at the time – you’d wandered back in from having been for a pee and found the smoke alarm going off and a right to-do going on, with the nasty acrid smell of burning plastic, and bewildered musicians beating out a burning table with their bare hands.

Then imagine it becomes evident that it was you that started the conflagration, by leaving a pile of papers and folders far too close to a lighted candle.

And an expensive violin, which had been lying on the table minding its own business, has been scorched in the flames.

Embarrassing. Very embarrassing. The only consolation was that the landlord didn’t seem to mind – he seemed kind of tired and beaten, more than angry, almost as though this was just another of the tribulations of running a British pub. And, as luck should have it, the owner of the violin just happened to be… guess what… a professional violin repairer and restorer. What are the chances of that happening? She was very nice about it and said she could sort out her charred instrument in the workshop. So things could have been a lot worse, though I did feel a bit of a berk, what with this having been my first visit to this particular music night.

Anyhow, the next day was Wednesday and I got a call from a recruitment agent about a temporary editing position I applied for a while back. “It’s for two months and they want someone to start straight away,” he cautioned. “Yeah, yeah,” I thought, having heard that particular phrase before from recruitment types. It usually means “in about six weeks, when we’ve sorted the paperwork out”. But no, he meant “straight away”. “Will tomorrow be OK?” he asked.

WTF???!!! I played for time. “How about Monday?” I suggested, wondering how the hell I was going to get the stuff done I’d been lingering over. Monday, it seemed, was far too late, and we split the difference and settled for Friday.

You can imagine the scene as I rushed to get work clothes washed and ironed, my usual uniform being leggings, a lunch-stained T shirt and slippers.

More on the new job another time. It was better than I expected: the people were nice, the bus stops outside, and there were three types of teabag, free milk and a massive fridge in the kitchen. Any employer who thinks of their workers’ beverage needs in this way can’t be bad.

Anyhow, I got home after my first day and checked my emails to find that TWO people wanted to talk to me about proofreading and copywriting work. Two! In one day! Talk about buses all coming at once. One had been recommended by a website developer I did some work for recently and I ended up speaking to him on the phone till 10.30pm about his project. The other, the owner of a marketing agency, had, believe it or not, got my details from a guitarist I met while I was setting fire to the pub. I’d been so busy apologising to everyone over the violin catastrophe that I didn’t even realise this chap was vaguely in my line of work in his day-job.

It doesn’t stop there. Had another email yesterday from an old colleague and drinking buddy, who wants to meet up to discuss some writing work he might be able to put my way.

Quite why I’m so popular all of a sudden, after a fairly quiet spell, is thoroughly inexplicable. Maybe it’s my new perfume.

Pic credit: think4photop, http://www.freedigitalphotos.net/images/view_photog.php?photogid=2294

Grumpy journalist seeks interesting assignments. I’m free next week! Don’t let my cats starve!

Today I completed a feature about a British exporter for an international trade magazine and tomorrow I’m writing some copy for a website designer who’s doing a groovy new site for a property company.

Next week I’ll be meeting a local small businessman who likes the nice simple WordPress sites I’ve created recently and might want one for himself.

But other than that, next week is stretching bare and challenge-free ahead of me. If I don’t get a commission to do something, I will get all grumpy and bored – and my poor cats will have to have their meaty chunks in gravy rationed, so they’ll get all irritable too, and take it out on the local mouse population.

If anyone needs any copy-writing, sub-editing or features, do shout! Requests to do features for consumer press particularly welcome, but I enjoy corporate and trade press work too.

This coming weekend is going to be considerably more eventful than next week and I’ll have little access to the internet, so if anyone does make my dreams come true and “gissa job”, it’s best to contact me on my mobile phone.

Back to being a starving freelance

I’ve been inactive on the blogging front for a fair while because I’ve been working full-time for a publishing company, writing a daily business news bulletin. Somehow the complexity of business news and the pressures of daily deadlines don’t lend themselves to fulfilling the creative urge. After a 7.30am start every day and having emails coming at me for hours on end, demanding attention, the last thing I want to do is continue sitting in front of a screen.

It’s interesting and absorbing work, though. I start at 7.30 in my dressing gown and rarely stop, except to get dressed and get some breakfast when my bulletin goes to press at 8.30 each day. Life after about 3pm, when I tend to finish, is strictly active – that’s when I go for a swim or play squash, do the food shopping, get the car repaired, pay the bills… any of those things the average 9-5 worker doesn’t get a chance to do during the day.

Anyway, the second of my three-month contracts is coming to a close as my bulletin is being taken in-house, along with the rest of the company’s regional bulletins. So I shall be back on the market as a full-time starving freelance. A scary prospect in a way but I look forward to not having to cope with 64-page financial results at the crack of dawn!