Each year The Guardian supports a charity. You call to donate and one of the editorial staff takes your details. You chat. You might draw the editor Katherine Viner, the social care specialist Polly Toynbee, or that arch-subversive, John Crace, the political sketch writer. A Scottish voice answered me, twas McCaskill (I missed his first name), with the paper 25 years.
Are you an editorial star? I asked. Modestly he said no. A foot soldier then? He agreed to that.
I told him I was encouraged the lines had been busy today. Unlike earlier years, said McC incautiously. When journos sat around waiting, scrambling for what few calls came in.
McC carefully checked my humdrum surname and credit card number. I applauded, said I'd once interviewed a trim young maid called Barker and in an adolescent flush of confusion I'd written it as Parker. "Many's the time..." said McC.
I told him these days there were so many huge running stories (Brexit, Trump) that it took me ages to get through The Guardian's main section, I read everything. I criticised a TV comedian the previous night who’d described Brexit as "boring" which I found inexplicable. "I saw that," said McC. "Totally wrong."
I apologised for not using the official code (Alfa, Foxtrot, Lima, etc) when spelling words for him. Trouble was I'd evolved my own code (B Bertie, P Percy) on a local newspaper and it was now ineradicable. McC recalled how computerisation meant journalists no longer dictated copy by phone to opinionated speed typists. "So much talk," he said. I burst in: "And implied criticism of your literary style." We guffawed.
An old war horse re-smelling gunpowder.
Fellow tradesmen....always a good chat.
ReplyDeleteMikeM: I imagine that in your case there's talk about wood's grain, the sharpness of tools that cut and bore, the extra infinitesimally small distance that those "who know" add to certain measurements, the sheer erotic pleasure to be gained from a joint which mates so snugly that the gaps between the two pieces of wood are virtually invisible, the perfume attached to shavings, the growing stability of the structure as it is assembled - poetry all the way through.
ReplyDeleteWith me it's an opportunity to roll the word "copy" over my tongue like a sliver of Chateau Haut Brion 2012 (£2211 for six bottles at Berry Bros). Copy is journo talk for the finished thing, it could be a 110-word squib, or five-thousand words on Trump's contradictions. To an outsider the word must seem misleading, there's no copying involved, usually the piece is original. I neither know nor care how this particular usage came into being. Even to consider uncovering its origins would be an amateurish response.
The above was temporarily copy when I checked it in MsW's Notepad. And it was the (actually unspoken) link between us when McC and I had our little chat.
Copy is a word that has persisted in conversations (text and telephone) between friends of mine who once communicated via citizens band radio. The radios are mostly gone, but the Dragnet, fighter pilot affectations remain. Out.
ReplyDelete