I am standing in my agent’s office.
“I’ve just had a request to do a guest edito- rial in a UCL magazine”, I tell my agent. “But I’ve no idea what to write.”
“Well I can tell you one thing: don’t insult their intelligence by filling your piece with line after line of reported speech just to fill up your word count”, says Phil.
Phil is my agent. His full name is Phil Harry Marston, but I call him Phil because I know him- he’s my agent. I tell Phil that UCL stu- dents are a more discerning lot than your av- erage ShortList reader so I will have to write something of substance; something to make these young, enquiring minds think.
“You”, begins Phil, “are”, he continues, “a” he goes on to say, “master” he says, “of spinning tenuous ideas out over three hundred”, Phil muses, “words” he concludes.
“That’s true”, I confess, “but what about the weighty subject matter?”
“Weighty-schmeighty” replies Phil, usefully using two more words. “You can write any load of old rubbish so long as you mention the cuts, Michael Gove, Aung San Suu Kyi, cheap beer, cheap housing, beans on toast, pictures of cats on the internet and Noam Chomsky.”
“Great!” I say, feverishly scribbling in my Moleskine. As I scribble I mutter the words out loud: “cuts...Gove...Thailand lady...beer... beans...Noel Chomley”. Phil finds this particu- lar habit of mine annoying.
“I find that particular habit of yours annoy- ing”, he says.
“Something else I’ve heard about is things being ‘meta’. Do you think that’s got legs?” I ask.
“Meta is huge with students!” he says, “But what does it mean exactly?”
“I think it’s something to do with pausing live TV or Twitter,” I venture. Like if you watch TV normally that’s normal, but if you watch it later, that’s meta and if you watch something and tweet about it, that’s meta as well.
“You’re probably right,” says Phil. “Now we’ve established that do you think you have enough ammunition to write the column?”
“Totes!” I grin. Then I do a quick word count and realise I’m already at 350! Some- times this crap writes itself! (Invoice enclosed – DW)