I remember meeting a freelancer once. It was a Sunday evening and she was doing a shift with the News at Ten team at Sky News. I even sat next to her for a while, while we were on air, and because it was quiet, or perhaps because I wasn't working hard enough, at one point she told me that she was writing a book. It all seemed so matter of fact. She was a middle aged woman, perfectly nice, organised, professional, happy, but I couldn't look at her anymore. Who did she think she was? How dare she swan in here and just do a shift so she could write her book?
I've also met someone who self-published. My Auntie Diana. She wrote a book when she turned sixty and when my mum first mentioned it to me I was horrified. Di? Published? My jealousy and confusion was visceral. But when she later said she'd self-published my jealousy turned to pity (it is now respect and admiration btw!)
Now I've done both. When it comes to the literary world; I am a wanker. Like Philip Larkin 'at ten past three'. I have done it myself. To myself. By myself. Sad. Pathetic. Deluded. And I can see it had been coming for years.
I remember having a stand up row at Sky News with a younger producer on the morning after Trump was first elected. He was midway through a righteous tirade in our backwater department upstairs and I simply couldn't just sit there and listen without saying something. Later, in my last few years as a freelancer, I remember choosing two Trump grabs from a speech he was making on the economy and then being told by producer in Washington that I had to use different ones that were nothing to do with the economy. It reminds me of the current Panorama Trump speech editing scandal: the grab I was told to use was Trump mispronouncing a word. I tried to protest, constructively, pointing out that he had delivered news-worthy information about the economy, albeit contestable, but I was ordered to use the mispronunciation clip.
I felt the same on the morning after the European Parliament elections in 2014 when UKIP won the greatest number of votes. We kept calling it 'a protest vote' on air and after ranting upstairs again I stormed into John Ryley's office (Head of News) and interrupted his much more important meeting with Jonathan Levy (Director of Newsgathering and Operations). They both listened to me respectfully and kindly as I made my point in a very John Kent kind of way. But nothing happened.
They were all so very patient and careful with me at Sky News, and I really did give it my all, but by the time I left in 2018, it hadn't felt the same for a long time. I joined in August 2000 because John Ryley gave me a chance despite the fact that I got off the bus too early and ran up Uxbridge Road in the sun and exhaust fumes. I used to love the fact that Adam Boulton defended Sky News for mixing politics and showbiz. And when my Aunt Sally and Uncle Brian used to tell me how much they liked Kay Burley at the family gatherings on Boxing Day, I always felt immensely proud that I worked somewhere that didn't patronise people and tell them how to think. I liked Kay Burley too. I liked Adam Boulton. I liked that Sky News mixed showbiz and politics. And I loved the fact that Sky News wasn't the BBC.
I always felt wrong at the BBC. I only worked there briefly as a runner on an edition of Crimewatch (and even got recognised from my non speaking role in a reconstruction!) but even just driving past Television Centre has always made me feel short of breath. I never got anywhere on the BBC News Trainee scheme. I got to the final round of ITN News Trainee scheme when I was at City University doing my Broadcast Journalism course (they always took one person from the City and one person from Cardiff) but when someone on the panel asked me what I would do if Tom Jones died I replied that I would "change the theme music". I'd already outlined my idea for a series of in depth reports on lap dancing during that interview; and when I couldn't think of a single thing to say in my interview for Cambridge or Oxford a few years earlier (I'm still not sure which one it was) I completely froze. I hadn't re-read any of the essays I'd sent as part of my application and had only applied because my history teacher said I should. Like a lot of people, I had a lot to work out and understand as I was growing up. I had no idea what I wanted to do. I made mistakes. I didn't fulfil my potential. I had no sense of direction. I was lost for a long time. And I can still see the panel of people sitting opposite me (three at Cambridge or Oxford and five in the ITN) looking at me with a combination of pity, bemusement and inconvenience.
But that's why I've always hated it so much when people took the piss out of George Bush or Donald Trump. I mispronounce names. I have no idea how things work sometimes. I freeze. I get things wrong. I say things I regret. I have feelings and thoughts I know aren't very nice, that aren't very progressive, that aren't pure (how could you ever even consider voting for Brexit?) and the longer I was at Sky News, and the more like the BBC it became, the more uncomfortable I started to feel.
And it was even worse in my brief experience of the literary world. The only direct experience I've got of that rarified bubble, apart from the fantastic short story course I did at City Lit with Zoe Fairbairns and my early success at the Bridport Prize, was at the Faber Academy. I did the six month novel writing course in 2018 and while I absolutely loved the first three months, during which we considered ourselves to be writers who were entitles to talk about other writers, but when we turned to face outwards after Christmas and start pitching and drafting letters to agents I felt like a complete and utter fraud. I was so ashamed of my simple third person chronological book about a man that can't express his emotions; ashamed of using the phrase 'oh la la' (it is set in a language school in Paris); ashamed that my main character was 'such a pervert' as someone said in a feedback session. And when the teacher asked if I should include his girlfriend’s point of view; everyone in my class, including the only other man, put their hand up. On Agents Day I wore a purple crushed velvet blazer and white trousers so that I at least might look like a writer. But they cheered every Brexit defeat in the Commons every Wednesday night in the middle of our two hour long sessions. And I never really felt welcome.
It seems as if a poet or a writer simply can't be a poet or a writer if they don't have liberal, progressive, north London sensibilities. One of my most recent poems is called Tits. Believe me, I have struggled with whether of not I should even self-publish it (despite reading it out once at a dinner party!) But that’s the word I grew up with. That's my lived experience. And I'm not ashamed because it's an honest poem that came straight from my deepest fears a desires in an unguarded private moment. And one of my earlier poems from my collection Wonderful Baboon is called My Wife's Arse. I read it out loud at at an open-mic evening in Chichester a few years ago, with my hands shaking in front of me (just like the first time I read my short story The Troll at City Lit) and I was was so moved and touched when a woman in the front row went 'ahhh' at the end. I was expecting to be hounded out of Chichester. Chased. Cancelled. Scorned. Reported. I even worried about writing the line 'the English countryside' in my poem The Countryside rather than 'the British countryside' because of all the connotations of flags and white vans. And that was borne out a few weeks ago when I watched a video of the poet Luke Wright reading his poem called Flag on Instagram. I follow Luke and really like a lot of his poems. But I was stunned when he referenced that Fathers 4 Justice campaigner who climbed Big Ben dressed at Batman! Once of my very earliest poems, Being A Dad, also references that campaigner. I remember it clearly at Sky News; everyone watching the TVs on their desk and making those comments that come so easily to people in the media. But while Luke goes on to slam him mercilessly for not apparently not knowing the date of his children’s birthday, I've always felt a weird sense of empathy with whoever it was; just like I felt empathy with Tony Soprano or any other struggling dad. Luke doesn't know the Fathers 4 Justice guy either, I presume, but judging by the rest of his poem he appears to assume that he must be a racist, fascist twat.
I've battled with shame all my life I now realise; shame at who I am, my simple desires, my complex desires, my simple and complex doubts: and it was only after meeting my wife (Kate) that I very gradually started to trust my own feelings rather than craving the approval of the perpetual panel I've been sitting in front of for most of my life. Maybe my writing has gradually got worse since that triumphant kebab with Kate on Bridport High Street but that is irrelevant: all I know is that the more I have expressed myself freely and honestly, the more reluctant I have felt to keep putting myself and my poems in front of people who can only reject me.
I have never felt more loved and less alone than I do now with Kate and our family (even though I still moan too much!) And so far away from my mum's response when I showed her some of my early short stories just before Bridport. "You're not quite there yet..." she said, handing the pieces of A4 paper I'd printed out specially back to me. My dad even nodded on the sofa in agreement. And, standing there, I felt like I'd just wet myself in public. Me and Kate talked about it on the top floor of the bus going home. I was so dejected and despairing looking out of that window but Kate was next to me as the bus kept stopping on Peckham Rye. And, looking back, that was the beginning of my journey towards self-publishing.