02 February 2005

Last minute

Very few Christmas cards arrived this year. At first I thought that was because everyone had gone electronic, but none of those loathsome e-cards arrived either. The Christmas card used to be the annual confirmation that a friendship still existed, but now we have email, and can drop odd notes whenever we feel like it, it has lost that status, and for all but a few of us (I sent more than 30 cards), inconvenience and cost have led to backsliding.

I only mention this because today I received a birthday card, a few days late, from the Mandarin Oriental Macau. I stayed there when I was writing a Macau piece in spring last year. Now I think about it, half of the Christmas cards I did receive were from tourism bureaux, publications I write for, travel companies, or hotels.

I also received a cheque for work done months ago, and despite telling editors who have work in progress several times that I would be away for three weeks on Sunday, received a note saying that a piece needed cutting but that the editor just supposed he'd have to do it himself, and another asking for a batch of pieces cut down from longer stories, but again accepting that the cutting would have to be done at the other end. Both of these issues have been under discussion for weeks. Two of the stories were a little sensitive, so I've done the cutting myself this evening. And then a batch of photocaptions were needed for the William Adams story, along with approval of a final set of edits. It looks fine now, and it's nice to be consulted. Many a publication just rewrites without ever mentioning it.

There's bound to be a mad scramble of other little problems before Sunday morning. So it's just as well that I'm ready to go, except for packing, which I'll do on Saturday.
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