I explained I was out to enjoy myself and that was that. Twenty years later I met him again briefly, discovered he'd received his comeuppance and had turned to God. Urged me to do likewise. I didn’t crow.
I became a journalist because I wasn't qualified - academically or temperamentally - to do anything else. A flibbertigibbet life for a flibbertigibbet mind.
But it's a strange occupation. Asking questions day in day out. Asking questions on subjects that, until that moment, meant nothing to me: forklift trucks, herbaceous borders, building development, nutrition in jails, time-shared computers, a competition for tape-recording buffs.
Most of all delving into people's professional lives, how they've progressed. Occasionally asking questions people didn't want to answer. In some respects being un-English because even in retirement I continue to be astonished by the lack of curiosity most have about their neighbour's employment. For goodness sake, it may be their only expertise.
Journalism does have side-effects. When young I feared personal contact; nowadays the problem is one of restraint. Because I've dipped into this and that I give the spurious impression that I'm better educated than I am. Perhaps best of all I'm rarely bored although VR maintains that curiosity alone is no substitute for the social graces. I use words like "gerund" and "participle" because I've needed to know their application. Out of self-protection I avoid clichés. Under certain circumstances – although this is a dangerous claim – I can imitate the common touch.
A wasted life? Having fun’s no defence I suppose?
Could use a "be" at end of second para :)
ReplyDeleteSorry...5th.
ReplyDeleteHaving fun is a good defense. You are so lucky you had a vocation and not just a job. Journalists are important in a free society. Asking questions is a joy for both the person asking, and the person being asked. And being uniquely yourself is an accomplishment. The words are the frosting on the cake for me. You make me think.
ReplyDeleteI like frosting as much as cake, by the way.
ReplyDeleteMikeM: OK, that's one word dealt with. How about the other 299?
ReplyDeleteColette: I've travelled (France, Germany, Switzerland, Italy, Spain, USA, Canada, Sweden, Finland, Ireland, Japan, Venezuela), had expensive meals thrust down my guzzard, allowed to make my choice from the wine list, been paid to address those who haven't seen through my disguise, watched the Seattle Mariners and attended first-class opera. But for me all that was just frosting (which we call icing).
What mattered was the dozen or so occasions when I interviewed someone who was really good at something (most often: business), who had reflected profoundly on what he'd done, and who was disposed to talk provided I asked the right questions. From which sprouted a dialogue, from which emerged 1200 words which I was able to read a week later without shame. My little world.
Novels evolved from the journalism but I'm still an amateur in that field.
Singing arrived without warning, almost within the shades of night. There's progress.
I'm having to work real hard not to be smug.
MikeM/Colette: I'd like to interview you both simultaneously - under a magnolia tree, a jug of mint julep to hand. Snow falling towards the end.
ReplyDeleteSomewhere in California.
Seeing if you both could stand the paradox. Several of them in fact.
I tried mint julep last year, and again this year, on Kentucky Derby day. Proper cups, mint fresh from the garden, bourbon with a horse on the label. Didn't care for it. The magnolia trees are just dropping their blossoms here. Meeting will have to take place in the mountains of Cali. As far as the other 299 words....they seemed eerily familiar.
ReplyDeleteBeing interviewed is almost as much fun as being in therapy, except you don't have to pay for the joy of being asked questions about yourself.
ReplyDeleteThe key to a good mint julep is the amount of sugar syrup they use. And, of course the glass must first be jam packed with crushed ice that melts slowly down as you poor in the bourbon and mint muddled sugar syrup. If you don't like sweet drinks, that's okay. There is always the bourbon to drink instead. I think those of us with family roots in Kentucky would always prefer the straight bourbon, but I grow mint for the julep on those hot Southern days when nothing else will do.
MikeM: Eerily familiar? So I'm repeating myself as well as the other ills the flesh is heir to? (Quote!) Time to join Grampa Simpson.
ReplyDeleteAll that build-up for mint julep and then you didn't like it. Found yourself wanting to start up the Civil War again, wanting to spout de Tocqueville. Under plain cover I'm sending you a Machine Disassembly Kit (Suitable for age 45 and above): it comes as a Weapon of Fairly Limited Destruction and reassembles as a self-propelled pipe organ for families of sophisticated tastes living north of the Mason-Dixon Line. Plays Dixie but only in the bass clef; the keys covering the diminished seventh are marked with stickers to help jazz aspirants.
Colette: A good interview and you find you're asking and answering question of yourself - the conversational equivalent of a Bach fugue (A polyphonic composition based upon one, two, or more themes, which are enunciated by several voices... oh heck, you get the idea)
I gotta say maintaining Tone Deaf in the face of US intellectualism is giving me the education I never had. But is it OK for gently brought-up ladies, in or of the South, to talk about such a male province as bourbon? And straight bourbon at that. Lan'sakes, they'll be smoking cheroots next.
Ha! What next, right? I think you will enjoy knowing that Southern ladies of a certain class refer to themselves as "gently bred." As if they were cattle. Sigh.
ReplyDelete...and they drink straight bourbon like crazy in the privacy of their homes.
ReplyDeleteColette: Now we know how Blanche Dubois got the way she was. Last night I was drinking bourbon myself (Clarke, bet you've never heard of it) though whether it was straight or crooked I couldn't say - before or after. Do you reckon Tennessee Williams' plays are put on much in the state whose name he adopted? That one about the crabs, for instance? Was it in fact crabs? I guess the bourbon was a mite crooked.
ReplyDelete