Goodbye, Thank grumpy it's Friday...

Cheerio!

Thank grumpy it's Friday is no more.

After 291 columns (292 if you count the potentially libellous one that didn't get published), 145500 words, and 6 years, my days of writing 500 words a week for publication in The Mail have come to an end.

In case you hadn't guessed, this is the big news I've been mentioning for a couple of months now.

Having found myself, with increasing regularity, sat in front of a blank screen with the submission deadline screaming at me, I spent the latter part of last years worried I was drying up. This also got me questioning if I was actually any good any more.

With little in the way of feedback from either the paper, or it's readers, I finally decided I'd call it a day at the end of the year, and sent an email to the paper explaining at the start of November. Column 289 would be my last outing.

The reply was somewhat startling. They were just about to offer me a full page. Not just in the Mail. In the News & Star too, which covers the north and west of Cumbria.

Ooo. Validation. What to do?

I thought about it a lot. Chatted to a few people. Consulted Mrs G. I even tried a Twitter poll (42% said "Never stop - I love you", 50% "Keep going - you're OKish").

I still couldn't decide.

Eventually, I started being a bit more positive. I have ideas all the time and thoughts about things in the news etc. I'm just poor at remembering them. What if I (and this is shocking) WROTE THEM DOWN?!!!

So here we are. Jenwis Hamilbutton was killed off during Big Blogger. Thank grumpy it's Friday has ended.

The lure of a page to express my innermost weirdness, in two papers, was too much. I'm giving it a go. The paper wanted to badge me as "Cumbria's grumpiest columnist", but as I'm actually only grumpy 99.7% of the time, that didn't seem appropriate.

So now Fridays will be accompanied by "A wry look at the week".

Apologies to the 8% on Twitter who voted "Stop. For God's sake".

New title. New photo (thanks, Jenna!). 2 papers. 3 topics. A whole page. 1000 words per week.

Eek...

And here's the first outing from The Mail, with an initial teaser on page 2. Looks like the decision to go with "A wry look..." was too late for this edition. I'm presuming the same layout will apply in the News & Star, but I haven't got a copy yet.

I think I might be a little bit proud...

Comments

The Schaf Shuffle

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Now and again, it’s good to reaffirm that you’re a (relatively) normal human being. One excellent way of doing this is to go to a business exhibition. Despite what you might have surmised from reading my previous columns, I am employable, and even capable of acting like a regular person most of the time, even joining in the Monday morning conversation about the weather over the weekend, and why (insert name of footyballs manager here) should be fired immediately. The mug! True, there are times, often involving a caffeine deficiency, where it is like having the distilled essence of ten moody teenagers in the room, but I try and get that out of the way when people I genuinely like aren’t around to see it. As part of my ongoing experiment with what others call ‘working’, my ‘job’ involves me occasionally needing to go and see what some of my colleagues get up to outside the office, and what our competitors do to try and make sure that they do whatever my colleagues do better than ...

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We are gathered here in this... (looks round a bit) um... blog, to mourn the passing of Jenwis Hamilbutton. His life may have been short and largely irrelevant, but he touched the lives of so many people that... sorry? Oh. Apparently that was someone else... Jenwis Hamilbutton rose briefly to fame on twitter during 2010, when he was retweeted by BBC F1 presenter Jake Humphrey, having criticised his shirt. A similarly unspectacular claim to fame occurred when a tweet he crafted at 1am on a windy night appeared in F1 Racing magazine. An amalgam of bits of Formula 1 drivers Lewis Hamilton and Jenson Button (mostly the hopeless bits), he came into existence via 3 pints of cider, a Creme Egg and the Electric Light Orchestra’s mournful 1986 farewell album “Balance Of Power”, played loudly over headphones. In his short existence, he was followed on twitter by Paul Hardcastle of “19” fame, and a bunch of slightly odd but jolly nice people, whom he was never entirely sure actually exist...

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