Perseverance & Planning

Plans. They make you feel more organised - more focused, don’t they? Maybe I’m slightly OCD about things like this but when I’ve got a checklist of things to do, or things to achieve with little check boxes to happily tick away, I swear my productivity soars.

There ain’t no stopping a girl with a plan…

Let me explain. Last week after researching my next steps after graduation - my baby steps into journalism if you like - I reacted somewhat melodramatically upon my discoveries. Postgraduate study is nowhere near as easily funded as Undergraduate study, studying in London is impossible unless I find a stash of money hidden in that hole Bailey’s been digging in the garden, and living back home whilst I study might be necessary if I actually want to still be able to eat for a year… This might not seem so bad, I’m still left with options after all, but to me it seemed like yet another mountain of obstacles in my path. Without a safety rope to climb over it, I did what any individual in despair did. I sulked for about an hour. Then I got upset for a further half hour. Then I gave Bailey a cuddle and thought about it all again. I spoke to a few people, did a bit of digging, a bit of writing and HEY PRESTO! With the help of my unbelievably supportive parents, I realised it’s not so bad after all. So what did I do?

I came up with a plan.

So now you’re wondering what this magnificent plan I keep banging on about entails right? Well, the first step is experience. Despite spending two weeks on a blogging internship this summer which I loved, I still need to get some media experience, so for ages I’ve been trying to get a contact or even get in contact with someone at a local paper to apply to spend a week there. But without success. For the Postgraduate Diploma in Journalism I want to do next year, you need some physical experience at a local/regional newspaper or magazine to even get looked at seriously when you apply. It’s a basic necessity. Yet, for an awful lot of local papers and magazines, you need to already be on this course to even get looked at for the experience. As a local journalist quite rightly pointed out to me, it’s a vicious circle. I took numerous rejections but in true journalist style I persevered. I phoned and emailed my CV everywhere I could think of and…I might have to wait until Easter but I’ve only gone and nabbed a week at a local paper! That’s a tick in box number one I think!

Secondly, whilst doing this I also sent some theatre reviews in to some local publications. I’ve hence transformed from dreaming of getting my name in print within a local paper to actually achieving it. I am on the website for one local paper (http://www.worthingherald.co.uk/lifestyle/entertainment/arundel-festival-s-shakespeare-season-the-taming-of-the-shrew-1-4205184) and in print for another local paper  (The Littlehampton Gazette)- published this week! Tick in box two, perhaps?

So that leaves me to my next step -locating where I want to study journalism once I’ve graduated from Nottingham. Ambitiously my first thoughts were of the bustling centre of London or the familiar yet lively city of Nottingham, but once I looked into the details I realised I might have to become a home girl once again….But to be honest, Brighton’s really not that bad is it?! Especially when the sun is shining!

So as I sit, awaiting numerous prospectuses to be delivered through the door, it feels like now I’ve identified what qualification I need to get and managed to book some experience in, I finally am moving on again in my progress. I can still apply for graduate schemes and internships etc, but for the time being my mindless floundering through the murky depths of journalism is at an end. I have joined the throng of dedicated writers, armed with nothing but a mind, perseverance, curiosity and a pen. I suppose it is true, if you want something hard enough you just need to keep trying until you get there.

So, after spending a minute doing a well-deserved victory dance in the style of Zingy – that little orange blob on the EDF adverts – I say bring it on. 

For I am a determined girl with an ambitious plan.
Watch out world.  

Twitter Grammar

So I’ve returned to Nottingham for a few days which has proven to be quite a nice change of scenery, despite the rain that has just attacked the world outside. So, sitting in my room with the rain hammering against the window I have decided to update you lovely readers with the amusing evening I had last night. It came in the style of a Twitter feud…

Remember when you were at school and your teacher used to correct spelling or grammar mistakes with the boldest red biro she could possibly find, scrawling over your work for everyone to see and placing a big red circle around any missed apostrophes and capital letters?

Well, the comment and reply features on social media have, for me, turned into something pretty similar to this. I’ll admit that when I first started texting and using the website Bebo before Facebook became popular, I ashamedly wrote in text-speak. That illiterate and indecipherable-to-adults language all teenagers at some point in their lives rejoice in using, spammed up my profile, my emails, my texts…everything except my everyday speech and thankfully, my academic work. Then you seem to hit a wall. You realise you actually have a Querty keyboard with all the letters readily available to you…you don’t need to shorten words when you can type just as quickly the full morpheme as you can the abbreviation. Text-speak died when that realisation struck. That and the one that made me think I just looked like an idiot typing ‘C U l8r bbz, luv ya’. Really?!

So, when I began writing properly again on Facebook and joined Twitter, I thought that any little grammar slip would easily go unnoticed because at least I wasn’t writing like a complete pleb anymore.

Oh how wrong could I be…

As an English student it seems that my friends delight in pointing out when something I’ve written in a hurry on my phone and speedily uploaded without proof-reading is wrong. When I’ve missed an apostrophe because I’ve been too tired to notice, or when, in my eagerness to upload my message I put two dots in the aposiopesis instead of three…

Last night was such an example. Laughing at my childish excitement at the return of The Great British Bake Off, I was called ‘cute’ and quickly made into a tweet… a tweet which I for once, could say was grammatically incorrect as my friend wrote ‘exited’ instead of ‘excited’. To my shame though, she was quicker to notice and promptly deleted her faulty tweet making my sly dig look rather stupid. But she still retaliated. And before I knew it we were firing amusing tweets at each other about grammar errors, which ironically led to more being made. In between our fits of laughter as we thought up the most annoying comebacks, I thought I’d be clever and explain that as Twitter was social media, my lack of compliance with standard grammar and punctuation rules was acceptable as it created a more casual, informal atmosphere with the friend I was speaking to.

‘I sEE wot u meen! Good point!’ she quipped.  Text speak was back.

And so continued an evening of petty remarks amidst more laughter as we set about publicly shaming each other on our Twitter profiles. Thank God we found it funny, because the amount of people who normally delight in picking up on my grammar mistakes is ridiculous to the point of annoying. Am I not allowed to slip up occasionally?!

I suppose not. Twitter is a grown-up’s version of social media. You have 140 characters in which you have to be as witty and amusing as you possibly can…it’s no child’s play. They’ll be no Bebo gifts to send to your friends here.

I should have learnt my lesson . An aspiring journalist can afford no personal slip-ups when it comes to their own writing – especially when it gets published worldwide. Back to proof-reading everything I go.

But despite all that, it’s still tempting to create one tweet in the style of the good ol’ days…

TxtSpk FTW ! Lol. 

Ralph Meets Rust

Meet Ralph, my nice little red Ford Ka. 

Around this time of year I get, what I have less than affectionately termed, my ‘motor month’. Around now, everything from car insurance to the M.O.T expires. Taking a deep breath and a noticeable chunk out of my bank account, I keep my fingers crossed that nothing goes wrong. Ignoring jibes from male friends that this is such a girl’s car, and dismissing suggestions that I look for a newer vehicle or try to sell Ralph, I still vainly hope that all goes well so I can keep him for yet another year.

I have a history with Ralph you see. He’s ferried me to and from both college and work, as well as making it easier for me to get to my Dad’s house not to mention all my friends, who cleverly decided to live at least twenty minutes away.  He’s pretty much what you’d call a run-around car, which means he doesn’t have many miles on the clock, but nevertheless I still insist that Ralph is much needed and - strangely for an inanimate object - much loved.

So this week, I optimistically drove him to the garage for his yearly M.O.T, fully believing that all would be well. I waved away any doubts and fears that were expressed over his brakes, his clutch, his windscreen wipers and any kind of obscure mechanical fault that I wouldn’t fully understand. “He’ll pass” I insisted, giving him a confident pat before I zoomed off.

He failed. Ralph had rust.

Disappointed, we forked out just over £100 to cover the test and the welding Ralph ended up needing, whilst I silently cursed myself for being so confident and jinxing his fate. He’s back now, parked for the time being in the lay-by outside where I can see him. But I just can’t get something out of my head.

When I told a friend about my car’s failure, he grinned at me and slyly asked, “You know what they call rust for cars, don’t you?”
I shook my head.

“Cancer.”

I blinked. I laughed it off. But I faintly remember hearing this before…

So that’s it. Despite being reassured that he won’t need any more attention for at least 18months regarding his rusty underside, I can’t help feeling that I’m dealing with a case of impending car cancer.

Poor Ralph.
(...I wonder how much a Fiesta would cost...)