January Chaos

'I played a heap of snow in a school play. I was under a sheet, and crawled out when spring came. I often say I'll never reach the same artistic level again.'
Stellan Skarsgard 


Bollocks to blogging in three-month quarterly summaries. And you know what? Bollocks to magazine-style professionalism, and the constant niggle of 'how publishable is this, outside of this blog?' These thoughts do not matter right now. What matters is that I stop being a 'bell chod', as one of my readers put it, and update this blog more regularly. So here you go.

My first sound-off is to remind you (again) that, in the space of one month, I have had a few publishing successes. Stray Branch, a literature publication, accepted a story. My poem found it's way into Aphelion- another lit magazine (both online), and also my letter was featured in the Oldham Evening Chronicle- my local newspaper. I intend to carry on this way: reeling out material and getting it published.

It was fairly easy to keep this up: I was pretty much stranded inside when 15cm (9 inches) of snow was dumped all over the town of Oldham, bringing it to a standstill. This disruption also occurred from Land's End to John O' Groats. Just to remind those living underground. I'm 27 and I've never seen snow like it.

I wondered up the hill behind my house while it fell- the whole of Greater Manchester is normally visible from Heartshead. In fact, on a clear day you can see the Clwydian mountain range on the North Wales coast some 50 miles away. I marched up the track to Heartshead's summit, trudging through iced puddles, the snow falling so thick it looked like mist. Each snowflake was twice the size of a cornflake. The eroded path forked, heading into two parts of oblivion. There is a beacon tower up there, known as Heartshead Pike, that has stood since 1863. It's not quite on the summit, but it's a good a place as any to get a panoramic vista. On that day, however, I got half-way up the track before realising I couldn't actually see anything in front or behind me. And if anyone was going to get lost on a hill like that, it would be me. So I backtracked. I took a few decent pictures on my phone when the visibility cleared up further down the road.

January's high-point number two occurred when I was updating my LinkedIn account. I suppose you could call LinkedIn 'the business version of Facebook'- a social networking site without the socialising. I searched the site using my Hotmail contacts and found a girl I'd pulled in 2004 when I was at uni. She was from down south, and was visiting friends in Manchester at the time. She kinda looked like Eady from the film Heat (the one DeNiro, erm, 'gets with'), only said lady is fitter.

It turned out that she worked for the TV company BSkyB. I was studying media at the time, so we swapped Email addresses and she promised to pass my CV on to the production team, for what it's worth. Back to 2010: I connected to said lady on LinkedIn. She's now BSkyB's head of trade marketing.

Has anyone else pulled any high-profile people? Comment below!

Speaking of business- now the snow has passed and I have loads of annual leave to use up before the business year ends, I won't be in work much. So stay tuned for more bizarre accounts of what I've been dumb enough to get involved in.