AUTHOR | ELDERLY SCHOOLBOY | IDIOT
Monday January 9, 2023
Well, I hope you all had a lovely Christmas. I was down with stomach flu but needed to write a presentation on ethics in journalism; so, delirious with discomfort and permanently online, seasonally depressed and unable to keep a drink down for the purposes of self-medication, I’ve been reflecting on that old ethical dilemma of whether journalists actually have any.
Ethics, that is. Continue reading “1. Journalism Attracts the Worst”
Three-hundred words isn’t enough for anything. Continue reading “Diary of an Elderly Schoolboy: Part 3”
Due to less than stellar book sales – which I’m going to attribute to the effect on the markets of Brexit, Covid and Putin – I’ve gone back to school.
Like an addict mistaking sobriety for enlightenment only to return to the bottle, I’ve decided to hobble around Portsmouth University on a bad knee like a fat ghost, hoping against hope that Student Finance England will get their act together before all my credit cards are maxed out. Continue reading “Diary of an Elderly Schoolboy: Part 1”
While desperately searching various drives for my old short stories but finding only corrupted files I came across an old project report, (Back in 2009, Vilmantė, Sölvi, Dina and I produced a heartwarming wee Choose Your Own Adventure style Flash game about villains of the week, those dastardly Lithuanians, and that’s why there’s no such thing as racism anymore.)
It made me smile to remember a time when the knee-jerk armchair generals and vicious bigots of this country were all up in arms about ‘swarms’ from the east rather than the south-east.
The rhetoric may be saccharine and naive but I thought I’d share the report regardless. I’ve stripped most if not all of the business/marketing guff since I didn’t write it anyway; besides, no one visits this blog flushed with expectation for Target Group Analysis and User Scenarios, right?
If nothing else, it shows that you can get away with using colourful language like the S, F and N-words whilst trying to make some sort of sense of this shitty fucking world full of C-words. Continue reading “Lithuanians and other bogeymen (2009)”
It’s been over a month since I posted anything here and even though I have nothing I feel comfortable sharing with you I still feel it polite to show a little love to whoever reads these things as it can’t all be people stumbling upon this site by mistake. It’s not that we don’t love you, we’re just so busy. Continue reading “Proof of life, wine guide and a video for Katie and Shaun”
I remain connected to my Teesside classmates through Facebook and Twitter. It’s fun to see the relationships between them growing; strangers becoming buddies, flirts becoming fucks – all that dirty romance. Continue reading “Please ensure that you write at least 200 words per box.”
I don’t want to alarm anyone living in Middlesbrough any more than they already will be – having woken up and, rubbing the sleep from their eyes, remembered that they live in Middlesbrough – but far from ‘Putting People First’, Cleveland Police doesn’t have your back; in fact it would appear that they are perfectly content for you and your loved ones to burn in the fires of prophecy.
I put in a Freedom of Information request last month to their HQ; I found a popular template, which helped make me sound smart, and added my query, which didn’t: Continue reading “Exclusive: Cleveland Police ill-prepared for apocalypse”
These next two tracks were exercises both in writing for broadcast and recording. I can only hope that the subjects were made up, but even so, pieces of a baby found flushed down a toilet? Really? I didn’t realise Bret Easton Ellis was writing NCTJ exams.
I think these examples of my effete lisp are proof positive that should this journalism malarky go to the dogs, there’s always work for me in pre-war Hampshire commentating lawn bowls.
On an almost unrelated note, would any Teesside based single ladies over the age of thirty that could imagine this voice, tinged with impatience, slurring suggestions of a sexual nature through their letterbox at 3am please get in contact. Please. Continue reading “Me, talking”
CHRIS PARLETT 