The other day my editor told me to do a rewrite of a book review that I wrote. She said she had read through the review and thought that it was a bit too young for the target audience and moreover that I didn’t take my job seriously. I was completely taken aback, I do completely take my job seriously I mean, I even bought a pair of skinny jeans that I heard were the in thing for people who are in the arts these days to wear. Given I do not see myself wearing them in the conceivable future even if my house burns down and they are the only pair of pants left but the fact that I bought them must, at the very least, count for something.
You see, I take pride in my job, it is the only job in the world that allows, if not encourages me, to be a lazy bum and sit on my arse all day imagining things and everyone knows that I enjoy imagining things. So it seems simple enough to understand why the rewrite had me completely bonkers. Not to mention the words in her “comments” on my review vastly outnumbered the number of words in the review itself. In my anger I went and did the most rational thing I could think of. I went to watch a football match in bar. Now before you get all judgmental on me or begin to ask what that has to do with anything this side of Pluto, hear me out. I don’t think the sport of football has any point. The goalkeeper will pass the ball to a player who will proceed to pass the ball out wide and run down the flanks after which they will bring it back in towards the centre and try to score. If they are successful they restart from the centre of the pitch. If not, the other team has a goal kick and does the exact same thing, only in the opposite direction.
Why then did I go to watch a game of football if I find them completely redundant? Well it’s simple. Football games, particularly the ones watched on wide screen televisions in bars
She does look a bit like my editor
with beer, are the perfect location to throw around as many profanities at whatever time you feel like it. No one will question you for your sudden outbursts. Try it, just go into a sports bar at the height of a United v Arsenal game and shout “intercourse!” or its more commonly used equivalent and wait for a reaction. You shall get none. Do the same thing in the middle of Kenyatta Avenue at the peak point of the after work rush and everyone shall turn and look at you as if you have fallen from the sky and have green goo dripping from your sides.
So it made perfect sense in my head for me to go to a sports bar, to my disappointment though there was no football and all that was playing in my sports bar of choice was a game of the only sport of the world that goes on for so long that the fans go to sleep and come back before the game ends, cricket. Cricket is such a silent game that if you yell profanities you may interrupt the concentration of the guy wherever he is so I decided to take a pass. No, not a football pass but pass by the bar and just beeline for my house and do something that is completely unheard of. Actually do the rewrite. Getting my stubborn old laptop out I re-read the review I had written and I figured something out. My editor actually was right. The review was sketchy, vague and generally not seriously written. The voice was that of a man who isn’t taking his work seriously. So maybe I owe my editor an apology for making her read that bucket load of crap. Or maybe I owe her two because she might have to read this one as well.
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