All I Do is Eat and Sleep and Sing

I don’t know if it comes across in this Tumblr often, but I really like making grand plans.

I found an A4 blank notebook, and the first three/four pages are scrawled with the synopsis and chapter plan for the children’s book I want to write. There’s a draft pitch email, waiting for me to finish it and send it off on Tuesday morning. I’ve set up a YA reviews and analysis blog (read a semi-frequent roll call of the books I’ve read on the bus), but the only posts I have are blog FAQs and geeing up for the eventual post-Bank Holiday soft release. All this excitement and yet…

My New Year’s Resolution is to become better at my day job. That is, my not-at-all-creative and low paying office job. For all the missed opportunities and false starts in my writing life, I just think that the state of my desk and the filing system needs sorted out much earlier.

Since the day job started to attract more business over the past year, managing the increased workload was challenging. There were mini-crises doing the quarterly book-keeping, when I would start to panic when there was errors reconciling and kick myself when the tiny errors are pointed out and solved in seconds. The weekly dictation has mounted up. The filing system really is unfit for present use.

And what am I doing…refreshing twitter in order to remain “on top of things” and trying to pitch and apply for jobs, all the while still kidding myself that I have a future in writing. Since a flubbed job interview for a paid internship at a GP news website on a rainy February afternoon in London, the enthusiastic phone calls and emails from recruiters desperate to find more about me have stopped.

Don’t think that the enthusiasm has waned on their part - they have read the same CV that stops getting relevant by July 2010 - I’m bored of it too. I glaze over application forms for roles that suit my experience, before realising that trying to adjust my skills to their scary job description is too taxing for post-work me. I don’t care about most of my friends’ statuses about their nights out and their snarky comments about Twilight that they have to yell out the parapet, sorry, important things that they have to promote. It’s gotten so dull that I actually LOVE finishing paperwork without feeling distracted by what I’m reading elsewhere.

It’s a roundabout way of saying how much I like my stop-gap office job now. Saying this will disappoint past Journalism Lecturers who would tell us about our place in a “difficult” time for the industry, and how we should work hard to maintain it, but I’m glad I’m not part of it anymore. Instead of being one of so many ambitious young journalism graduates fighting for that big internship, I’m in a calm space working with people - not necessarily colleagues - who have become friends. I used to think of it as a taste of a disappointing future, but now I want to do my damnedest to ensure I will still have a job during this long slog.

Awww, remember this? 

I have to apologise to those who actually read my sample column. I didn’t go through with the camping after all.

I know, what a coward. But I have my reasons. As the weeks and days flew through before T itself, I was too busy with work and family issues to get around to buying the tent, the groundsheet, the pegs, the sleeping bags, the inflatable mattress and pillow, and the rucksack to carry them all in. I was so disorganised and rushed, that I only organised my carpooling arrangements on Thursday night, and bought the patterned wellies, hiking socks and “heavy duty” poncho in one fifteen-minute spell in Mountain Warehouse on Friday lunchtime. Some of this information will be important later.

“Good afternoon T in the Park, we are the Arches Community Choir”

The main reason I was here. Up until the car journey to the festival grounds, I was constantly worrying about what people would think of us. Would they throw half-empty pints in our microphones? Would they provide their own sonorous bass part? Which of our songs would make them all tetchy and uncomfortable? But of course, I’m always thinking thoughts like these everytime I prepare to perform - as a soloist singing at funerals, or in our smaller concerts in the Arches Foyer.

I shouldn’t have worried. Apart from a couple of stage invaders boshing around to our version of “A Little Respect” and the time I spotted a curious onlooker rolling his eyes and smirking at a friend, the response was encouraging. Out of our two performances, the Sunday afternoon one edged it. Our audience didn’t want to move, frightened away from the outdoor stages by pellet-like rainfall, and I imagine that our choir wanted to be focused on entertaining people, if only to forget about our wet clothes and hair. 

Leaving the Healing Fields for post-gig drinking, I wondered whether we’d be able to better this moment.

The Best Time Ever I Pushed Into Crowds of People

The choir were all given Staff wristbands for the weekend. This not only allowed us to travel through blue doors into backstage roadways and cut into the front of the audience at the Main Stage, but psychological powers too. We saw how our “three day piss-up” came together. We even pushed into drunk and pilled-up crowds before Deadmaus.

Our fellow choir colleagues had media passes along with their staff wristbands. They told me and another member to meet up with them in the open field before the headlining set, so we cut backstage in order to call out for them. No success. They were probably on the other side. 

At first, I was polite and scared. Members of the crowd started chucking plastic pint glasses, and I never realised that cheap lager could feel slightly corrosive on my skin. A flare launched up and nearly landed on our face. This would not stop us getting back with our friends - our polite nudging and gesticulating turned into the two-handed Parting of the Ned Seas (yiiiiikes) as we reached the other staff door. 

Of course, they weren’t there, and were actually stuck in the crowds witnessing mud-fights, mud splashing from plastic cups, and chanting of “DEAD. FUCKING. MOUSE.” My colleague and I gave up by then, and decided to dismantle the tent before nightfall and to escape the rain.

I really wanted to go up on a Bungee Ball. Jarvis Cocker endorsed it, and everything!

I may have annoyed my choir colleagues all weekend. If it wasn’t my melodramatic singing along to the acts (I was trying to see if they made good choir standards - HONEST), I kept going on about the fairground attractions. 

The following reactions peppered our walks around the park, and are edited for clarity and repitition of untypeable noises:

“OHMYGOD, LOOK AT THAT! IT’S SO HIGH!”

“THAT THING OUTSIDE THE GHOST TRAIN IS MOVING! I WANT TO GO!”

“FUCK IT. WE NEED TO GO ON THAT THING!”

Nobody humoured me. Yeah, yeah, I know they were expensive and not what Summer Music Festivals are all about, but, OHMYGOD, look at how high they were going! 

Next time, I am buying a roll of bin bags

The heavy duty poncho from Mountain Warehouse was not so heavy duty after all. Throughout the weekend, what with all the taking off, and putting on, it was gradually ripping in half, before becoming unusable during the worst of the rainfalls on Sunday afternoon.

The poncho became a scarf and eventually a makeshift strap for a colleague’s inflatable mattress. It had some use after all.

I did see some bands when I had the time

I loved that it was sunny for Beyonce, and Pulp, the nerd Beyonces. Patrick Wolf’s hair matched his kilt jacket, and his music became more bodied with the expectations of the Radio 1 Stage. The Pierces were fairly good.

I hated myself for enjoying Jon Fratelli in the T Break tent - and I was only lending support to one of the choir members’ friends’ brother on drums. I not only preferred his new songs to some of the worst of his original band’s really boring material, but, *ugh* I actually thought that he was hot with his new haircut and double denim. I am actually ashamed of myself right now.

I did not cry once.

Even despite all these minor catastrophes, I’m really relieved that I never went into meltdown in front of people.

Before my weekend at T, I assumed that it would be the worst place ever for a person like me, but it was imperative to remain strong and optimistic around all the rain and lager-splashing and kicking throughout. I was not only glad to have a strong group of choir members who became good friends by Sunday evening. I was also glad to have a reason for being there.