Thursday morning, September 30, 8:45am: Autumn has finally arrived. I scoop the ash leaves which had fallen into the grooves of my car boot when last visiting my family home before removing the detritus from my boot ahead of the National Car Test (NCT) a few hours from now.
If nothing else, the NCT is a good reason to give the car the hygienic once over but thankfully the tidy-up doesn’t take too long. I’m not eating as much messy stuff in the car as once I used to – and not before time. It’s one of many poor eating habits I’m once again attempting to undo. I’m as fit as a fiddle, thankfully – but I’d feel all the better if I was 20 to 25lbs lighter.
Despite the continued hiatus from the workplace which will surely conclude between now and Halloween, the day job has remained happily busy.
In fact, the newspaper (www.waterford-news.ie) has, in my estimation, more than maintained its quality and breadth of coverage throughout the past 19 months.
A cover price of €3 might be considered too high by some (some of whom undoubtedly settle for unverified nonsense on Facebook) but when one considers how newspaper prices have not kept pace with the rate of inflation throughout my 23 years in the business, it’s not that expensive at all.
I buy at least three print newspapers a week and have subscriptions for four more plus two magazines. There’s never enough time to read them all but I know I can dip in and out of them when I want to: money well spent in my estimation.
A book project I thought I’d have largely completed by now has completely stalled and I suspect it’s not going to go ahead at this stage. To be honest, I don’t think I’d take it on now even if it got the go-ahead. Whatever about a few months of re-thinking, the guts of 18 months to mull it over doesn’t imbue a great level of confidence from my end as interviewer, researcher and writer. And it’s a real pity; I think I’d have really enjoyed the challenge of it but it’s not as if I’ve been twiddling my thumbs in the interim.
In the past week alone, I’ve written at least 10,000 words on a host of topics: rail services, education, a great deal of positive copy about my native Waterford and keeping my sportswriter’s eye in with two pieces about hurling.
But I’ve not been gazing into a glowing laptop all that late at night or at an extraordinarily early hour each morning. It was not always so. I’ve a better sense of balance to my life now than I did during a time when I felt I had to write a particular piece or I had to go to a certain match, etc. That went on for years. It threw everything else in my world completely off kilter.
Walking our two dogs (including Zippy, pictured) is my first priority pretty much every morning and I’m glad of that routine: it brings me right back to being nine years old at home, walking Huggins, our only ever house dog, on a 200-yard round trip before the bus collected us for school.
I’d see Huggins again after school each evening and I couldn’t wait to get back to him, put the lead on him and go up and down the road with my friend again. I’m glad it’s a habit that I’ve fallen back into over the past decade.
The about turn in my life from a work perspective was akin to an oil tanker attempting to do a 360: it’ll eventually come all the way around but without doing so in all too great a hurry. It’s probably not the full way around yet but it’s definitely moving in the right direction. And it’s surely best not to force these things either. Decades-old habits take time to undo.
2:40pm: With more copy filed for next week while still digesting the opening 15 minutes of this afternoon’s ‘Liveline’ show on RTE Radio One – which featured my colleague Darren Skelton, forced to defend our newspaper featuring news on our front page – the sky is growing greyer as I gaze out my home office window.
There’s not a whisper out of the dogs downstairs or from the cats in the room adjacent to me. There’s plenty of work to be done yet this afternoon, a copy of today’s Irish Examiner to work through and a few more cups of tea to be guzzled before I’ll down tools just after 5pm. Oh, and the car passed its NCT. Sometimes, there’s a lot to be said for the simple pleasures...
Comments