It’s our review of the year issue. It’s also my last opening column for the Observer Magazine. Covering for Eva Wiseman during her maternity leave has been a wonderful part of my 2014, so, since we’re taking a look back this issue, I thought I’d take you through what I’ve learned in my brief but rewarding time on the job.
1) You don’t have to be angry to have an opinion worth hearing.
Between you and me, I wasn’t sure I was right for this job. I’m not a particularly opinionated person. I’m actually reasonably suspicious of opinions – they’re everywhere nowadays, pretending to be facts. I am, however, compulsively interested in almost everything, which seemed like a good starting point, and also made the challenge too tempting to resist.
Still, I secretly thought this type of gig was best suited to a more extreme type – a disputatious socialist in ethically sourced sackcloth, a smooth-talking debating society graduate with bone-china vowels... not me. I’m a muller, not a fighter. It turns out you don’t have to be angry to have an opinion that will engage people (disclaimer: you do have to be interesting). The machinery of our media and social media often favours emotive, binary choice rather than query and complexity. But that’s because that sort of thing is louder, not because it’s better.
I worried this job would make me shouty, but found an audience up for (me) being thoughtful. Which confirmed my belief that good communication is about dialectic, not rhetoric; and showed me the value of speaking up without yelling.
2) People slagging you off is not the end of the world.
I knew writing about what I thought would engender some destructive criticism. I don’t mind the other kind, but these days we’re always hearing that saying anything in public invites a pounding from the tireless, pulverising tentacles of the Internet Kraken. I don’t mean actual harassment here, just what the run-of-the mill catcalling idiots know as “#bantz”.
As it turned out, my skirmishes with the Kraken (though regular) were actually pretty funny. They even gave me my all-time favourite review, which I found so delightful I’m having it immortalised in needlepoint for my office: “WORDS OF SIN FROM THE LAND OF THE GAYS”. The wisdom I gleaned felt pleasingly Seussian: plenty of people disagreed with what I had to say, but only dicks were dicks about it.
3) Being a fan of what you’re making is a reasonable place to start. I’m not a writer, really. I mean, I wrote a book once, but if I started listing the things I’ve done once as part of my job description I’d be working in a circus, in prison. I am an enthusiastic reader, though. So I decided to approach the job as a reader instead. That turned out to be helpful – it kept me focussed on what I wanted to say, rather than how I said it. I was thinking about the end product rather than worrying about whether I was up to the job. I think this is a good way to make things.
4) Sharing personal stuff can be powerful, even if it’s difficult.
It was quite a big thing to talk about my family life and my experiences of coercive control, misogyny at work and the NHS, but I was humbled by the way readers responded, particularly to my piece about coercive control, which was shared 22,000 times. I received messages from women who had found it helpful, which was depressing, but also weirdly great – what had been a pointlessly awful experience had done some good 20 years later. So thank you and happy New Year to all the Observer readers who made this year so memorable. I hope to see you on these pages again soon, and Eva will be back here next week.
