14April1997

14 April 1997
My dear folks,

I don’t much like getting phone calls & am never better pleased than when I arrive home to find the little red light on the answering machine unlit. That’s because most of my phone calls come from someone who wants me to do something & isn’t going to pay me for doing it. Today however I had a welcome phone call, from a secretary at the Beeb who called to say that the On Line Board would convene at some point on Monday 28 April especially to accommodate me. That’s welcome news indeed! It means that I can fly down to Portugal on Sat without either having to resign all hopes of the attachment or spending a great deal of effort & money to fly back & forth.

Since Jones has been waiting on exactly such news, I have elevated it to the very top of my letter. Jones I have also emailed R&P to thank them for the book. And while I’m at such things, Cathy the full address of University College London is:
Gower Street, London, WC1E 6BT.

Mother, thank you for your fax a few hours ago. The erratic delivery of the SA Times has nothing to do with the renewal, which only takes effect from July & which I’ve already seen to. Re the charges you ask about, I’m not sure but suspect the answer is yes. As for my report on the unfortunate Hutu refugees in Zaire, I’m pleased you had the satisfaction of it. They are truly unwanted people, paying the price of their tribal leaders’ evil 3 years ago. I frequently reflect how horrible a world it is for most people – I don’t mean comfortable westerners - & wonder what sense starving mothers & children make of it in the hellholes of Zaire. At least, it puts my only tiny frustrations into perspective. Thank you also Bevan for your chatty account of your doings which I shall fax down to Jones.

I worked Sat & Sun, long, unrelenting days with a 30 minute bulletin to fill every hour. That’s hard over a weekend, even a fairly newsy weekend, especially with the skeleton teams we’ve been reduced to. I arrived at work eightish on Sun a.m. to find the editor cursing because a live inject of the pope’s meeting with Bosnia’s rotating presidency was fast outdating the report which our ovenight in-house correspondent had just compiled. So the first thing I had to do was a package on the Pope for 9 a.m. I watched the pix come in till 8.30 & then sat down to do some fast scripting, voicing & cutting with a tape editor. Putting a package together in 30 mins is a bit like running a 4 min mile….doable, but tough going. We got it into the transmission suite with two mins in hand. That’s considered quite generous. I’ve often heard the gallery producer asking the presenter to try to read the cue to lead story slowly as the package they’re waiting for hasn’t arrived in tx yet! That’s hairy!

I’m back again tonight & Tues night. I wasn’t due to work again until Thurs but one of my colleagues begged to swap his night shifts with me as a neighbour was having building work done & it was quite impossible for anyone to sleep in the neighbourhood during the day. That suited me quite well; means that I could get off the Sunday after my return from Portugal on the Sat evening & use the day to prepare for my board.

I’m starting to crack the fundamentals of setting up web-sites, to my considerable creative satisfaction. I added two pages last night, both advertising the holiday home of a BBC colleague which is situated quite close to the Quinta. I have also put up Jones’s write-up on all the restaurants in the area. Now I must find some pix & info about Loule & the Algarve, fancy them up a bit & weave them in. The tricky bit is making the pages look good & setting up the links that enable one to move between the various pages on the site. I feel like someone who has managed to daub a recognisable scene on a canvas. All I need to do now is cover the ground which separates such a dauber from Michelangelo.