A thief in the night…

I unlock the front door to find a diminutive but devastatingly beautiful uniformed Crime Scene Investigator dangling her identity badge for me to inspect.

“I’d better check that”, I say, “you’re way too pretty to be a copper”. She smiles at me, as I usher her in.

Actually I don’t and she doesn’t – but I think it, and that at least means a valve for something approaching humour is loosening the anger I’ve lived with for the past 14 hours, since my life was turned upside down.

It only takes her a minute to conclude that there’s no point in dusting the place for prints or looking for smoldering cigarette butts or whatever forensic people do. It may be a crime scene, but as crime scenes go, it’s not worth circling the wagons for.

I tell her that her colleague, when he had called for my statement last night had told me to be very careful not to touch any door handles until they had been dusted. And how, when he left, he had grabbed the outer handle and pulled the front door shut behind him. She roars with laughter revealing a mouthful of metal fillings. I wonder if they’re copper.

Now, here’s a challenge for my Uclan cohort: let’s see how many crimes you can name that I was the victim of last night. And for a bonus point, add the recommended custodial sentence for each. First correct answer sent via Twitter, Facebook or email wins you a bottle of champagne.

I’d returned to my flat at around seven, having eaten my first solid meal for three days; spaghetti bolognaise, cooked by my girlfriend, Jane – delicious. I’m much too old to have a girlfriend, but partner…well, I don’t know…it just doesn’t sound right; makes us sound like a couple of raddled old queers.

Anyway, I digress.

I was in for the night, and so I lock the front door, finish a piece I was writing for Rugby World and was enjoying Dirty Harry and a hot chocolate when Jane rings. She was on the way back from her writing group and wanted to call in for a glass of wine. That’d be nice, I say, and when she arrives at 9.30, I unlock the door to let her in.

If she’d been intending to stay for any length of time, I’d have locked it behind her, but for reasons that I won’t bore you with, I knew that her visit would be brief.

We enter the living room, off the landing at the top of the stairs. I pour her a glass of wine and reluctantly swap Clint and his .44 Magnum  (…“I know what you're thinking. "Did he fire six shots or only five?" Well, to tell you the truth, in all this excitement I kind of lost track myself. But being as this is a .44 Magnum, the most powerful handgun in the world, and would blow your head clean off, you've got to ask yourself one question: Do I feel lucky? Well, do ya, punk?”  - again I digress) for Jeremy Paxman and University Challenge.

It’s a bit cold, so I go to the kitchen, which is next to the living room, turn the heating on and close the living room door – something I rarely do.

Mid-way through University Challenge we both hear a noise – or think we do. Being old, my hearing isn’t terrific - although there still are enough instances where I wish it was worse. I link my television to the stereo, and with a large speaker on either side of the room it throws sound about a bit, so naturally we attributed the curious noise we had noticed to the stereo.

Around 11.15, Jane goes to leave so I accompany her down the stairs and open the door.

“Where’s your car?” she asks.

My middle-aged toy - off to Eastern Europe

It’s a simple enough question but it my eyes won’t tell my brain that no amount of goggling will bring it back.

It has gone.

“Did you leave the keys in it?”

“No – I’m not stupid.”

“Sure?”

“Sure I’m sure or sure I’m not stupid?”

“Sure you’re sure?”

“Sure…”

“Did you leave them on the ledge inside the door?”

“No!”

Ditto the above sequence of questions.

We look in my bedroom; the key’s not there, and neither is my wallet. For a moment I think I may have left my wallet in the glove compartment but then remember I’d used my debit card to book a hotel room, replacing the wallet on the dresser beside my car keys and my watch…

“Shit! They’ve taken my fucking watch too…”

“You mean my fucking watch…”

Either way, the Georg Jensen £1000 silver watch has gone along with my keys and wallet.

I call the police and we stand and pathetically try to find some sort of logical explanation for what’s happened.

I mean, surely, someone didn’t walk in the front door, climb the stairs, go into my bedroom and help themselves to my car keys, wallet and watch. Her watch, Jane points out.

Shit! What if I’d opened the living room door as they were coming out of the bedroom? I would have been between them and the stairs, cutting off their escape route? What if they’d been carrying a knife or a gun? I mean, they must be pretty fucking desperate to have the balls to walk straight onto someone’s house, when they knew there were at least two people in the living room?

Maybe they were high on drugs? What if they had a knife or a gun and were high on drugs? Fuck me! One of us would have been killed, and it wouldn’t have been me I say bravely, now that the intruder’s gone.

We were lucky!

Or were we?

No…not lucky. I’m angry – mainly angry at myself for leaving the door unlocked and for being so fucking stupid as to fail to recognize that I was inviting a thief in the night to come in, enter my bedroom, heap themselves to my stuff and make off in my car.

I certainly won’t be making that mistake again!

THERE’S NO JOB LIKE A SNOW JOB

THERE’S NO JOB LIKE A SNOW JOB

Within 24 hours, I’ve had my dreams of being a successful magazine journalist shattered.

It’s nothing to do with efficacy; I believe I’ll get there in the end. It’s just the realization of what I’ll have to do to get there.

Now before you say that I’m much too old, too chunky (I refuse to call myself fat) and too dull to sleep my way to the top, that isn’t exactly what I mean.

This dissonance began with a visiting speaker at Uclan on Wednesday. Alumni of the university, Rob Crossan is now a successful freelancer specializing in travel writing. He had four years at Front magazine but managed to wean himself off “lads mags” and regularly gets features in the broadsheets.
Sounds great – if he can do it then so can I. Then what’s the problem?

The problem is that to be a travel writer you have to sell your soul to the devil. It works like this:
You come up with an idea for a story, which is finding a “peg” to visit some exotic location where you fancy a holiday; anywhere, really, other than Scotland or Wales. You then think of a really clever angle – or better still, six or seven clever angles so that you can sell your feature to six or seven different publications. Nothing wrong so far, is there?

Next, you get a commissioning editor to say: “Great – that would sit really well in our travel section!” You will, of course, somehow have to put those words into his mouth.

So off you go to that exotic location to research and write your commissioned piece at the publication’s expense? Wrong.

Very, very few publications will consider paying your expenses. Ever. Not even your bus fare home from their offices.

And your piece, brilliant though it may be, will earn you anywhere from £130 (e.g. TNT magazine) to £750 (e.g. The Times or Telegraph) so that’s not going to cover a fortnight in Cape Town.

To fund your trip, you will have to beg. You will have to go cap in hand to airlines, travel PR companies, tourist boards and blag the bits and pieces that will make your trip feasible without causing insolvency.

And in return for that, the airlines, resorts, restaurants, tourist guides, theme parks and anyone else who opens their doors to you free of charge, will expect you to write something about them; something nice about them.

The simplest way to do this is to add them to the “how to get there” footnote part of your piece. That’s works well for airlines, as it draws attention to a destination that travellers may not know about, and may open up a new market for them.

However, the problem is that if you say in your piece that the destination was awful and really no one should go there in a fair, objective and balanced manner, no one will buy a seat on the plane bound for your destination.
Furthermore, you
will seriously piss off the PR people, the country or region’s tourist board and anyone who felt the fallout of your wholly unbiased feature.

Let TripAdvisor do that, if you want to be a successful travel journalist – and by that I mean one who gets to go places at other people’s expense – you have to write what us referred to in the trade as a “snow job”. That is, to say how wonderful everything was and why everyone should spend their lives’ savings to go there.

So that’s travel writing out, then – I just can’t do that. I actually like to find things that are rubbish and write about them.  If I have a meal in a restaurant that is inedible and they service is dreadful, I cannot bring myself to praise it.

Well that’s part one of my disillusionment.

Now, for no better reason than I have to put it somewhere, I’m going to add a video clip of me grumpily reading some news.

I have to do this for the Digital Content part of my MA so it might as well go here as anywhere.
Please ignore the fact that it has absolutely no relevance to this blog and enjoy it for what it is – a very amateurish piece of multi-media.

Part two of my disillusionment tale will be coming right up. Enjoy.