COPYWRITERS

I get paid to write stuff now, it’s almost like I'm a real journalist.

In other words, I've become one of the elite band of copywriters. It pays reasonably well given it’s around £15 per article and I can write one in around half an hour depending on the length and how much I concentrate.

It’s weird, I always saw copywriting as something 'grown up' journalists did to supplement their incomes while I had to stick to writing for free. It’s nice in a way, to be paid for something that may actually benefit me in the future. I always thought that the only way I'd be able to alleviate my poverty would be in a shop being verbally abused by stupid customers who don't understand how basic economics, business or common decency works.

Although I'd say it would be hard to make a living out of it, the jobs come in a bit sporadically and you have to be basically sitting refreshing your email to get them. However, with a bit of luck and perseverance you should be able to make a small income for yourself.

Maybe if I devoted myself to being a serious freelance journalist full time I could fashion a living out of it. There are so many good websites to write for out there and they make it is to work from home.

It probably won’t get me out of debt or be a significant contribution to the ‘save-for-the-future’ fund I started when I got my first job at sixteen that has been gradually depleting over the past few years.

However, it will probably allow me to buy more shoes and is there really any great reward than that?

Home Alone

I've got a confession to make: I've never seen Home Alone.

Shocking isn't it? That a child of the nineties, one who spent most of them in USA no less, could not have seen such a proverbial classic which remains one of the highest grossing films of all time.

However now the cold germs have really started to affect my brain I definitely think I'm hallucinating. I noticed food on the counters that I swear I did not put there. Curtains have been opened that I swear I did not open.

Now it could be the friendly poltergeist Bob, that I created back when we moved to the house in 1999 to scare my little sister (I was always such a nice, caring big sister)messing with my head or perhaps it is some comically inept burglars?

I am fairly out of it at the moment having no one to take care of me in my illness and have run out of painkillers (the shop is a forty minute round trip- I hate living in the suburbs) so my head is currently throbbing.

I have actually taken the day off writing (apart from this) as I doubt that much of what I am writing is coherent.

I don't like being alone when ill. I have never been the type to say 'Oh look at me, woe is me' when I'm ill but it would be nice if there was someone to cook me dinner (which I can't even do when I am healthy) and do my washing while I curl up in bed and will the headache to go away.

Blah

I feel blah.

My parents are away on holiday and I'm alone in my house and am currently struggling to spend more than half the day out of bed.

I don't feel ill as such, although I do have a sore throat, I just feel blah.

I'm tired, every part of my body aches, when I'm not asleep, I'm reading in bed or watching TV curled up in my duvet watching television.

I'm doing no work either, even though I am ridiculously bored. I have a list of articles to write and investigate as well as having to read the entire collected works of Virginia Woolf in the next three and a half weeks but I've managed to only write 250 word blog post about a bookshop closure that I'd read about on the Guardian.

I suppose I need a holiday after doing some much work experience this summer (7 weeks and counting, I've got another one on the way next week) but its miserable outside. It's raining and it doesn't change how bored I am.

I don't really like stopping, I've always liked being busy. I get bored too easily.

But maybe if I'm getting down, ill and blah when I do stop maybe I should down......

Nah, I'll sleep when I'm dead.

Kiss Me? No: Germany Bans Kissing

Germany has been questioning it's workplace decorum this week after The Knigge Society (why does everything official and German have to sound so comic?) called for a ban on kisses on the cheek in places of work as it can make greeting colleagues and business partners uncomfortable for many.

The society's Chairman, Hans-Michael Klein said he received many worried emails from workers who were uncomfortable with the practice and liken it to form a form of 'terroism'.

He said the practice was something that came in from France, where two kisses are common and Italy, where in some parts three is the norm and it "is not typical German behaviour".

Although I do have to say that the terrorism allegory is a tad extreme I do find my self agreeing with any legislation that may prevent people I don't know touching me even if its an over step into personal liberties.

It's not just kissing, I don't like it when people hug me when they don't know me, when they pat my arm, even when they sit next to me on the train. I don't like an aura of physically proximity to other people.

This may surprise some people as I'm normally quite a tactile person once you get to know me. I will always hug and kiss people I actually like and it means absolutely nothing in particular other than general affection.

But because I associate physical contact with friendliness and affection I don't want strangers anywhere near me.

They are not my friends, they do not know me, I don't know where they've been. So they can't spread their germs all over me.

I'm quite in favour of a 'social distance zone'.

Buses

I hate buses.

I really do. I've been doing work experience for the past two weeks and have had to get the bus for the first time really since I left Harrogate.

I've been nearly hit by them in Birmingham more times than I can count though admittedly this is partly my fault (and the fact that the temporary traffic lights on Bristol Road never seem to work) and have got lost in Edinburgh more than once over the past week or so simply because I don't know which bus stop to getting off at.

My woeful lacking in the navigation department has been well documented and I have always relied on trains (or the Tube when I'm in London) because of it. Despite the fact they're never there on time at least its simply, you get off when you see the sign for the station, there aren't five hundred stops with the identifying markers around them being a non descript electronics shop.

I just can't do it. Some people look at maps and see a logic grid depicting the world around them; a see a confusing haze of wavy lines varying in size and meaning absolutely nothing. I can picture streets in my head but I mark them with certain shops and they stand out isolated in my mind; I can't connect the dots.

And its because of this I hate buses, I find travel stressful at the best of times but trying to find the correct point to jump off a moving vehicle makes it all the worse.

I've mastered the 73 from outside Angel tube station in Islington and the 36 to Leeds from outside my doctor's in Harrogate, anything other than makes me feel stressed and slightly ill.

My fear of buses may also come from the fact that I nearly lost my teddy bear on a London bus when I was about two or three. It was pretty scaring.

Revision

I hate the library.

I hate the people who just have to be crammed in next to me and just have to brush past me every time they have to get up (which seems to be every five minutes)and their friends that insist on leaning over me to talk to them for ages.

But most of all I hate revision. No matter how hard you try its never done, you never feel like you know enough, you feel like want you're learning will probably irrelavent.

What is worse though is that if you actually want to get any work done away from the distractions of Facebook and Glee you have to go to the library and you have to get there early. Ridiculously early.

I was not built for trekking to the library with the birds. I just spent 4 and a half hours there and I've had to come home to eat and rest because I was actually starting to feel physically nauseaous and could no longer see straight.

I call this library fever.

And now I'm going back for another couple hours of revision.

Its times like these when I kind of of wish I smoked because I would have a legitimate excuse to escape from the shackles of my chair legs every once in and while. I feel stupid just aimblessly wandering around the library and I can't keep going to Spar.

I can't wait till next Tuesday afternoon is over and I can have my life back.

Oh but wait, I still have an internship to do and I'm supposed to start working on my dissertation because I won't have much time this summer because of work experience.

No rest for the wicked.

Question Time

I really shouldn't watch Question Time anymore. It only makes me angry.

Watching it this week just enraged me, hearing the talk about Osama Bin Laden and watching how the usual reactionary drivel bandied about is met with the approval of the clapping seals in the audience.

One of the commentators and several of the audience members seemed to think that it was ok to contravene international law because Bin Laden is evil and they seemed to have the mistaken assumption that the West automatically takes up camp on the moral high ground.

There were voices of reason in the audience and on the panel but I just felt so frustrated that they could say all this stuff and I was stuck behind the computer screen unable to contribute my own opinion to the debate and could only vent on Facebook.

I have never been able to keep my mouth shut.

Maybe this is why I want to be a journalist because I feel so frustrated when people don't listen to me or I can't get my voice heard.

This could also be a sign that I am completely insane but whatever.