Hello!
Hi! Happy post-election day to you! I assume! I am obviously not writing this on Friday! I am, as you are receiving this, almost certainly still half-asleep, very hungover or, realistically, both at the same time!
In fairness, I do always write this newsletter a day early, though the problem here is that “Thursday 2pm” and “Friday 11am” do (will?) just feel like entirely different worlds this week. I am, as a result, going to shove a Tumblr post in there, in lieu of a segue, and we can all pretend that we’ve gone back in time slightly. Here we go.
I didn’t know what to write about today because it is Thursday and it was stupid of me to assume that I would want to write about anything but the election, which was a problem as I’m just not sure what I could have written about that.
Well, I probably could have come up with a bunch of ideas, but few of them would lead me to still have a career in political journalism. A number of them would also involve little more than having one finger on the letter “a”, one finger on the letter “h”, and about half an hour spent typing.
Instead of boring you with the words of an obviously distracted person, I decided to repurpose an old piece I once wrote for a culture magazine which was about to launch and, crucially, never launched. That’s part of the fun of being a freelance journalist: sometimes people come to you and ask you to write for their shiny new thing, and then the shiny new thing never goes anywhere, and you never hear from the person again.
As a side note, I have just googled the man who commissioned this piece and it turns out that he used to work in New Zealand politics and once made the headlines for saying that incest should be legal between adults. Journalism! It’s a rich tapestry. Still, I vaguely remember him offering me 50p/word, so it’s a shame that his idea never took off. I could have put the weird views on incest aside for that amount of money.
Anyway! I was actually pleased with the column I wrote for him and annoyed that it never got to be read by anyone, so I’m giving it to you now. I’ve even improved it a bit. Don’t say I never do anything for you.
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