Life & Society
Pens, rulers, fists - and tears
Published 03 January 2008
Being unemployed would be fine if you knew in nine months you'd land a dream gig. So it's a finite period, and you can have a ball, or learn Italian, or watch Jeremy Kyle
A peculiar way to start the new year. I don't just mean because of the spineless performance of the England cricket team in Sri Lanka. Nor am I thinking of the terrible sense of loss that sweeps over the soul at the premature ending of Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, a fabulous but rather overlooked show from Aaron "West Wing" Sorkin. No, I'm feeling strange because last weekend's edition of the Observer was the last I will put to bed, after nearly ten years as editor - a job I feel privileged to have been given the chance to do.
Journalists can get a bad press, but in my experience there is no more collegiate, kind or thoughtful bunch of people anywhere. Highly sentimental and traditionalists, too. There's an ancient custom in the industry that when someone leaves they get "banged out" - a reference to the sound of the printers hitting their metal rulers against the steel tables where newspaper pages used to be made up. That's all gone, of course, and you don't get much noise from tapping a computer keyboard. Having watched, and heard, many friends being seen off this way, I was deeply touched when, after the final page was sent at 6pm last Saturday, my colleagues gathered round my office and started banging any nearby surface - desks, filing cabinets, window frames - with pens, rulers and fists. It was a glorious, chaotic din that would have brought tears to the eyes of a dead man, as it did to mine.
Now I am officially out of work for the first time in nearly 40 years. Being unemployed would be absolutely fine, I think, if you knew that, say, in nine months you'd land a dream gig somewhere. So it's a finite period, and you can have a ball, or learn Italian, or cycle to China, or watch Jeremy Kyle. My married women friends tell me they'd have had much more fun being single if they'd known that in five years, say, they would meet the man of their dreams. That's the future, eh? You just never know what's coming round.
Don't do it
The received wisdom in media circles is that damn all happens between Christmas and New Year, so everyone can go on holiday. That's why the broadcasting number ones have tended to be absent from our screens in the past few days (except for the blessed arched eyebrows of Fiona Bruce). It's a complete myth, of course: look at the Boxing Day tsunami in 2004, the execution of Saddam Hussein on 30 December 2006, or the Iranian earthquake the day after Christmas in 2003.
Now the assassination of Benazir Bhutto, a shocking story, and almost completely predictable. What makes it all the more shocking is the poignancy of the TV footage showing Ms Bhutto getting into her armoured vehicle seconds before she is killed. It reminded me of those images of Lady Di and Dodi Fayed just before they got in their car at the Ritz in 1997. You want to lean forward and say, "Don't do it, don't get in the car."
Sound of silence
Keen students of British self-restraint should have a look at Time magazine (the one with Putin on the cover). In it there's easily the best pic I've seen from that curious photographic subgenre of political-leaders-go-to-work-on-the-Tube-and-everyone-pretends-not-to-notice. It is by Tom Stoddart and it shows a painfully tense Gordon Brown in a packed Underground carriage. The joy is that no one seems to notice. You can almost hear the silence from GB's fellow passengers, immersed in their Metros and iPods. Better that, I say, than a lot of bloody shouting.
Gorgeous and talented
The English language is full of great Yiddish expressions. Here's one you might not be familiar with: the word is nachas, and it means (I quote) the unique sense of pride and gratification a parent has in the achievements of his or her children. So I hope readers will bear with me if I heartily recommend a brilliant new ITV drama series starting on Thursday. It's called Echo Beach and it's screened immediately after its companion show, Moving Wallpaper (don't ask, but you will love it). It's clever, funny and full of gorgeous and talented actors, including, ahem, my teenaged daughter Hannah.
So please watch it, and then I can kleib nachas, which means to bask in the reflected glory of one's children's achievements.
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