Beautiful Porto

The transition from freelance to full employment can be a bit of a challenge. It’s one I’m facing at the moment as I take on the role of Creative Content Editor for a new travel website, basically writing, editing, overseeing, commissioning, and generally project managing the whole production.

So far it’s been a fascinating journey. The sheer volume of work to be done is quite daunting, but I’m realising that that’s exactly how it was with EssentialWriters.com to begin with, except that I was my own boss then and took things one day at a time rather than having a boss present the entire list of objectives to me on a sheaf of A4 pages.

Being part of a team is enjoyable though - I share a small, wonky-walled office in a historic building in one of the nicest areas of Bristol. Each morning I have a lovely walk in to work over bridges, past a turret-towered church and across a park, which wakes me gently and happily, and far more effectively than my walk from my bedroom to the living room ever did.

There’s as much coffee as I can drink, and just the right balance between silence and noise so those things are all fabulous. Plus I’m doing lots of travel-writing - my favourite kind of armchair travel! This week I’ve revisited Geneva, Spain, the Alentejo and Porto, if only in my mind. Bliss!

The structure of a normal 9am till 5.30 day is harder to handle though. I’m having to relearn how to sit and work for several consecutive hours instead of bobbing, working, wafting, working, meandering, working, from around 7am till 9pm as I’m accustomed to.

But I’ve only on experienced one week of my new working life. I’ll let you know how the job, and I, develop as the days go on.

My hubla is celebrating his birthday today. Not that it’s his actual birthday. Because why should the commemoration of such a momentous event last just a day? Medical professionals these days recommend that due dates for births are broadened into likely ‘birth weeks’ and I believe birthday celebrations should follow suit.

With our birthdays falling just a week apart, that would mean 14 days of revelry for my hubla and I, which suits me just fine.

But this year there’s more to my demands than sheer self-indulgence. My hubla has been on an NHS waiting list for over a year, desperately waiting to have a painful varicose vein treated (yes, he’s young for that, but a few years ago he had testicular cancer, and there turned out to be some unexpected side effects).

After hobbling around for several months, he thought about going private, but £1,500+ versus free is an easy equation to make, so he waited, and waited, and waited some more.

Then he got a phone call – a cancellation meant that he could be treated in the next few days! The downside? It was to be on his birthday…

On the one hand, a horrible way to spend your most important day; on the other the best birthday present in the world. So at 11am on his birthday he headed off to our local hospital, gowned up and settled down to wait, and wait and wait some more. He finally got treated under local anaesthetic at 5pm, having missed his birthday tea with our niece and nephew, in favour of spending six hours of his birthday in a hospital ward all alone because relatives weren’t allowed in (we take up too much space, apparently).

But now the waiting game is over, he has a pain-free future to look forward to and doctor’s orders to eat cake, drink beer and party. So the celebrations are back on. Hurrah!

Andrew Beierle

The longer I work as a freelance journalist, the more obscure the publications I discover. I’ve written about all manner of curious things, and have come to realise that the more niche the magazine’s subject, the more successful it’ll be in these cash-strapped times.

With limited spare money to throw at new, exotic possessions, traditional hobbies are hotter than ever, especially when they don’t cost more than the price of, say, a skein of yarn and a mag subscription.

However, I just come across the best yet. My daily Gorkana fix has alerted me to the rambunctious world of Only Doormats (www.onlydoormats.co.uk), which I initially mistook for a witty site about unhappy spouses, but turns out to be “a niche, destination site focusing exclusively on doormats: coir doormats, cast-iron door mats and contemporary, designer doormats…”

Fantastic. And I didn’t even know doormat fancying was a sport.

After the emptiness of January, I’ve suddenly been hit in the face with an influx of work, from days in-house on publications to feature commissions and requests from a clutch of artists and galleries to produce their press releases. I even had to turn down work for the first time, because I noticed my sanity slipping as I tried to meet an excess of deadlines!

It’s all good - money coming in, lots of interesting things to do, but I really think the biggest challenge of the freelance writer is surviving the extremes. Forget sub-zero temperatures and searing heat, the vacuum of an empty inbox (if you ignore the spam) in contrast to the one that’s bursting at the seams is more than most fragile journalist minds can handle.

Today it’s Saturday, which is completely irrelevant from my point of view, as I will be slogging on, coffee within in reach and TV remote firmly out of reach, in an effort to tick a few things off my growing list of priorities.

Funnily enough, this blog was top of the list, followed closely by reminders to update Twitter and Facebook. The key is to updte fast and get out before you discover you’ve been sucked into the social networking vortex and an hour or more has passed.

Once that’s achieved, however, I’ll have the satisfaction of scrawling a big fat tick, and feeling a sense of progress, however small.

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However much people tell me that it was invented by greetings card companies, however much I tell myself that it’s a shamelessly sentimental holiday, there’s a big part of me that just adores Valentine’s Day.

I come from a family that like to celebrate every possible occasion, from Christmas to Diwali to the Chinese New Year. As a child I was used to associating Valentine’s Day with receiving cards emblazoned with hearts and signed by mystery suitors with handwritng uncannily similar to my mum’s. It was a day when my parents would sparkle at each other and there would usually be something especially nice for tea.

These days, two years into my marriage, I’m glad to say that romance is still on the agenda, and it really doesn’t have to cost a lot. I’m lucky that my hubla ensures I always have flowers (currently gorgeous purple irises), but our Valentine’s tokens to each other were personal rather than expensive - my hubla graciously accepted wonky homemade card from me, just as he will accept a wonky homemade card for his birthday.

Not being blessed (or cursed) with an overflowing imagination like mine, he buys his cards, avoiding anything padded or sporting a printed poem.

Often we celebrate Valentine’s over a special meal eaten at home, but this evening we’re going out for dinner, partly because January was particularly grim this year and partly because the recession has led to some fab restaurant deals (hurrah for a positive-side to the credit crunch!). We feel in need of an excuse to get dressed up, eat some good food and smile at each other in a candle-lit setting.

Actually, that latter bit is the part I love best about this day. It’s not really about gifts and cards and flowers, its about being given a nudge to devote some time to the person you love, and a candle-lit setting isn’t a bad place to do it.

On the opening night of Barry Lewis’ Monsters exhibition 13 out of 40 pieces sold, which is pretty impressive. Sadly all the ones my hubla fell in love with went within moments, but I managed to get a red dot onto a rather lovely one of a pegasus, very similar to the horse of spoons, but with an elegant pair of fish-knife wings. I can’t wait till the end of Feb when I can take it home.

The exhibition gained loads of media attention, partly, I’d like to think, due to my press releases. I picked up a copy the Evening Post and found that one of the journalists had used paragraphs from my release word for word. Nice to know I’m making life so easy for them, but odd to see my words credited to someone else…

A selection of my words are also currently taking part in an art and poetry exhibition called Exploding Poetry. It’s being held at Bank Street Arts Centre, and is on the topic of women and warfare. I wrote short piece called Not War, Nor Peace, inspired by my time in Israel, and it got accepted! Love it when that happens – it almost makes all the rejections worthwhile.

Sabre tooth tiger by Barry Lewis

Last night’s preview of Barry Lewis’ Monsters exhibition was the most bubbling I’ve been to for a long while. I barely got to say hello to Barry as folks crowded round him, eager to meet the great creator of so many magical beasts. I’d seen countless photos of his work, but never come face to face with the animals until the event, and I was intrigued by how many I fell deeply in love with. No wonder red dots were springing up all over the room.

Sadly, Horse of Spoons, sold early on, as did my hubla’s favourite, Codzilla, a huge glimmering fishhead made of fish knives and other reclaimed materials.

There’s something about the combined elegance and unpretentiousness of the scultures that really appeals to all kinds of people, including those, like my hubla, who occasionally complain about not getting art. There’s a playfulness to the whole collection that’s hugely appealing, as people crowded round, identifying old coffee pots, forks, engine parts and gas canisters. It was like a version of Where’s Wally for grown ups.

The menagerie was populated by enough creatures to put Bristol Zoo to shame, with seagulls hovering overhead, gigantic scorpions, spiders and dragonflies, lobster, crabs and vast coppery fish, an alligator with a body woven from bike tyres, as well as more abstract works such as a heart made from spoons and a satellite dish - ideal for Valentine’s Day.

The one serious undercurrent running throughout is the message of reclaiming, restoring and recycling, the three R’s of our era. In taking other people’s rubbish and transforming it into art, Barry works magic on several levels. The animal-heads mounted on plaques  made from old table tops take this a step further, by poking fun at those who still believe hunting is a good, honourable hobby.

I’d rather have a sabre-tooth tiger made from cutlery on my wall than the head of a dehydrated, stuff dead animal any day, and the hordes of people at the Grant Bradley Gallery yesterday seemed to agree.

Horse of Spoons by Barry Lewis

The latest artist on my radar is Barry Lewis, a Welshman who trained as an engineer, worked as a carpenter, became an ice sculptor and finally put his passion for South Wales’ Rhondda Valley together with an eye for aesthetics to create his own, uniquely eco-friendly kind of art.

The result is an exhibition called Monster, which begins tomorrow at Bristol’s Grant Bradley Gallery. He describes his work as a means of letting “nature get its own back”, and meanders through the countryside, reclaiming parts of the rusting cars and bikes dumped in rivers and on mountainsides and transforming them into wonderfully peculiar beasties.

“Someone might chuck dump a bike on the hillside, then I’ll bring it home to pull apart and turn into a sculpture of some weird animal, making it into art and clearing up the countryside in the process. I use all kinds of things - some of my sculptures might include six types of metal, from a bit of stainless steel cutlery to an old petrol tank from a motorbike. A bit of metal might resemble a nose and the animal grows from there.”

The curious creatures range from immense scorpions to alligators – one of my favourites is a horse made entirely from junk-shop cutlery. There are also dragonflies with tea-strainers for eyes and a dragon made from an old car seat with fence-posts for teeth. The scale of some of them is immense – a true zoo of the bizarre.

Around forty of the recycled beasts are taking residence in the Grant Bradley Gallery for Barry’s Monsters exhibition. I can’t wait to see more of them for myself at the open preview tomorrow, and maybe even take a small one home, though my landlord might protest – there’s a no pets clause in our contract.

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Ah, Sunday. I do love Sundays. Even though my hubla is slogging away at work today, and I too have spent, oh, maybe an hour working this morning, there’s a gorgeous sense of relaxation hanging over me. Plus I have fun plans for later, which means I actually had a reason to get dressed before midday - hurrah!

It may seem slightly ridiculous (and possibly verging on disturbing) to celebrate having cause to change out of PJs on a Sunday, the one day when most people remain firmly glued to bed-wear, but as any freelance writer knows, when most of your week in spent inside with only a vase of white roses (aw, thanks, hubla!) for company, any activity involving leaving the house becomes a novelty.

Yesterday was very exciting because I had reason to leave the house not once, but twice, and not just to empty the recycling bin! The first time was to got to a lunchtime end-of-show party of my pet photographer’s art exhibition, and the second time was long after nightfall and involved cocktails and lengthy discussions about a friend’s torrid affair with a married man. So a good time was had by all (apart from, perhaps, the married man’s wife).

Today’s adventures involve meeting up with my entire immediate family sans hubla, and attending a local cheese fair. I’m not exactly sure what that entails, though I assume it will have more to do with sampling tiny cubes of locally reared cheeses than riding waltzers made from cheddar.

I’m slightly disappointed that it’s not a chocolate fair, rather than cheese, but, whatever, it’s a reason to go out, talking of which, I’d better go and surgically remove my slippers in order to don more outdoors-worthy footwear.

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As I get into the swing of the new year, I’m finding my week is naturally dividing itself into patterns, with two days devoted to creative writing, two days to the website and two days to sourcing and carrying out the freelance writing work that keeps a roof over my head.

Yes, that does add up to around six working days a week, but while I’m doing what I love, I really don’t care. Besides, some days that simply means logging on to check in on the forums (which are currently suspiciously quiet – where are you all?) and delete spam, while creative writing days can include long strolls and longer chats with like-minded people who inspire me.

This week has been particularly fruitful creatively, as I completed a short story yesterday, sent off an entry for a short story competition, submitted a short story to a literary magazine and sent off some query emails to agencies offering support to selective mutes, as the protagonist of one of my novels suffers from that particular social disorder.

Ooh, and then today I found out that a poem I entered for a creative writing competition run by Sense has been shortlisted, which is fab news!

The stipulation for the poem was that it had to be written from the point of view of someone who is both deaf and blind. It was an interesting challenge, but one that meant a lot for me as Diabetic Retinopathy is something that’s looming alarmingly on my horizon.

So I engaged all my other senses and wrote a poem about a deaf/blind person being taught about colours by their lover. I enjoyed the challenge, was pleased with the result, and am now tempted to go through some of my old short stories and see what happens if I remove one of the protagonists’ senses. It could alter the whole slant of the tale, which might utterly revitalise some of them.

So 2010 is looking (and sounding) good already. Now all I need to do is maintain the momentum…