What's in a blog?

Ok, so, recently my retired school teacher chum Mr Coleman posed a question for me, asking what blogging really is. (Ooh, he won't like that, I've ended a sentence with a preposition. And every teacher knows that prepositions are words that you're not supposed to end sentences with. Unless, of course, they're games teachers, in which case, if my school was anything to go by, they're dictatorial perverts in cheap tracksuits who prefer chatting to sixth form boys in the shower to teaching kids about grammar.

In fact, where i went to school there was this one kid, really cool kid actually, just not very good at sports. But really bright and the girls all loved him. Anyway, he passed out during cross country - which is a stupid idea of a 'game' anyway - and Mr 'Wilkins' the teacher gave him mouth to mouth to resuscitate him. When the cool kid came round, Mr 'Wilkins' banged his head on the ground to knock him out again and carried on giving him mouth to mouth. Poor kid was too scared to tell anyone about it.

This sort of stuff shouldn't be allowed to happen, don't you think? People who work in schools should be subject to some sort of checks to see if they're the kind of people that will bang a kid's head on the ground and then kiss him for ages. I suppose the powers that be would say that no system's perfect and that one or two rotten apples will always slip through the cracks. But that's not good enough. At my school there were three teachers who married pupils (obviously the pupils had left by the time the marriage happened) which means that some kind of relationship was happening when the kids were at school.

Not that i would have minded if Miss Holly, one of our English teachers, had been up for trying it on with me. She was bloody gorgeous.

Anyway, that's no help to the poor lonely kid wandering the playing fields alone at lunchtime, unable to understand why the other kids all laugh and point. Kids can be so cruel, but so can adults. And we, as a society, need to look at these things and see how we can deal with them and stamp them out. NOT that I'm a fan of mob rule and setting fire to paediatricians and all that stuff. Those crazy people that did that ought to understand that paediatricians actually help children, not hurt them.

Bit of a touchy subject, all this, I know. But we can't pretend it doesn't go on. It just makes me so angry that there's nobody looking out for kids like the cool kid I was telling you about earlier. Anyway, I hear he turned out really very well, despite what happened to him.)

Right, back to Mr Coleman's essay question. Actually, you know what? I'm not in the right frame of mind to be doing that now. I'll do it later.

I am FUMING!

Yesterday I was out doing more research – on the bus, this time. I’ve really got the bit between my teeth with this religion/public transport debate. Anyway, Gill had the day off to go to the doctors (women's problems) so I asked her if she could stay round at my flat. I'd ordered Sky with some of my redundancy package and I needed someone to be there to let the engineers in.

Anyway, things didn’t go so well on the research front. I got thrown off three buses. Twice on the 333 and once on the 419. The 333 goes to Elephant and Castle so I shouldn’t be surprised that the drivers are more aggressive.

I was feeling deflated when I got home. Gill was on the sofa watching Sky. I ran to the box to have a look. I asked her if the installation had gone ok.

“Yeah, it was fine. But one of the engineers was a bit weird,” she said.
“Weird how?” I said.
“Dunno, just a bit sleazy, I suppose.”

I got a funny feeling in my stomach when she said this but I knew from my sales training that the best way to get people to talk is to start with open questions, rather than jumping straight in asking if he’d tried to feel her up.

After an hour’s discussion, she confessed to me that he’d said she had a pretty smile and that he liked her dress.

Sexual Harassment!!!

I couldn’t believe it. Here’s a company like Sky, with a reputation, sending perverts into people’s homes to make suggestive remarks about their girlfriends. Or, even worse, if you look at it from Gill’s point of view, about people themselves!

Poor Gill. She seemed to be in some kind of denial; pretending that it was nothing important.

Half of me was consumed with the protective urge. I wanted to find out who this man was and dish out some punishment. I’m actually a black belt in Judo. It’s one of the purest forms of martial art, although some of the other ones get all the attention these days.

Anyway, the other half of me was thinking: News!!!

What a story? I could just see it all over the front pages of the tabs. Sky would be in disgrace. They’d have to sack the engineer and the head of customer visits or whatever. I might even get a free subscription. Murdoch might have to issue an apology!!

Then I realised a problem. Murdoch owns quite a few newspapers and I don’t want to get myself in trouble with the boss at such an early stage in my career. On the other hand, it’s my duty as a journalist to expose this kind of corporate misbehaviour. What a quandry.

I figured I would write this story under a pseudonym and submit it only to non-Murdoch papers. Then, when it became a huge snowball, I could reveal myself as the investigative reporter par excellence. What an opportunity. And how rewarding to realise that my news sense was already developing so keenly.

I was straight on the phone to Sky.

Unfortunately, I was in a queue for 40 minutes before I took a break to think about the best way to take down such a powerful corporate monster. I went for a walk around the block. One of my neighbours was putting signs on lamp posts beause her dog had gone missing. But I didn’t have time to think about that. It was me against the most powerful media conglomerate in the world.

Journalism is so rewarding! I feel like I’ve completely reinvented myself.