Casting Off
Authors: Emma Bamford
2
We will have a fishy, on our little dishy
6
What’s the worst that could happen?
8
The (pygmy) elephant in the room
11
My new family – and other animals
13
What a difference a day makes
15
Close encounters of the turd kind
16
Epiphany on the slow train from Stansted
18
The curious incident of the dogs in the night time
22
A passage through the Indian Ocean
25
The first rule of customer service
27
He made me an offer I couldn’t refuse
29
Hell hath no fury like a fasting Muslim scorned
30
Put your back into it (or not, as it turns out)
I
t was the day before the
Independent
was being re-launched with a new design and mid-negotiation over selling the paper to a former
Russian spy that I handed in my notice. Not the most considerate of timing to quit my job on the newspaper, but it had to be done. I crouched by my boss’s desk and spoke in a low tone, so
that no one could overhear me. Reporters are a nosy bunch. Keeping a secret in Fleet Street is like trying to prevent a five-year-old from creeping downstairs to open their Christmas presents
early. Delicate manoeuvring is needed and despite your best efforts it is likely to result in some tantrums and a big mess.
‘I need to talk to you about something,’ I murmured into the ear of Ollie, the news editor.
‘Sure, what is it?’ he replied, neither his eyes leaving his screen nor his fingers stopping their tapping on the keys. I say tapping but he’s rather heavy of hand, so it was
more like stamping.
‘I’m going to quit tomorrow.’ That got his attention; he hadn’t seen it coming. He stopped and turned to me. ‘Why?’
‘
I can’t hack it any more
,’ he might have understood. ‘
I’ve got a better offer from the
Guardian/Mail/Telegraph,’ he possibly expected.
Hell, even ‘
I’ve had enough of this excitement and I’ve decided to retrain as an accountant
,’ he could have considered reasonable. But there’s no doubt that
the answer I gave him would never have crossed his mind in a million years of a month of Sundays and then some.
‘Because I’ve answered an ad on the internet from a man who wants a woman to come and live on a boat with him and his cat. In Borneo. So I’m off.’
Since I was 16 I’d wanted be a journalist on a national newspaper. I know this because when my parents moved house and dumped a load of my old things on me, I found my UCAS application
form in a box of old school files and in my personal statement I had written ‘I want to be a journalist’. Pretty clear. At university I forgot this for a bit but somehow ended up
falling into journalism anyway. Fate, some might say. Others might sagely label it sobering up.
I had been at the
Independent
for two years, working as a news editor, shaping the news content of the next day’s edition and galvanising the reporters into action. I was
contracted to work 40 hours a week; I put in 55 to 60. I wasn’t highly paid but I was highly stressed. In a world where people can – and prefer – to get their news for free,
updated 24/7, the British newspaper industry felt like it was struggling to take its last breaths, being suffocated by a combined mess of falling readership numbers and declining ad revenue.
Budgets were non-existent and reporters were overstretched, writing for all sections of the newspaper at the same time. There was no money for freelances or for commissioning work from outsiders
yet not enough in-house staff to carry the workload. Demand from on high for world-class exclusives was incessant and it often felt like the senior executives wouldn’t listen to reason. On
more than one occasion I’d had to lock myself in the ladies to cry.
Of course it could be a thrilling place to work, when a big story broke or we had a breakthrough in a case we’d been campaigning for. The adrenaline rush that carried me through a day like
that was immense and sometimes if I met friends for a drink after work I’d be practically incapable of coherent speech for the first 20 minutes or so, until I’d had a chance to come
down off my jittery high.
But newspapers can also be a nasty environment, mainly for one reason – egotism. Fleet Street must have some of the biggest, baddest egos around. I’ve worked with an editor who
literally screamed at people in front of colleagues and had a bully’s instinct for preying on those least likely to fight back. A political columnist said that he was glad news reporters were
being made redundant because he’d get more space in the paper. Another columnist demanded the quotes-of-the-day section be removed from its habitual spot so he could write a bit more. Gossip
about newsroom punch-ups was not rare. I even heard tales of an editor stepping over a news editor who lay on the floor suffering a heart attack, just so he could get a conference started on
time.
Good riddance to all those egos
, I thought when I quit. (In the interest of fairness, I should add here that they weren’t all total gits all of the time. One journalist offered to
ask the managing editor if I could have the six months’ worth of days off in lieu
he
had accrued so I could go off on my travels and still have a job to come back to half a year
later. Another helped me research ideas for books to write about my trip and a deputy editor, who had twice got me to do his daughter’s homework for her, tried to impress me by hoiking both
feet on to the desk, splaying his hands on the floor and pumping out elevated press-ups in the middle of the newsroom. Past the bloom of youth he might have been, but he still managed two.)
What I hadn’t expressed in that UCAS personal statement back in 1995 was that my 17-year-old self fully expected that, by the ancient age of 31, as well as being a successful journalist I
would be married, live in my own detached house with a garden and have at least a couple of kids under my belt. It wasn’t an aim, it didn’t need to be worked and strived for, unlike
getting into the right university and working at a career. It would just happen, naturally. My thirties were sooo far away and there was plenty of time for all of that. It was so far in the future
that I’d possibly – the horror! – be wearing high heels instead of Doc Martens by then and carrying a handbag.
By 31 the Docs were long gone, the art of walking in high heels was perfected (well, improved) and there was a lot of stuff shoved into the recesses of that handbag. Yet there was no house, no
husband and no children. There was a mortgaged-to-the-hilt-and-then-some ex-council flat, a few ex-boyfriends and some dates, the last one of whom tried to charm me by pointing out my knobbly
knees.
Like many a single girl who went before me, there were moments, both privately and publicly (the public ones being mainly brought on by an excess of gin), in which I bemoaned my lack of a good
husband and angelic children. OK, if I’m being honest, sometimes it really got to me. All my friends seemed to be getting hitched and popping out kids left, right and centre. Some even had
the temerity to be on their second marriage by the age of 30 when I was struggling to get a fourth date. I desperately wanted to be married, like everyone else I knew. My (lack of a) love life was
a standing joke at work. ‘Get back on your shelf, Bammers,’ was one of the set remarks whenever I filled in my colleagues on the latest round of dumping and being dumped. I still
considered myself a hopeful romantic, though, and thankfully I didn’t fall into that self-destructive trap of wondering what was wrong with me. Mainly I put it down to a run of bad luck.
A lot of the time I wasn’t sure if my remorse was because I was single or because everyone else wasn’t. It always mildly shocked me when I went to visit friends from university,
friends whose hair I had held back from their faces when they were throwing up after one too many pints, and I now found myself at their homes, sitting in their gardens and playing with their
children while their husbands fixed me a drink. It was all so grown-up. I felt left behind and left out.
‘I’ve got some news for you,’ said my old friend Katie when we were drinking tea at Jane’s. Jane, naturally, lived in a house (although not a detached one) and had both a
husband and a daughter. ‘One of your friends is pregnant.’
‘Not another one,’ I said, rolling my eyes. ‘Who?’ She laughed. ‘Me.’
I’m not a total bitch and obviously I congratulated her and her husband Dave on their news but my joy was a little bit tinged with sadness through this ‘great, there’s another
one moving on’ mentality that I’d developed.
But Katie wasn’t having any of this ‘woe is me’ attitude, once she’d gotten out of me what was wrong and why my smile looked forced. ‘Are you crazy?’ she
said. ‘Look at you. You can do anything you want to, go anywhere you want, be anyone you want. Me and Jane, we’re stuck here now. This is it for us for years and years.’ She
looked at Jane, who nodded. ‘Do it now while you still can.’
Well. It was a bit of a light-bulb moment and I felt a rush of exhilaration. Honestly, I’d never thought of it that way before. What an idiot I’d been. Katie was completely right. I
wasn’t enjoying my job any longer, I had some savings in the bank, a flat I could rent out and no ties. Also, having dated half of the single men in my part of south-west London already,
perhaps I might be able to make a more meaningful relationship work with someone from further afield. There was absolutely nothing to stop me going somewhere I wanted to go, doing something I
wanted to do and being someone I wanted to be. The only problem was that I hadn’t the foggiest where, what or who that was.
That evening when I got back to my flat I couldn’t get the idea out of my mind. The one thought that kept popping into my head was to go sailing. As I had been falling out of love with
journalism, blinkering myself so that I could only see the negative aspects of my job, I was falling in love with sailing. What had started out as a hobby for the odd week in the summer holidays
had been inching towards an obsession. I’d signed up for courses; I’d read Ellen MacArthur’s memoirs on the tube on the way to work, and Peter Nichols’ tale of the first
non-stop solo circumnavigation race back in the 1960s, won by Robin Knox-Johnston.
Ironically it was journalism that pushed me away from journalism and towards the sea. At the
Independent
I was approached by the marketing team behind the Clipper Round the World Yacht
Race, a race with only amateur crew on board the ten yachts. Would I like a place on board in exchange for writing a blog about it on the Indy’s website, Clipper asked. A thousand times yes!
The catch? I had to do three weeks’ training in the Solent and the North Sea, just as any paying crew member would. I used all my annual leave preparing for the race. More than 100,000 people
gathered around the Hull docks to wave us off on a Saturday morning in September. I was assigned to the Hull and Humber boat and we were treated almost like heroes as we paraded through the throngs
to our 68-foot boat for the race start. Strangers cheered and wished us good luck; some dashed forward to shake our hands. It was a surreal experience, especially since we were little more than
novices, not experienced, professional racers. The route to La Rochelle in France was fast and furious – we covered the 800 miles in just three days with 20 knots (nautical miles per hour) of
wind at our back. When I rejoined the boat, months later, in Canada to cross the Atlantic to Ireland, we went even quicker, making it to Kinsale in just nine days. I loved every minute of it
– except, perhaps, for those minutes spent throwing up.