24 January 2005
Death by deadline
I've completed a long feature for an in-flight on visiting castles in the Ardennes region of Belgium. That was a very enjoyable trip indeed. The castles are rich in both furnishings and history, it's possible to spend the night in some of them, and both the places I stayed also housed restaurants in the top ten of the main Belgian restaurant guide. For reasons too long to go into here I had my little boy with me, and part of the trip was undertaken with someone I've known since I was four. My little boy behaved very well. Already a veteran of castles in Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and England, he happily ran around and was occasionally whisked off by staff members while I was given a private tour. But travelling with friends always makes the work more, not less difficult. There's less time to think, and a certain reticence in dictating notes when other ears are listening. Bu the trapping of first reactions and the recording of thoughts as they are still fresh is the key to producing lively writing, in my opinion. And then, given that my friend (who brought his girlfriend, too), lives in a slightly more grand manner than I do, meant that each evening started off with a coupe de champagne followed by a more than decent wine, after the boy was asleep. None of this contributed much to the compilation of notes.
The ideal, of course, would have been to have written the story straight after returning, but no one does that. They wait for the deadline. There are always more pressing problems: other deadlines, administration, pitching other stories; just keeping the whole mechanism going. These last few days, for instance, I've been mailing off copies of recently published articles to those supporting bodies too impoverished or mean to employ cutting agencies; dealing with calls from the Taiwanese, and email from the Baltics and Australia about arranging the next trips to each of these. Then there've been further Antarctic preparations. I've also written two other stories, a long feature on visiting points in Japan connected with William Adams, and a quite different and shorter version of the same for a Canadian syndicate. Then there have been several re-writes of the latter to deal with.
So writing the Belgian story, six months after the trip, has been a bit of a slog. But it's done, and I've heard no more about it (which probably means it simply hasn't been read, since in the manner of many a magazine, the deadline set was probably a month earlier than needed). When it is, we'll have the usual sharp exchanges on vocabulary. Someone there decides what English words Japanese readers won't know. The real answer, of course, is that the Japanese readers will read the Japanese part of the magazine because the won't know 90% of the words. But the answer used is that if the Japanese in the publishing company's office don't know the words, then they must be changed. Usually I try to anticipate the requests, and I supply a list of alternatives. This time I just ran out of steam. And an orangery is an orangery. There's nothing else to call it.
Speaking of words (and I'm going to finish this another time because I have a raging sore throat and I need my bed), some idiot at one paper I write for regularly decided that the phrase 'eating croque-monsieur' (used in a story about Reykjavik, would you believe) wasn't like 'eating fish', or 'eating stew', but required a plural form. His choice was 'croque monsiurs'. In the next five or six articles I wrote for that paper I managed to find a way to include a mention of croque-monsieur. Whether he ever picked up on this I don't know. 'Oh, he knows about French matters,' someone cheerfully observed. Harraps doesn't think so.
I also once had a long argument about whether eau-de-nil could be included in a story (I was mentioning in passing the latest talking fax machines on sale in Tokyo's Akihabara) and for a while I was quite fond of using that, too.
One must amuse oneself somehow.
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