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2004-12-21 - 4:24 p.m.

As attentive readers may know, early next year I am to be hauled across the coals, or at least hauled on some other rough surface with unrestricted views of the coals, and forced to live on my marketable skills without the safety net of my regular sub editing gig, which, with no disrespect to the job, could be done by an easily-distracted chimp without any noticeable decline in productivity.

I�ve been living in a fool�s paradise, and it�s time to wake up and smell the skinny mochachino dregs being dripped onto my forehead as I lay tied to the cold, unforgiving stone floor in the solitary cell of my professional outlook.

I suppose I�ve enjoyed a modicum of success writing for various travel sections this past year. So much so that my teary-eyed old mother was so emotional that she was moved to remark: �Well, whoo-peeee shit, freebie boy. How about getting a real job?� Her cruel jibes are just her little way of showing she�s proud, of course. That�s the thought I keep carving into my lower arms with rusty bits of metal, anyway.

I have reason to be pessimistic, though, and it�s nothing to do with my awful grammar, complete lack of literary invention, repetitive writing style or awful grammar. The travel sections of newspapers have become, for want of a better phrase, the clamouring rancid knocking shop of smug, posturing whores.

Travel journalists are lucky to get a look in these days because the pages are already crammed to oozing point with everyone from the faux-na�ve investigative journalist and his family in a US theme park to the polemic ex-lesbian columnist on some south coast jolly to, I don�t know, the man who washes the sport�s editors car every other Tuesday on a three week cruise down the Nile, contraceptives supplied. There they all are, writing about their cynically arranged week of luxury swanning around some eight star palace swimming in asses milk and enjoying all the Turdu�ken they can snort.

The commissioning editors are all: �Oh, sorry Pablo, we can�t take anything from you this millennium as we�ve got Bigtrousers McSuccessful from features filing his report from somewhere inside a gold-plated youth hostel in Mogolia�(ahem)�plus your ideas all stink like badly rotted sewage do you understand not just regular sewage but sewage that has actually rotted.�

Me: �Oh, OK. (pause) What was that last bit?�

Them: �Oh, nothing. GottogoBYE.�

It�s not that I don�t like the journalists from other sections that write for the travel section. They are brilliant and talented and witty and big-bottomed and rightly have a trillion groupies, but for flip�s sake, give the rest of us a chance! It�s not enough that you�re successful enough in your own field to be able to afford any holiday you want without shoving into the other sections just so you can have some disgusting, freeloading self-promotion fest.

A disgusting, freeloading self-promotion fest that isn�t mine by right.

Do I waltz in and do the theatre reviews and cycling round ups and exposes of right wing cults that manage to be funny and serious at the same time? No I bollocky well do not! Because I�m not good enough and would never be asked to, fair enough, but that�s not the point!

So I ask you, please, have a heart. Stick to your own patch and allow the dim bulb of mediocrity to shine through. You don�t owe it to yourselves, but you do owe it to�er, well, maybe if you could just do it anyway.

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