Have rod, will travel. It’s been my mantra (and my escape) whenever I jump on the big white bird and head off to train journos from Houston to Singapore, from Oslo to Moscow.
Except this time.
In a few hours, I’m off to Karachi for three weeks’ work with journalists on a new daily newspaper. However, this will not be a trip where I head for the hills, rod in hand, at weekends. At least, not unless I want to become a ransom note.
I’ve spoke to loads of people about what to expect. Not one has told me: “Oh, you’ll be all right.” On the contrary. They all advise: “Keep your head down, do your work and get out.”
Come on! This is Karachi, Pakistan, sixth most populous nation in the world. Civilised, sophisticated city! Can’t be that bad…can it?
Well, I’ve got an armed driver and an armed guard. I will live in a “secure compound”. That rather puts the kibosh on boarding the train with the locals at weekends and trying a spot of trout-fishing in the hills. Unless, maybe, the guard and driver are keen anglers.
I’m going there to help with training staff on a new daily. Normally, you’d chat to people in the street and in cafes about the papers they read, what’s right and wrong with them; monitor buying habits; maybe bring some of the better UK ideas to the table.
With my mobility sharply limited – and unless I have a death wish – a lot of that stuff will need rethinking.
My wife is worried to hell. Surprisingly, I’m not at all concerned. I find it a fascinating challenge, and I’m really looking forward to it.
My only worry? If the worst came to the worst, and I was kidnapped, would anyone bother to pay a ransom for me?
If you wondered why people’s eyes glaze over when the fifth and the 21st letters of the alphabet come together, take a read of this. “Building a strong professional sense of camaraderie among practitioners of journalism should be a major concentration, especially during an era in which media moguls are leading a transition that does not prioritise the defence of quality journalism.”
Got it? Depressingly, that’s one of the clearer missives coming from Brussels. One thing about training any of the EU institutions is that you’re never short of material. They churn out a vast number of words, but most of them fall into the category of typing, rather than writing.
I’ve just finished a series of workshops for Eurocities, an organisation that represents major European cities. The delegates were a delight: bright, multi-lingual people who only need telling once and they’ve got it.
But they are battling against an unyielding monster called Brussels English. This bastardised language features everyday words like “modalities”. All those famed bullshit bingo terms must appear at least once in every sentence (which in itself has to be at least 50 words long and lack any punctuation).
Who is the fool (come to think of it, there’s probably a sea of them) that thinks this sort of nonsense has anything to do with communication? Is there some shadowy bureaucrat who leads a grey team, scribbling through anything that risks being immediately comprehensible, replacing simplicity with obscurity?
The problem is not with the foot soldiers, I suspect, but with the generals. Either they don’t know, don’t read or don’t care. But if Brussels want to tell the rest of the world what it’s achieving, it needs to do so in a language that human beings can understand.
Off to Brussels by train and to train Eurocities (“a platform for its member cities to share knowledge and ideas, to exchange experiences, to analyse common problems and develop innovative solutions, through a wide range of Forums, Working Groups, Projects, activities and events”).
Its mission statement gives you some idea of the issues, but the people were great: bright young things from Sweden, Holland, Portugal and Poland who speak a swathe of languages but needed a bit of help in writing to communicate.
Depressingly, their grammar (despite the fact that only one had English as a first language) was better than most people who attend PMA courses.
On the other hand, they did admit to using the word modalities and not being very sure what it meant. (It’s a favourite word within the EU, meaning, er, “the classification of logical propositions according to their asserting or denying the possibility, impossibility, contingency, or necessity of their content”. Any the wiser? Nor am I.)
Still, I was told that in Westminster, an even worse word is very popular at the moment: granularisation. Think it means breaking things down into smaller parts, but I could be wrong. People who use it ought to be granularised.
It amazes me that so many organisations (generally government departments or large companies) claim to encourage plain English but actually fill their reports, briefings and proposals with those bullshit bingo words. I had an article sent in a few weeks ago that talked of “empowering our silos to have a two-way dialogue on the issues”. Uh?
All examples of similar meaningless tosh gratefully received.
Meanwhile, may I commend those travelling to Paris or Brussels to take the Eurostar, rather than suffering the airline indignity of being charged for being a kilo overweight on your luggage.
I left St Pancras at 1pm, and was in the heart of Brussels at 3pm. Beats hell out of trying to outrun the Easyjet crowd across the tarmac.
There’s only one thing worse than covering an exhibition, and that’s working at one.
I’ve just come back from three days at the CLA Game Fair and I’m not in the best of moods. Ten hours on your feet, answering inane questions or trying to convince someone who does dressage or races ferrets that they can’t live without a magazine on antique fishing tackle. Thank goodness I never chose to work in ad sales.
God bless Rob Ganley of Practical Motorhome who lent me the staff bus. Without that, I’d have been camping. Great if you’re 20 and having mud fights at Glastonbury; not so good if you have to look vaguely respectable, showered and shaven.
In previous years, the Classic Angling stand has been a place for social networking. Didn’t sell many subs, but met a lot of old friends and dined healthily on burgers and pork rolls from the concession stands.
Not this year. Riva came along to ensure I chatted less and sold more. I never got near the hog roasts. Every lunchtime, it was greenery of some sort. Not proper bloke food at all.
Overall, the show didn’t seem that good. The CLA’s post-show press release claimed 136,000 came along. Not past my stand, they didn’t.
Friday was slow because the greedy CLA bumped up prices by a fiver. One of my readers put it well. “You’re paying £25 to shop in a field.” And a wet one. Torrential rain and gale-force winds just about rounded off the day.
The only light relief was the evening round of parties: The Field; Hardy’s; the Irish Tourist Board, Trout and Salmon and various others I never reached. The day, viewed through a cocktail and red wine haze, suddenly didn’t seem so bad after all.
Saturday was OK, but Sunday was slow as a snail with a limp. Didn’t sell a single sub. On the other hand, when I totted up the tenners from the books and reels I’d sold, it turned out that I’d made enough to pay for my trip to Texas in a few weeks.
And ploughing through a pile of scribbled notes, I’ve sourced five very promising features for forthcoming issues.
The only bad news: Riva loves the motorhome concept. She thinks we should turn into snails and carry our house with us whenever we go on holiday. So keep those press invites coming in, and save me from a life of salads.
Having to work harder in recession? Then spare a thought for the chap I helped on a course last week. As well as being the editor, he is also the designer, news reporter, feature-writer and sub.
You probably think he’s just turning out a 16-page A-fiver. Wrong. The publication is A4 and typically 100 pages.
Although he works from home, he confessed that he struggled to get the mag done, even when he beavered away every weekend. The poor guy thought it was his fault for working inefficiently.
The only holiday he’s had over the past year was a French trip, where he turned out two features (and pictures, of course). Phew! That’s filled 10 pages!
And instead of doing what most journos do on such trips (going out for decent meals paid for by the hosts, getting pissed at your hotel bar at least once during the week), he sat in every night with his laptop, working on pages for the next issue.
You might say he’s dumb to put up with it. But he loves the subject (I’ll spare his blushes by not telling you the title), and because he knows no better, assumes that’s the way it is elsewhere.
Not yet, maybe. But over the past year, I’ve seen plenty of titles that once supported six staff now brought out by two. Advertising’s gone through the floor and is down into the inner core.
Blame what you like (Gordon Brown, greedy bankers, global warming), but those heady days of walking out of one job and immediately finding another into another are gone, at least for the moment.
And more magazines and newspapers may soon have to face the day when one or two names fill the flannel panel.
There wasn’t a great deal I could do to help that harassed editor. Even consoling him with: “Look on the bright side: at least you’re not having to sell ads as well,” didn’t help.
“Don’t tell them that!” he said. “If they find out I once sold space, they’ll have me doing that as well!”
Those expecting to see me perform the Elliott Dance (free demos on all PMA workshops with Keith Elliott as tutor) will be sorely disappointed over the next few weeks. No gymnastics, minor or otherwise for me. I’ve just torn some fibres in my Achilles tendon – fishing.
Stupidly, I made the mistake of admitting the true reason I’m hobbling around with a stick. Now, if I’d said it was playing a particularly arduous game of squash or badminton (the most common cause of such an injury), it would have evoked much sympathy. But when I say that a mackerel caused it, it provokes not compassion but chuckles.
I won’t go into the story (though I did catch the mackerel). However, it also means that my training workshops over the next few weeks will be rather sedate affairs.
I’m not very good at sitting still. Every few minutes, I tend to jump up to write on a flipchart, check on people’s progress, and even act out charades when encouraging a slightly slow group on headline ideas. No such pyrotechnis now.
Getting up from a chair has to be executed with extreme care. I’m walking like the figure on the weathervane at Lord’s. I’m going to need to rethink my training; maybe, try a more cerebral approach.
Our postgraduate course starts next week and though I no longer work as course tutor (Roberta Cohen’s much more diligent, caring and patient than I am), I like to get involved on the news and subbing parts of the course.
Except I can’t scoot off to an exhibition with the eager young things while I’m walking like Igor. The prospect of trudging round Earls Court or 02 to find stories is out of the question for several weeks.
Some wag suggested I phone up and arrange a mobility scooter. “Maybe you could even get one of those little baskets on the front to put the press releases in,” he said helpfully.
Doesn’t quite fit in with the image of a thrusting, hard-drinking hack asking incisive questions, does it?
If you’re chewing your nails wondering if you’ll have a job next week, let me announce officially: things are getting better. And the source is impeccable.
This isn’t because I’ve been slipped a secret Treasury report. (It did happen once, but that’s another story.) It’s because companies are booking training again.
The bad news about running a training business is that your core product is almost the first thing that companies slash when profits drop. So you can imagine how much fun it’s been over the past nine months.
When you’re struggling to survive and having to make whole departments redundant, a training budget is a luxury on the same level as mink-lined lavatory seats.
Trying to drum up business by calling up old mates and regular clients provoked the identical response: we fear that any light at the end of the tunnel is probably an oncoming train.
Once, it was a battle to get through the media centre doors. Lunches were costing us hundreds a week. No more. The place was quieter than a Fulham home match. To think I was whingeing because I was so busy.
Many tutors felt that they’d fallen out of favour. It wasn’t that: just nothing for them to do. Talk to the bank? Huh! They were too busy saving themselves.
Another six months at that sort of level of inactivity and we would have joined the one in 55 companies that has sunk beneath the waves.
But the past month, thank goodness, has been healthier. Black figures rather than red. The phone’s been ringing. The website’s trebling, quadrupling its number of hits.
So take it from me, boss of Bellwether Business: the world isn’t going to end just yet, because it’s training again.
If you think your local paper is a bit rough, you should see what American newspapers get away with. All the journos write as if they are aiming to win a Pulitzer Prize – and sod the readers.
It drives you crazy, reading a simple story about a car crash or someone rescuing a cat from drowning. Everything has a delayed-drop intro. It makes you scream: “But what’s the bloody story?”
I’ve done a fair bit of training there. When you talk to them about putting the main point of the story in the first sentence, you feel a bit like Moses coming down from the mountain. “Keith, that is a great idea!”
I think the problem is probably because most of their teaching comes from universities. So why should that be a problem?
Last year, I was at a conference and met someone from a US university that had better remain unnamed. He boasted that they had more than 100 people in their journalism faculty. “How many have been journalists?” I asked casually.
He thought, and answered: “Two.”
I was in New Jersey to attend a Dion concert. (DiMucci, not Celine. Come on!) He’s getting on, and seems unlikely to come to the UK again, so I headed for the Count Basie Theatre on Red Bank.
It wasn’t all perfect: the lights looked they were done by the usherette with a torch; the sax player looked like Zoot from The Muppet Show and Dion only played for 90 minutes. But I guess 90 minutes of rock n’ roll takes it out of you when you’re nearly 70. His voice is still amazing, however, considering that he was touring as a teenager with Buddy Holly.
I thought the theatre press office could get some mileage out of it (Man travels 3500 miles for Dion gig) and emailed the local paper too. I’d rather hoped to voice my trenchant views on the state of US journalism as well – but neither bothered to get in touch.
The paper’s front-page was about the problems of graduates getting jobs and some junior baseball team getting knocked out of a cup competition in the quarter-finals. Nice to see such a sharp news sense at work. God bless America.
It was an editor’s worst nightmare. You put the magazine to bed, send it off to the printer and feel pretty good about yourself. Another deadline hit, another decent issue. Time for a tincture.
Then you casually glance at one of the pages – and notice a typo on the front page.
Fortunately, pre-press had only just started on it, so I could Fetch through a new page.
But it’s one of those constant worries when you proof-read something you’ve written.
People always ask on training courses: “How do I pick up all the mistakes when I’m subbing or proofing my own work?”
The simple answer is: “You don’t.”
No matter how careful you are, something will slip under the radar. Homonyms, missed words, punctuation errors or typos: one of them will find a way round your defences.
The answer, of course, is to get someone else to proof your work. Easier said than done when you’re a one-man band. Even my wife, who is wonderfully loyal, suddenly finds she has an urgent need to wash her hair when it’s Classic Angling proof-reading time.
Can’t really blame her. Reading articles about the different engravings on 1920s Allcock Aerials or the minute changes in National Federation of Anglers’ badges requires a knowledge and devotion to accuracy and checking that few have (or want).
So spare a thought for those like me who beaver away writing, subbing, designing and proof-reading every word, every page. We’re gonna make mistakes. We just hope that we catch them before the presses start rolling.
I remember, some years ago, the phone ringing at 2am. The temptation was to ignore it. Drunk friend wanting a lift home? A pal arrested and hoping you can help?
When your magazine is due to print that night, it can only be one thing.
It was the printers, who in those days stripped in the ads. “Er, Keith, we’ve got a problem. On page 15, you’ve got a 25 x 4 ad. Only it’s not. The ad is 25 by FIVE columns.”
As I said, find someone else apart from yourself to do the proof-reading.
This isn’t an easy thing to confess, but…I’m a Stoke City fan.
Never lived there, worked there. No Elliott, to my knowledge, has any sort of Stokie connection.
It all started years ago, when I did casual shifts for Accountancy Age in Frith Street. Turned out the cleaner was Alan Hudson’s mum.
We talked, I travelled to a match with her, and for a couple of seasons, hardly missed a single fixture, even the away ones.
Those of a certain generation will remember Hudson (Chelsea, Stoke, Arsenal). Franz Beckenbauer called him the finest English midfielder he had ever seen after Hudson destroyed Germany, then world champions, in 1975.
And what a team Stoke had then! Hudson, Banks, Pejic, Greenhoff, Mahoney, Salmon, Smith… For a while, they were actually top of the league, but five broken legs for first-team players put paid to supporters’ hopes.
They were the 1970s equivalent of today’s Arsenal: sweet, flowing, one-touch football. Easy to support such a team and its ethos.
That was then. Now, Stoke appear to be a team of big, intimidating blokes who can kick and throw a ball a very long way: a real security guards’ XI.
Trouble is, as a fan, you can’t switch. You can’t say: think I’ll support Liverpool this year. You take what you’ve inherited and snatch a few moments of pleasure in seasons of gloom, while dreaming of those golden days.
Dominic Mills, Haymarket’s editorial director, is a Fulham fan. He’s even got a season ticket (renewed early, too). And when he invited me to their home match, I accepted without thinking.
Trouble is, I’m not a quiet supporter, a stay-in-your-seat-and-clap-politely fan. What if Stoke add to their rich tally of 13 away goals this season?
Unlikely, but it could happen. I just know I’ll leap in the air, punch Dominic and taunt the opposing fans – except they’ll be all around me.
Haymarket is an important client for us. Beating up their editorial director at a football match is probably not the best way to boost business and improve relationships.
Would it be too much, God, to ask for a tame 0-0 draw?