Bottom rung gone
Funny how one person’s working life can take twists and turns and then end up more or less where it started; it’s 37 years since I went freelance but in some ways it seems like half an hour ago that I walked out of that tennis ball factory for the last time and embarked on what I laughingly call my ‘career’. And, as I keep reminding myself, the great thing is that I’m still here and yet around me so much is changing that I wonder if the younger version of me would have the same chances that I had then.
It was always one of my great ambitions to write funny and thoughtful columns for newspapers and here I am, still writing funny (I hope) and thoughtful (I hope) columns.
The first ones I wrote were for the Barnsley Metropolitan, a long-gone alternative paper, and I still remember the thrill I got when I read my first piece in that paper and that thrill is still replicated every week when I open The Yorkshire Post Magazine. Young people still want to write, of course, but will they still want to write for newspapers? I do hope so; newspapers are vital for culture and for democracy, and I hope they survive and thrive after the present crisis subsides.
It was always another of my great ambitions to work on the radio and I’m proud to say that my Radio 3 show The
Verb has been on air now for 18 years. I started off at Radio Sheffield being interviewed and then they asked me to review the papers and then they asked me and my mate Martyn to do a Saturday morning show and the rest, as they say, is history. But last week the BBC announced cuts to local and regional radio and television and, combined with recent amalgamations of commercial radio stations, I wonder where the younger version of me would get a foot in the door now.
It was always yet another of my ambitions to run writing workshops, and 25 years ago I started doing so for a community arts organisation in Doncaster called Darts; I left there just at the end of the last century but I went back in 2019 and I’ve been involved in all sorts of creative workshops, in person until the Covid crisis but now online until we can meet again. But again I wonder how easy it is for younger people to get on the first rung of the community arts ladder these days.
Maybe, of course, I’m just an old bloke looking back. There are lots of internet radio stations, and community radio is a good place to learn your audio trade. Vloggers can make fortunes and people can start their own podcasts and at least make a living; online performances have been a feature of the lockdown and once we start to be able to meet again I’m sure that pop-up and reconditioned spaces will brim with performance.
Onward to the new normal!
disobedience, its denial of humility, its insistence that his private judgement was right and the judgement of his church wrong.
Presumptuously I would guess that he is a proud man who would like to be a humble one, and finds this beyond him. He hasn’t, however, drifted so far as to arrive on the cold shore of atheistic materialism, whether simple or dialectical. “Faith unfaithful” has kept him “falsely true” and so he “remains” – or perhaps is again – “a member of the Christian Church... part of the community that keeps the dangerous memory of Jesus alive in history”.
There is much in this book to make you think, much to provoke arguments for and against. Happily Holloway is still there at the bus stop, the bus not yet in sight. So this may not be his last word. If it is, it’s a good one to depart on, but one can’t think that the door to Doubting Castle hasn’t been slammed shut.