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I’ve had some tight deadlines in my writing career, most of them self-imposed because of my own laziness, but today I had six minutes to write 70 words for the Metro tomorrow. As well as my main article which I usually do by Friday, I have to do a short bit of extra text, which I leave until Tuesday so it can be topical. I had kind of forgotten about it today, but on the drive home from Cheddar suddenly remembered and when we’d stopped for coffee I’d knocked off something about my confusion over Brexit or Bremain. I did it as I was feeding my daughter, because MEN CAN MULTI-TASK, sexists.
Anyway when we got home we wanted to head out to buy a new car seat for our rapidly growing daughter (well done car seat manufacturers, largely managing to come up with a system where you have to keep buying new ones - should have written about that). I got an email from buy editor asking me to write something else as they didn’t want something politically biased (even though I was very much not coming down on either side - they’ve only ever asked me rewrite something twice and both times I have mentioned Michael Gove, which makes me think he has some kind of blackmail thing over Ian Metro). So I needed to buy the car seat and then quickly rush over to a coffee shop and write something else on my phone. The deadline was 4.15pm. It was 4.09pm by the time I got to Costa.
I had struggled to think of anything the first time, so wasn’t sure another subject would leap into my brain, but necessity is the mother of invention (or at least of coming up with something that will do) and I wrote about the weirdness of talking about my dad’s cock in front of my dad and his grand daughter. Which apparently was an OK topic of conversation. I was unable to check the word count and I am pretty sure it was a bit long (the article I mean, not my dad’s cock, even though that was actually the point of the bit I wrote, so as you were). I sent it at 4.16pm and apologised for missing the deadline and presumably causing the printing presses to have to shut down and mean there would be no Metro newspaper tomorrow.
To be honest pretty much every week I wonder what I am going to write about for the Metro and even though I’ve managed to come up with something every time so far, I still pretty much always think I won’t do it this week. I have used up most of my applicable golden oldies. This week’s column is my 212th one. Will they just keep finally coming? Or will I have to write in one day and say that I can’t think go anything? And surely that week I can at least do an article about how I’ve used up all my ideas. But what about the next week? And if I keep going long enough all the original readers will be dead and I can just start repeating the columns from the start. This will NEVER end.
I mean I should feel the same about this blog, which continues to stutter along. But no one is paying me for this (not that the Metro are paying me much) and I give myself the permission to fail or be boring on here (achievement unlocked) and hope that if I just plough on I will come up with the odd nugget or two that can be explored more fully in stand-up or in my column. The problem with touring is that the same thing is happening over and over again and it's not too interesting to write about, or at least it's rarely funny to write about. The tour bits of the blog always feel like the most like a diary at least. It's so relentless and tiring and the same.
If you’re interested we bought the car seat that won the award for best second stage car seat at the Mother and Baby Awards (I feel they might just have booked me knowing they’d make their money back from me buying all the stuff that won) the Brittax King II ATS. It seems pretty good, even though the salesman said it hadn’t sold all that well. All in all it’s a bewildering array of choice, isofix, forward or rear-facing (or swivelling) and so on, so having the validation of the award and having met some of the team behind it did help swing our decision. We’ve been meaning to buy a new car seat for months and this genuinely felt like a major triumph that we’d finally done it. Life as a parent becomes largely tragic, but only if viewed from the actually more tragic position of not being a parent. It’s only more tragic because you don’t realise it’s tragic and think that it’s good. All positions are tragic.
