Freelancing means walking from the West Village
to the Upper East Side and back because
you don’t have enough money for the subway.
Freelancing means being so poor and so hungry
for so long that you “eat” a bowl of soup
that’s just hot water, crushed-up multivitamins
and half your spice rack (mostly garlic salt).
Freelancing is being woken up on a Monday
at eight a.m. by an editor who
gives you the following assignment: “Put
together everything interesting about
all the city’s airports by Friday,”
doing it, and then not getting credit
when it runs … as an infographic.
Freelancing is having your mother send
you a book called $ix-Figure Freelancing
which lists as helpful resources, on page
one nine eight, the dictionary, thesaurus,
and sree.net. Freelancing means your editor
will reject your pitch and then, seven months later,
run the story you pitched—with the same language
as your pitch—and then have it submitted
for a National Magazine Award.
Freelancing is having an editor tell you
that he really loves the story you’ve filed
and wouldn’t change anything, and in fact
suggests you expand upon the characters
a bit—and also cut the story in half.
Freelancing means having to chase down checks
every time, even when that means waiting
two years for one thousand dollars. It means
having stories killed and being told that the
editor-in-chief gave no reason, but
that the same editor would love to work
with you some more.

From Seven Years as a Freelance Writer, or, How to Make Vitamin Soup, The Awl, 2 August 2010.

Things millennials hate: old stuff,
mayonnaise, reading a book,
bluegrass music, movies that are
mostly talking, being sober
at school, people who have never
been on TV, having opinions,
losers, math, having an emotion,
animals, not being on Facebook,
virgins, when your mom makes you talk
about your day at the dinner table,
murders.

Things millennials love:
texting, sexting, Twilight.

From Young people neither love nor hate anything, Gawker, 6 August 2010.

I am not sure why this summer seems so vivid,
with each day somehow more beautiful than the last.
I only know that is the way it feels. The days
are moving as if each hour is two, and every
detail – a salad, a bunch of sweet peas or box
of tiny broad beans – is somehow more rich than it
would normally be. It is as if the colours,
sounds and scents of summer have been turned up a notch.

Tiny broad beans so tender you could eat them pod
and all; sweet little peas (they love a drop of good
steady rain) and lettuces that have benefited
from the cooler mornings and evenings. I made a
bean sauce this week with a base of crisp purple
and white spring onions, broad beans and tarragon. I
gave it a backbone of cubed unsmoked bacon and
bound it with a little cream. I skinned the larger beans
but left the real babies in their paper-thin skins.

The early peaches are at last arriving from
France and Italy. I wait all spring for these fruits
with their rose-scented juice. It is rare to find them
perfectly ripe in the shops, so I make sure I
buy them a couple of days before I need them.
The old trick of putting them in a paper bag
with a ripe banana to speed up their ripening
works well, but they do very nicely just left out
for a day or two. But there is no need to squeeze
and prod. An unripe peach has virtually no smell;
a ripe one will tell you it is ready to eat.

From Nigel Slater’s recipe column, 4 July 2010.

Ten years ago. Stock takers; thieves in Hexham
resorted to extreme measures to avoid
punishment, by stealing a set of stocks
and a pillory from outside the Old Gaol.

Fifty years ago. Head case; A thief stole the
shrunken head of a South American Indian
from a wall of the Fox and Hounds in Whitley
Chapel, where Fred Gazzani was landlord.

Seventy-five years ago. In the dark;
Defying the wishes of the parish
and county councils, a packed meeting
voted against a scheme to install
electric lighting in Allendale.

One hundred and twenty-five years ago.
Carte blanche; Hexham labourer George Wilson
was fined five shillings for not having a name
on a cart he was using on the highway.

From the ‘Looking Back’ column in the Hexham Courant, Friday 29 May 2009.