TEELINE - THE SILENT KILLER

Teeline.

           

            Sounds innocent enough, doesn’t it?

           

            The genteel tinkling of china cups on the poop deck of the Queen Mary?       

            Cucumber sandwiches served by deferential colonial waiters as we sit in wicker chairs and watch the Polo?

           

            And would sir care for some shorthand with his Earl Grey? No, sir would not; sir would prefer shortbread, thank you. In fact sir would prefer almost anything at all.

            If Carlsberg is probably the best thing in the world then shorthand is probably the worst.

            Ensconced in room GR250 we await the first formal assessment of the week. The preceding four days have advanced my knowledge of shorthand to the point where – given sufficient time – I can construct a couple of rudimentary words. But then given sufficient time, I can even write them out in longhand - legibly. 

            To pass the NCTJ Diploma requires entrants to demonstrate a speed of 100 words per minute. Now, I could only get anywhere near that if I wrote the same word, and it would have to be something like “a”…or “be” or “to” one hundred times. If I’m interviewing someone who repeatedly informs me that he wants “…to be a…” something unspecified, and he has a stammer, so that he repeats this 33 and a bit times, then this may perhaps be quite useful.

I know this isn’t the point; we’ve only had one week of the wretched thing. However, the prospect repeating this a further 25 times, added to the requisite two hours of nightly homework, fills me with a deeper dread than ever troubled Steve McQueen on his way to the Cooler.

A friend of mine is depressed. He claims to suffer from depression and his doctor has got fed up and finally put him on medication. This has only made him worse. I’d like to tell him to pull himself together; I’d like to tell him that there are plenty of people much worse off than himself; I’d like to tell him that if he wants to really find out what depression is, he should take a course on Teeline Shorthand. I’d like to, but of course I won’t.

And so we sit and wait for our austere school ma’am instructress to hand round the test sheets. Twenty minutes later, I’ve finished. I’m exhausted; wilting beneath her desultory glare as her frown confirms how little I’ve managed to get right. I feel like an eight year-old again. It’s not that I don’t want to learn, it’s just that I can’t, at least not in this pre-1944 Education Act, payment by results environment. There may not be a cane in sight but that’s all that’s missing to complete my complete humiliation and dejection.  In fact, it might even improve it.

I ask myself how much I need this. Will it change my life if somehow I manage to live nothing else but Teeline for the next six months and somehow scrape a pass?

This wasn’t what I enrolled on the MA in Magazine Journalism to do at the expense of everything. And so, perhaps regrettably, I can only reach one decision.

As Steve McQueen might well have said, bouncing his ball against the ball against the Cooler wall.

Teeline? Fuck it - I’m going over the fence!

LET'S GET STARTED!

The good intention to write my daily UCLan blog, has, as expected, already run aground.

           

And that was after only two days.

           

The main reason for this is the amount of work involved on this course. Although last week was induction week, Cathy (course leader) set us several assignments in addition to the challenge of getting to the right place on time.

           

First, there was the magazine proposal that we were instructed to complete. My idea – all right, I’ll admit it - it was my girlfriend’s idea - is a publication with the working title of GUTS, targeted at middle-aged, middle-income hetrosexual men with no strong recreational focus. Cathy likes the idea, so hopefully Sally O’Sullivan (August Media and entrepreneur who founded Front magazine) will go wild about it and either commission it or give me a top editorial job when she comes in next week. Dream on.

           

We also had to do a couple of other challenging exercises. One was to pair up, interview and do a 700-word profile of the other person. I finished mine on Friday morning with two minutes to spare and then sent it to the person I’d profiled instead of Cathy.

I was very glad when the weekend arrived. This is the first time since 1999 that I have had to get up at a set time - 6.30am, which is frankly ridiculous, and work a full day then face a two-hour journey home.

I drove in on Thursday and Friday, arriving before the car park filled up allowing me over an hour before classes began.

Time now to say a word or two about the university. While Preston may well be justifiably described as the arse-hole of the universe, the university certainly is not.

The buildings are mainly red-brick (with the notable exception of the Media Factory which resembles something that a four year-old would build with Lego), well designed and sympathetically situated so that the campus actually feels like a campus.

There is an abundance of toilets on every floor of every building, mostly clean and with soap dispensers that drop soap into your hands, not onto your shoes – as they did at London Metropolitan Uni.

The library is an outstanding achievement. It combines well-lit spacious work areas where you can chat with silent areas where you can work. There is a café on the ground floor and a suite of AppleMacs in the Media Centre. Unfortunately, because of the intricate bundling of the leads, they work for right-handed people only. There are also books.

The Sir Tom Finney Centre is a brand new sports’ centre, opened last week. It comprises two full-sized sports’ halls, a cardio-suite and a huge gym with brand new Technogym equipment and an excellent fixed and free weights area. What it will look like by the end of the year, when the students have got at it is, of course, anyone’s guess. My only concern is that there is not enough room in the free weights section; with a blank sheet to begin with, the designers should have addressed this fairly obvious issue.

The dining and café facilities have proved to be better than my earlier sorties suggested. The bacon and sausage barm cakes are worth the journey alone and there are a couple of acceptable reasonably priced hot options on offer for lunch each day.

The first proper week of the course has begun quietly. The only attendance requirement today is Shorthand – this runs from 9.15-10.45 each day. Surprisingly it is not as bad as I’d expected and, after an hour or of private study in the library I am now even able to construct short sentences. My favourite is: “The lady likes a lot of sex”.

I came in by train again today. I discovered there is a direct train from Hazel Grove, a ten-minute drive from home with free parking at the station. The train was packed, however and the journey took almost an hour and a half but at least I didn’t have to change and I arrived on time.

Well, that’s about it. I’m afraid today’s blog isn’t very exciting, but who knows what the rest of the week will bring?

            

DAY 1

The Boys are back in town - well sort of!

6.30am: The Bee Gees pull me from a dreamless void as Staying Alive blasts from the alarm on my phone.

            I shower quickly and curse myself for drinking most of the second bottle of wine opened in haste after dinner. You’d think I’d know better, at my age. A banging head, a dry mouth and persistent sweating as I dry from my shower isn’t the best way to commence my first day at school.

            Well, not exactly school: today I sign on for a full time post-graduate degree at the University of Central Lancashire (UNClan) three months after becoming eligible for my teacher’s pension. There’s a kind of retrograde logic to that, isn’t there? From the ashes of a soul and spirit-crushing career in teaching, rises the phoenix: an MA in Magazine Journalism which I hope will lead to a happy expansion of my fledgling freelancing career – besides which, the one pays for the other.

            The 8.15 train to Manchester Piccadilly is cancelled for no reason. There are three trains an hour from Bramhall and a discernable buzz at the station from frustrated commuters informs me that one is always cancelled. Terrific - Russian roulette at rush hour.

            Thanks to this, I just the miss the connection for the Glasgow train that stops at Preston, reaching platform 14 as the train pulls out. An hour later, I arrive at Preston and take a cab to the Uni. Although it’s relatively inexpensive at £3.50, it takes almost as long as the walk, and so I arrive at room GR270 mercifully just in time to miss the bear throwing name-learning ceremony.

            It’s no great surprise that I’m the oldest person on the course; this was to have been expected. However, I had anticipated that there might have been one or two of my cohort of 25 or so who had been engaged in something other than full-time education since they stopped sucking their thumbs. I get some pretty curious and suspicious looks, but they’ll soon get used to me.

            There’s a little man about my age, nattily dressed in a grey herringbone suit with overly-ostentatious Armani glasses, animatedly telling the class that we’re not students – we’re trainee journalists. A couple of other staff that I haven’t met exude massive amounts of enthusiasm, which bodes well.

            The pervading memory of this first day is wind. It says on the News that we’ve caught the tail end of Hurricane Something-or-other but personally, I think this is normal for Preston.

            After the initial meet and greet, the group separates – there are eleven on the MA in Magazine Journalism, and another twelve or so taking Broadcast Journalism. The key demographic of the entire cohort – other than age - is a strong female bias. I wasn’t sufficiently awake at that point to do a precise head count, but I’d say at least 80% are young women. The broadcast section, as you would expect, is made up of those who spend a lot of time in front of a mirror, and naturally would see the logical extension of this to spend their working lives in front of a camera.

            We then have a break of an hour and a half to find the lecture hall in a building that is a five minute walk away, where we are to be greeted by the Head of School. This, presumably, is not the Head Prefect but some senior academic. It transpires he is ill – and so dull is the presentation that I can’t blame him for this – as his place is taken by an underprepared fluttery woman who adds nothing to what we we already know from our welcome pack, other than there are over 35,000 students in campus.

            After this, we have our photographs taken in case one of us becomes famous and can be used for future promotional activity by the university.

            The afternoon finishes with a talk from Cathy on the current state of the newspaper industry and we have a go at de-constructing a magazine (The Press Gazette) in small groups.

            I’m thankful for the last bit as I’m really struggling to stay awake now. The excitement of the day and the legacy of the red wine conspire to triumph over my best efforts to keep my eyelids apart.

            Unsurprisingly, the journey back is as fractured at the journey there. The 4.46 is delayed, thus becoming an unscheduled 5.01 so that I miss the 4.48 to Bramhall by a minute. I can see how people become obsessed by train timetables - I have acquired an alarming body of knowledge on this already.

            Two train and one circuitous bus trip later, I arrive home exhausted. It is 7.15 – two and a half hours after leaving the Uni.

            London to Stockport takes 40 minutes less.

GETTING PUSHY IN PRESTON

On Preston platform, I did my soft shoe shuffle dance. No one cared, except me. And I didn’t care that no one cared - I’d always wanted to do it.

            I’d also always wanted to know what Preston was like since Jethro Tull sang about it on Aqualung forty years ago. And now I knew; sadly, it’s pretty much what I thought it would be – a dump.

            Leaving the station on a windy September afternoon, I went in search of the University of Central Lancashire. The young Asian man who ran the general store around the corner didn’t know where I’d find Corporation Street but did point me in the direction of the university.

            Corporation Street was actually across the road from his emporium; I followed my map expecting to make light work of the fifteen minutes that my downloaded directions suggested the walk would take.

            Preston, aside from being a dump, is also the world road-crossing mecca. To get from station to university would have taken less than five minutes were it not for the necessity to cross 27 roads. Perhaps there are so many roads because everyone wants to get out of the place.

            I managed to find Greenbank Building, which sits - if not serenely - at least unobtrusively at the hub of a campus that is not as bad as some I’ve seen.

            My meeting with Cathy Darby, the leader of the MA in Magazine Journalism went pretty well and, after an hour of chatting I was offered a place on the course. We talked about content, work placements and career prospects.

            “Of course,” she told me with a refreshing honesty, “there are no guarantees that you’ll get a job at the end of it. Or even be successful as a freelance, if that’s what you want to do.”

            “What are the prospects of me getting a work placement?” I asked, “I mean, would my age go against me?”

            “Not particularly”, she replied, “You just have to be determined and a bit pushy.” I reflected on this. “In fact, you have to be pushy in everything you do to be successful in this business.”

            Pushy; you mean how Sean Connery calls the cat at bedtime? No pushy – as in you don’t take no for an answer. I reviewed my list of characteristics: grumpy, vindictive, intolerant, sometimes even aggressive. But not pushy. Pushy was for people who were driven, thick-skinned, focused and motivated. People who weren’t lazy, and lazy was the last word I’d just mentally added to my lengthening list of unhelpful character traits.

            This course is not for lazy people. People who can’t get up in the morning or do a five-day nine-to-five week with some weekend commitment and plenty of homework needn’t apply. A bit of a contrast to the last MA I took.

            I cogitated on this on my way home: train from Preston to Manchester Piccadilly, then to Cheadle Hulme and bus to Bramhall.

            At least this was the plan. Except that I went to sleep as the train pulled into a station. The sign read “…hulme” and I leapt from the carriage only to discover that I’d alighted in Levenshulme as the train left the station. Not the same thing at all, and several miles on the wrong side of Stockport.

            And so I did my soft shoe shuffle dance on the platform at Levenshulme. Not because Jethro Tull had sung about it forty years ago, but because I had nothing better to do for fifty minutes until the Bramhall train arrived.

            Other than to contemplate the importance of being pushy.