A case of the DTs...

Tomorrow the Daily Telegraph promises a guide to photographing 'absolutely everything'. Now, I don't have an enormous amount of free time, 7 month old son and all that, so I won't get round to it myself but I would imagine that even the most dedicated of photographers would be hard pushed to take on this mammoth task. Taking photographs of absolutely everything? Cripes. If you are following the DT's guide, good luck! And apologies in advance if I don't have the time to view the results.

Welcome to the blank charade...

I had the misfortune to read a comp copy of the Daily Mail today, and found, within its tightly packed, appallingly designed and scaremongeringly sensationalist pages a warning headed: Why no child is safe from the sinister cult of emo that built a case against teenagers wearing dark clothes, wrist bands from Claire's Accessories and long fringes and listening to Blink 182 (!!!) on the grounds that they may commit suicide like Hannah Bond, who, the Mail suggests, would have been alive now if she hadn't discovered emo and become addicted to the internet's evil Bebo. A tragic case indeed but the Mail does Hannah's memory no favours. The only thing they get right is the sentence: "No doubt many adults would ask: 'So what?'" I must remember to have a chat with my skinny jean fixated teenage son, if I can get to him through his lengthy fringe, in order to demonstrate my new Mail-inlfuenced knowledge, without which I would never have known that "Emos like guitar-based rock with emotional lyrics". Dear oh dear.

A thousand trees...

More press clippings sort of sorted, cut out, transferred to plastic transparent wallets and snapped inside ring binders, in no particular order, original publications sliced to smithereens and hurled into a box for later disposal. Obscure, defunct publications, far-flung newspapers, dodgy trade magazine, print outs of long-since collapsed websites, even bizarre pitches to magazine editors sneaking in here and there (one to Total Football: "Let me write a feature for you about what it is to follow a perennial loser - Hull City - instead of you wasting more print on those top flight bastards that fill your pages." I don't recall ever having read Total Football, don't really feel strongly about Premiership sides getting coverage in what is, after all, a wholly appropriate publication, and hadn't followed City closely since 1982). Some memories revived and stirred along the way and a lot of newsprint on the hands. Catherine Cooper from The Stage welcomed me to the fold by telling me that the said publication rarely published a review that dared to damn a show. I got in there because my predecessor in the region, Barbara Theakston, had gone deaf but also, bizarrely, was increasingly complaining that the productions she was watching were too 'loud'.

I realised, as I got busy with my craft knife, that I miss writing for newspapers and magazines, although I'm happy to no longer be a critic and reviewer. I enjoyed working for Artscene and its editor, Vic Allen, who had, maybe even still has, the finest head of hair in journalism. Vic's briefs (no, I don't mean his pants) were truly great - if they had been written down they would have been several thousand words over the required word count. I didn't do that much for Artscene over the course of eight-ish years - little bits here, little bits there - but I always felt that the mag was important and I was honoured to be a part of it right up to its untimely demise, a victim of some brave new electronic, interactive world perceived by Arts Council England that hasn't really materialised. The Big Issue In The North, first place that paid me for the privilege of publishing my words. I remember buying a copy and running around town, bumping into people I knew and showing them the piece I'd written, with a great big grin on my face, as if I'd won the Booker prize or something. But I had always remained so excited about seeing my name between front and back covers and hadn't got so cynical and weary. The HDM, bless it. I haven't salvaged a lot from five years of hack work. But there were three columns that I'm proud of and several little bits of me that sneaked through that should have been stopped in their tracks. I loved the Mail when I turned up there, all excited to have bagged a job that meant I'd get paid for writing full-time. Then I spent all my time shunning and running from responsibility. I could have done a lot more for them if they'd let me but, well, sometimes it doesn't work out like that, does it? And the end might, when it came, not have been for such exciting reasons.

Interpup v The Mighty Windass

The playwright David Eldridge has, for the second time, christened me The Mighty Windass. Which, coming from such an esteemed theatrical gent, is very nice indeed (and marketing will, I'm sure, be keen to use it on the posters come January). In the spirit of Lewis Carroll, of course, if he says it a third time I will indeed become The Mighty Windass and I shall rule, if not the Universe, the World or the country, then at least a couple of the dirtier streets in east Hull. I am assuming that David is, perhaps, a fan of the Christopher Guest film A Mighty Wind, a piece of work that I wish had existed during my school days as The Mighty Windass is certainly preferable to a lot of the utterly uncreative names I was called as a trembling, spotty member of Woggy (!) Hall's form with an oh-so-funny surname at the boys only Riley High - an establishment designed and run with the encouragement and training (but very rarely education) of thugs in mind. All of which, in a rather contrived way, brings me round to a conversation I overheard at the bus stop this afternoon. Someone was talking about being bullied. A bigger, older chap who should have known better offered the bullied some advice: "Yeah, bullies, they don't give a shit about you. So if you're gonna be punched you may as well give them a slap. Tell you what you need to do. Put some pool balls in a sock and whack the bastards across the head."

Actually, steering my thoughts back to the playwright David Eldridge, I've not given up on Big Brother. I'm there every night - even forcing M to endure the show on the nights when she feels indifferent to tuning in - and will be until the end. There's nowt so life-affirming as meaningless trash on telly, is there? But I've gotta say that I'm missing Russell Brand on Big Mouth enormously, and have yet to find a guest presenter that doesn't leave me wanting to throw one of the cats at the television or, say, whack Pete Burns across the head with some pool balls in a sock.

So, we we're in town - I had to drop a hard copy of the aformentioned half a script in at the theatre - and I walked past a newspaper bill board, announcing the staggering news Hull shops to open late. Which illustrates, I suppose, that we're in the middle of the silly season when nothing much happens but is hardly the earth-shattering stuff of your above-average front page. Keen, as ever, not to buy a copy of the paper I read the story online when I got home, amazed that mother-of-two Lynn Smith, 32, of Belvoir Street, west Hull, reckoned that "Late-night shopping will make life easier." Which makes it sound like shops being open until 7pm is on a par with the invention of the wheel, the availability of food and peace in all corners of the globe. But never mind late night shopping, you want stuff that makes life easier, you read what the clever Newsround kids have to say. I especially like 10-year-old Lauren's: "I would invent a robot dog called Interpup. On his belly would be a screen and you could play games or surf the web. You could teach him to speak and sing by telling him through the speaker!" The Mighty Windass would certainly buy one of those.

Half a job...

Submitted a revised first half of the play. Always a relief to get these things off my hands, a few minutes of calm before the next life-trauma needs unravelling. At almost the same time I got an email from someone informing me that an entire coach load of people are attending the play on the same night. I'm amazed at and impressed by the way some folk can be so incredibly organised five months ahead of an event, if I can call my own play an event - I'll probably only start thinking about my own tix for the play a couple of hours before the curtain (what curtain? Have you ever been to Hull Truck? - reality check ed.) goes up. Quite obviously, having revised the first half of the play now means that I have to turn my attention to the second half for it is, indeed, a play of two halves.

Like the other 60 million writers in the country, I'm also knocking an idea into shape for the Red Planet competition. Now, I'm not big on writing competitions (it's no way to develop anyone's talent, is it?) but it seemed like a nice diversion at the time. And, at last, I'm writing about the wacky world of regional newspapers. I wondered when that would happen and suddenly, it has. It won't stand a chance of winning, I'm certain of that, but what I have doodled thus far may well form the basis of something that could be performed a bit further down the line. Although, maybe not, as that would mean finishing it. In case you're wondering, my regional newspaper drama is not about me, as that would mean that it revolved around a main protagonist who spent much of the time he was being paid to write content for various publications actually writing plays and being in rehearsals instead, rather than around a main protagonist who spent much of the time he was being paid to write content for various publications getting pissed instead. I jest, of course - they all work incredibly hard and very long hours.