How to Stuff up Successfully: AKA Making it in Radio
It's not exactly been a doddle, living all over the place and far from home, quitting a lovely relationship, flaking on friends and working strange hours to get ahead in this business. Moreover, it's been less of a doddle for the friends and family that have stuck inexplicably by me. After them though, my second best friends in building a radio career have been a little intuition, coupled with simple hard work and common sense.
There are some very smart people in radio. There are talented ones. But there are a lot of average people with bog-standard intellects that can go a long way too... and a willingness to do other people's work for them never hurts.
Someone pointed out today just how much spoon feeding I do for other colleagues, who don't appreciate it, but expect it. More fool me for doing it, I thought. But another thought quickly followed, and it was one my peers are quite prone to experience too... if you don't do it yourself, someone else will do it. And they will fuck it up.
Because for all the average people that exist in radio, that have a good work ethic, take pride in their work, and arrive pre-9am with a measured level of sentience intact, there will always be others whose eye is not on the ball. That's probably something you can say for most workplaces isn't it. Suddenly, the people who care a little too much make themselves indispensable, simply by being the only ones prepared to do the crap that others think can wait until tomorrow.
In radio, this is an opportunity. For in what other organisation is self-flagellation, martyrdom and sheer underdog-championing as universally accepted as virtue? None, I answer. Because Radio is the underdog medium. Take the Sony awards for example. When did a well-funded, heavily staffed and commercially successful show or station last get the big hoo-ha prize? Can't remember, can you.
At any rate, I waffle on here in general terms. With regards to London itself, I should think this is meant to feel like the pinnacle, or at least, some sort of achievement. Here I am, fortunate enough to be working for several national brands in the heart of the city, in a turns of events that would have made my younger radio fan swoon, and yet my lifestyle is poles apart from the sophisticated dream I had envisaged.
The New London Baby
Instead, here is the new twenty-something London lifestyle. I race through the week like a rabid dog, forced on in a blur of adrenalin and caffeine and stuff that gets dropped on the floor and left there. I scramble through Monday to Friday, throwing cash at obstacles, such as the need to eat, socialise, date, feel fulfilled, paying not the slightest bit of attention to the moment. When Saturday comes, more often than not I am empty and overcome with exhaustion. This feeling in turn, must still do battle with the guilty obligation to make amends, do the cleaning, the washing, the shopping, some DIY, a good, long-run, see friends, have a health kick and.... sleep itself, which has suddenly become not so much a desire as a time-consuming task.
I've come to the conclusion that a certain style of London life, particurlarly the whirlwindy media sort of life, just wastes you, spoils you, and leaves you unable to appreciate the real satisfaction of it's most wonderful moments. That is, unhurried company, good honest savings, a cinema trip maybe, a frugal bit of shopping. The worth of things is exploded all week long, and at the weekend, doing the sums, one must repair and repent, replan and reignite. All these things I generally fail to do. Because I'm so BLOODY KNACKERED.
But it will all be OK.
It a rare moment of optimism, strolling in the cold winter sunlight across St. Martin's the other day, I had a sudden sense of goodwill.
It was a passing, and as yet not repeated, suspicion that although things were really quite deeply sad and regularly in the ball park of shit right now, that a corner would be turned, a sequence would be triggered, and things would be.... OK again.
Maybe it was a wise spirit dropping by for an epiphany. Perhaps I'd just walked through someone's good aura. Maybe I'd stepped on a magical paving stone. At any rate, for a moment I felt a flash of everything I needed to know: my big sister will be OK, that her husband is at rest, and that life will go on, richer for their shaping of it's course and pattern.
She's going to get through the sadness and one day she will tell her children all about her husband, and we'll all remember him with the same fondness and love we felt every day of his life.
I so want her to be happy again.
I want that more than anything.
I'm beginning to realise she will be.
Isn't it remarkable how your world can break, and yet everything, everyone keeps moving, dragging each other along like a sea of incessant reformation. Funnily enough, our attachments, our entanglements with other people, with things mundane, the things that rescue us from the atrophy that their loss brings.
No comments:
Post a Comment