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

Making an exhibition of yourself

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 ...

"It's all gone quiet..." said Roobarb

If, like me, you grew up (and I’m aware of the irony in that) in the ‘70s, February was a tough month, with the sad news that Richard Briers and Bob Godfrey had died. Briers had a distinguished acting career and is, quite rightly, fondly remembered most for his character in ‘The Good Life’. Amongst his many roles, both serious and comedic, he also lent his voice to a startling bit of animation that burst it’s wobbly way on to our wooden-box-surrounded screens in 1974. The 1970s seemed to be largely hued in varying shades of beige, with hints of mustard yellow and burnt orange, and colour TV was a relatively new experience still, so the animated adventures of a daft dog and caustic cat who were the shades of dayglo green and pink normally reserved for highlighter pens, must have been a bit of a shock to the eyes at the time. It caused mine to open very wide indeed. Roobarb was written by Grange Calveley, and brought vividly into life by Godfrey, whose strange, shaky-looking sty...

Suffering from natural obsolescence

You know you’re getting old when it dawns on you that you’re outliving technological breakthroughs. You know the sort of thing – something revolutionary, that heralds a seismic shift it the way the modern world operates. Clever, time-saving, breathtaking and life-changing (and featuring a circuit board). It’s the future, baby! Until it isn’t any more. I got to pondering this when we laughed heartily in the office about someone asking if our camcorder used “tape”. Tape? Get with the times, Daddy-o! If it ain’t digital then for-get-it! I then attempted to explain to an impossibly young colleague that video tape in a camcorder was indeed once a “thing”, requiring the carrying of something the size of a briefcase around on your shoulder, containing batteries normally reserved for a bus, and a start-up time from pressing ‘Record’ so lengthy, couples were already getting divorced by the time it was ready to record them saying “I do”. After explaining what tape was, I realised I’d ...

grumpyf1

Search This Blog