No carpet, no problem

Today has been another productive day. In fact, I would go so far as to say most days are productive for me at the moment. Poached Creative and Camden Calling are providing challenges, but they are realistic challenges I know I can rise to. Away from the work side of things I am coping with – dare I say enjoying – life generally.

The ups with the downs

I have built up a resilience that I did not have until recently. I can accept that sometimes life throws up surprises, problems, and generally just doesn’t go the way you planned. I am gradually gaining the ability to accept this and continue through life without dwelling on misfortune. This means I can handle situations far better than I could before. In other words, it takes a whole lot more to piss me off than it used to.

Natural disaster avoided

This new-found tolerance was put to the test a few days ago however. I was visiting my family at the weekend, when I received a phone call from my landlord informing me that my ground-floor bedroom had flooded.

To be honest it wasn’t actually as bad as I had thought. I rushed back to Kentish Town expecting to be washed away by some huge tidal wave upon opening the door. There was no such drama however, just a soaking wet, ruined carpet from where the water had seeped under the patio door. I mentioned in this blog that I am quite proud of my newly-organised self, and this is a case in point. Had any clothes, CDs, discarded pieces of paper, folders etc been left on the floor at the time of flooding, they would have certainly perished. As it was, only the carpet was affected.

Every cloud...

The whole incident has brought all seven residents of my house closer together. It’s strange, but through my adversity and everyone else’s sympathy, we have developed a sort of unity and a closer friendship. It’s great to know I have this kind of support from people I live with, because there is no guarantee of it in a house in which I did not hand-pick the occupants.

Multitasking – one for the ladies

By the time I arrived in Wood Green today, the fact that I have no carpet was not bothering me one bit. More new learning opportunities were on the agenda today; this week it was interviewing to gather information for an article. This seems to be a real art form - involving asking a question, listening to the answer, writing down the answer, and thinking of the next question - all at once. The structure of questioning has to be thought through too – sandwiching tricky questions in-between easier, more light-hearted ones. I devised a set of questions to ask Otu (a Poached Creative adviser), and tested them in mock-up interviews with Brij and Jess. I don’t know what the real interviewee would have made of it all though – it was far from seamless.

So the flag was just blowing in the ‘wind’, then?

This afternoon we looked at differences in features and articles – a feature being more detailed and thought provoking than a regular news report. Specifically, we compared pieces on the 40th anniversary of the moon landing. The news piece focused on the facts, whereas the feature included all sorts from personal accounts to bits on how, apparently, the whole thing was faked. Features tend to stray from the Inverted Pyramid style of reporting we studied a few weeks back. The inclusion of pictures, diagrams and graphs adds to their visual effect.

Life beyond Poached

Next Thursday will be the last day of my six week programme. This certainly doesn’t mean the end of the road for me as a trainee writer, though. I have made contact with Rokpool to let them know I am ready to take on some of the subbing work they offered. I have some other options too, which I will discuss with Jess next week. After some positive, enlightening experiences so far, I am keen to pursue this interest and hopefully find an arrangement which will help my writing progress.

I will fill you in with more on my future plans next week.