I hate the feeling I know other Africa "bosses" in other big outfits share: that since the continent's a low priority in the minds of those who do the budgets for today's media, we can wind up regarding the people we have there as pieces on a board, to be shifted around to "optimise resources".
They aren't.
Such a system only increases a tendency to judge them as "strong" or "weak" links in a network, thus ignoring a chunk of their qualities as people, not just job-doers. Within limits, such judgements are fine and necessary; beyond them, they're insulting, offensive and fuck up lives.
If I get into trouble for digging deeper into this, I don't care. The point I'm making runs deeper than internal Factory politics; it's an attitude and understanding problem applicable both to the media and our "public" worldwide.
I couldn't give a damn when people tell me "Africa's unprofitable" or that its "time has yet to come". So what? So most of the world, especially in Asia, doesn't give a shit? So what? I do. So do a lot of the people who work their guts out reporting on a continent undergoing slow but vast changes. On a daily basis, it may be ephemeral; in the long term, Africans are writing the history books like everyone else. If we don't tell it when it happens, nobody will.
What I'll leave out are details of the plot I've hatched during the weeks Lauren's absence and other "problems" were compounded by the obsession with the Vatican and the need to have people there. By mid-April, I realised "things can't go on like this".
That is internal Factory politics where I'm used to the tightrope of appearing to tell my own bosses what to do when it's just MGs for the sharing.
I hope the outcome will make sense to everybody.
My New Year's 'Diktats' got a "please disregard...", their writer got a reprimand and one of them jusy got enforced by others regarding a so-called "urgent" story about Togo that was mostly crap and propaganda. If my hierarchical superiors chose to make those diktats known more widely than I did myself, that's scarcely my problem.
Even the reprimand was couched in ... well, terms worth framing on the wall if I was that kind of guy.
At such times, that "sixth sense" I've owned up I've got comes into play along with the common sense and stuff I know since I must.
When I enjoy dinner with the Kid's mum tomorrow night, she'll get none of the anticipated odd questions about it; other people who see I'm stuck with it and sometimes have similar gifts have answered them.
One of the most lucid said: "Nick, it's like you've sometimes 'seen' how untold things are for others and already done their thinking for them. You can be like a walking 'I Ching'!"
She made me laugh, but J.'s observation remains a rose with a thorn, since I feel what I 'see' is states and probabilities. I assess them without letting standard moral judgements get in the way, and make suggestions.
At what point does doing that count as interference in people's lives? This is a big dilemma and varies from one person to another, since while I prefer only to dish out suggestions when asked, I think it's wrong to leave people in the dark either when you can see things they can't and it's "for real".
They don't have to listen, after all.
I just leave it there for now.
Catherine will in any case probably be far more interested in finding out about iTunes now she's realised sticking bits of iPod in your ears is quite different from listening to music outside your head and can be wonderful. She compares it to making a journey and she's right, but as I found again today, it's the kind of trip that opens the way -- if that's what you want -- for easy interaction with strangers on a train.
She also says she can't understand half of what I write here.
This came as less good news. While I'm intolerably long-winded, I try to be clear and was thus plunged into an existentialist crisis: one of the kind where I'm seized with an urge to sub everything bunged in the log as cruelly as I do other people's Factory stories.
With such a comment on the back of that mail informing me how brilliantly I write about "nothing", I do begin to need reassurance!
Catherine made it easier, however, when she told me she can't understand a widely read French arts and literature site. Since she's smart and interested in both, another lesson of last year's life-changes for me sunk in: people's brains sometimes work so differently that what she finds incomprehensible is no sillier or more stupid of her than my inability to do mathematics. I've become so hopeless that it takes me ages to get my head round the sums and algebra scientists use in books I read, though I usually manage with a huge effort because if I skip it, I don't know whether they're bullshitting me.
Some of their ideas are so indispensable to the LP, though they won't be in the film since it's about people's stories, not a lesson, that if I've misunderstood the science, what I'm writing about the Quiet Revolution in human relationships will be no more than hot air.
It certainly feels right and has raised enough interest, but now everybody's telling me it's more than reassurance I need at this point: it's a backer. Yes. Somebody willing to risk their money where my mouth is. That's an inescapable reality, since soon I'll need to see people face to face when I can't possibly afford it.
Lord, how people need each other sometimes! It's bad news but that's how it is, even for self-sufficient ones like me, never bored when I'm doing what I enjoy and always at a loss for enough time to do everything. Far from scaring me like it does people who make their careers their lives, the prospect of retirement one day fills me with so much delight I can occasionally scarcely wait or want to go out and buy a lottery ticket.
People like Lauren may be "just friends", but I've missed her so much and do several others when they disappear. She's an air freshener who swears and sweats in Senegal, a swim away from a onetime black heart of a different "slave trade".
Some would call my missing her dependency. They're wrong.
Nothing changes the climate on the English news desk at the Factory as much as much as presences and absences. The interactions and the chemistry, like anywhere else, are extraordinary. The daily mix of people, always varied, is far more important than the workload.
Maybe that's why I'm such a damned nuisance when people are too hard at it for my liking and behave badly or cause a disturbance which gets me told to shut up. I don't know what it's like for them when I'm not around helpfully pointing out that if we take anything too seriously, however horrible, we'll end up dead faster.
I bet this place is less boring when Lauren's around since just knowing she's at the other end of a line in Dakar for an occasional exchange of topsy-turvy views and jokes brightens me up no end. I miss Tony a lot too, but the bastard's gone for good, so I hope he's enjoying it.
Successive desk chiefs have been told they should get software to do the fucking rotas with since all of them hate it and many go half-bonkers or turn sour by the end of their term. I should know, I've seen enough of them. David, for a change, took some home to try out. He hasn't yet because he had better things to do, but I don't doubt he will.
However, while the software steadily gets better at making allowances for the unscheduled absences that are a part of our job, one which depends on what happens where and when, as well as handling personal needs and preferences, nobody in the world can write a programme to factor in the fun.
Thank heavens for that.
Some of the posts here that get the most feedback have been book reviews along with the intimate stuff. Regulars will have noticed that 'River of Gods' has been at the top of the front page's reading list for a long time. That's because it's a superb novel, which I'm chewing on slowly. McDonald knows India very well. Without calling it a thriller, I'm about halfway through and have no idea what's going to happen next.
Much of it's set in what India could certainly be in 2047, which is no longer one country. Some takes place in space, where the Americans have found something. Most of it's about real people, but the future of artificial intelligence is a key part of the plot. Like me, McDonald's into probability theory.
I don't see the future like he does, since I reckon the Quiet Revolution's for real and chances are the world will turn out differently in 2047. But what he does with his science, again without ramming it down anyone's throat but putting India at the forefront of the technological revolution, is as fascinating as the way he starts with 10 quite different people and gradually creates the mix.
McDonald's too good just to read. If he'll have it, like some of the other creative people logged here down the years, he's unfortunately taken me to places where I want to kick ideas around with him.
That's part of the QR.
We can do that these days, like never before; the barriers are now often where we choose to put them, no longer enforced on us by a physical inability to connect. Now I'm mildly annoyed: I can't remember which VoW has a great song about this, but the iTunes "history" of recent listening will remind me who sung that when people dismissively tell you "It's all in your head," they're not only right, but a lot of the time that's exactly how it should be.
Things go wrong when you're simply out of your mind.
There are a lot of fun people around, so I can only suspect what makes Lauren special to me but in no rush to meet her, let alone have any more with her than we've got, is just technology put to the service of human chemistry.
The Factory sometimes strikes me as a place at the mercy of technology, where we can't be "competitive" unless we do what everybody else and make news where there is none. If we don't, it's on telly, and we're not part of it, we're in trouble. But so long as journalists go on kidding themselves they're "objective" in a world where what we write about events can have such an immediate on them we become part of them, then everybody gets screwed.
Some of us have to yell: "Pack it in. Stop. It's not news, it's a circus and we're part of the act." I've so far just skimmed 'We the Media' (Safari Bookshelf)', also front-page reading, but what I've digested warns it's high time to see the game for what it is.
Technology has changed the rules.
Allow it to change us without understand what's happening and we're stuck in '2001'. To see Kubrick's insights of 1968 as anything less than a serious warning about what can happen when you toss a bone into the air and it turns into a spaceship is a big mistake.
He saw where humanity was going, the 20th century point where technology and evolution interact so much that unless we get with it fast, we'll become slaves to machines and no longer the other way round.
Unlike Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke in that fiction, I don't count on benign extraterrestrial seed sowers to change our minds for us. We've got to do it ourselves.
That's heavy shit, isn't it? If you want it to be...
While people who read this log have proved to have increasingly varied interests and reasons the more I've disclosed my own, I'm less and less interested in writing about me. As in life, almost nobody comes here for that, unless they like fertiliser.
What '2001' didn't foresee, except by becoming part of its history, was the QR.
(To be continued... of course. Somehow, some when.)
12:42:48 AM 
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