It's The Story Of...

I've just finished writing my first cover. For the main magazine. I also wrote the cover for the lifestyle portion but that I finished on Monday. (Efficient, girl, efficient, efficient). I now have to write the sidebars to go with the main story.

Instead, I am rummaging through my various bags trying to find my iPod. No cigar. I must have left it at home when I tumbled out the contents of my bag onto my bed. My phone battery is on its last legs. Forgot that it was time to charge it last night. And this is a battery that goes from hero to zero in about a split second. No warning.

I wish I could have gone and hung out with Mark last night. Mark and friends, that is. They were celebrating his last day at the Concorde. There was to be lots and lots of alcohol and no one was supposed to remember anything in the morning. But if you're doing the cover, you don't go party with your friends (especially if you've already been out partying twice that week).

I am constantly pickled. So much so that I burp up red wine during lunch time and think...hmmmm.

I'm relatively OK with my story. I scribbled it out at Sids in Taman Tun yesterday, whence I repaired when my clogged brain was just not giving me any love at the office. The moment I sat down and smelled the familiar fumes, I called for a pipe and I called for a bowl and I called for my fiddlers three...no, I actually called for some paper and started to write furiously. I got the intro. The second para. The third para. All the stuff that required quotes I put up a ... I scribbled a three-page long story (complete with ellipsis) And somewhere through my pen ran out of ink which is no problem when you know the manager and Rick let me borrow the pub's pen which meant that for the duration I was scribbling away, all of them were sharing one pen.

(Journalists really ought to carry spare pens and name cards - also paper...I am a disgrace to journalists).

I received a call from the PA I had trouble with a couple of weeks ago. Or was it last week? Time seems to travel so quickly over here, that:

I thought I saw a Rattlesnake
That questioned me in Greek:
I looked again, and found it was
The Middle of Next Week.
'The one thing I regret,' I said,
'Is that it cannot speak!'

Yeah, that kind of thing. There I am strolling along in the balmy weekend and suddenly I'm kicked into the middle of next week. It's an unsettling feeling. Alcohol may have something to do with it, especially the blood of grapes.

Anyway bout the PA: she said that she loved, she simply loved my story about her boss and that all the staff including him, were very excited about it, and that it was very well written, and we should do tea sometime and she would come to my office because her husband works in the next building and she would come over with him and we could have tea and she could pick up the paper with the story that they missed...and...and...and

OK I'm going to go look for coffee now. I'll walk, clear my head, come back and write the two side stories.

That's what you do when your mind is a labyrinth, a torrent of swirled threads, tangled, tangled, tangled....who is that again? Is there someone on the outside looking in?