editorialgirl

I’m getting married in five weeks. Exciting, huh? Yes. Well, yes and no. I do seem to have got a lot more stressed about it than I was intending to. For someone who is usually quite laid back, I’ve had more “bridezilla moments” than I thought I would over the last few months.

These are the things that have surprised me the most about my wedding planning so far.

The Dress: It’s A Proper One

One of the first things I did was to look for a dress. I hadn’t been sure that I wanted a ‘proper’ wedding dress – after all, I never wear dresses in real life, and those full length ivory things all look the same, don’t they? – but after chatting to a few people, I thought I should at least try the bridal shops to see what was what. My sister, font of wedding knowledge since her own nuptials a couple of years ago, made the appointments. I phoned our mom, and we spent a couple of Saturday mornings together looking at ‘proper’ dresses, despite my protestations that it was only February.

I was surprised to find that, actually, wedding dresses don’t all look the same. In fact, there’s rather a lot to the whole wedding dress thing. I was quickly educated in the difference between tea length and cocktail length; chiffon and tulle. I even went to two different shops. In the second, I was disconcerted to hear myself explain, with some confidence, that I definitely did not want a mermaid.

The second surprise was that choosing a dress eight months in advance wasn’t a ludicrous idea. In fact, explaining to the shop assistants that my wedding was in September actually elicited a pause, the words “September this year?” and suck of air through the teeth. “We have to order it in,” they explained, “and have it delivered to the shop.” Well, ye-es. And that takes nearly a year? But so it has, apparantly. They still haven’t phoned me for my first fitting. I find this quite weird.

The Registry Office: Stuck In The Olden Days

I know the Registry Office is a government office dealing with really important stuff, so they have to do things formally, but they’re frustratingly old-fashioned and pedantic.

For example, their phone calls are crackers. Once we’ve established I am the person they need to speak to, they introduce themselves in full. “Hello, my name is Miss [say, Smith] and I’m calling you on behalf of Birmingham Registry Office.” (Yes, they introduce themselves by their title. It’s like Are You Being Served.) I reply “oh, hello!” in my cheeriest, we’ve-spoken-before-and-I-know-you voice, but it doesn’t stop them. “I’m calling you about your forthcoming wedding…” they say, every time. And despite my “yes, yes, hello, how can I help” responses, they continue. “…to Mister Darren Wright, on the twenty fifth of September, two thousand and ten.” The first time, it took every ounce of restraint to stop myself from getting the giggles. The second time, I had to stop myself from shouting “NO SHIT, SHERLOCK”. Or saying “oh my god! I didn’t know about this!” The third, fourth and fifth times, I’ve been dying to say it along with them, but in a stupid high voice. “Mithter Dawwen Wight! Mmmnty fifth of Thepthemburrrr!” (I did it in my head, anyway. It helped.)

Daz had a weird chat with them last week, too. They were after some extra information and, after they made a big deal about the urgency of receiving this information as soon as possible, he suggested emailing it to them, rather than posting it as they’d requested. The assistant was apparently a bit flummoxed, saying, “well, you could email it, but there isn’t much point – I wouldn’t get it til tomorrow anyway”. Why was that, then? It wasn’t even mid afternoon. Had they got problems with their email? “No,” she explained, “all the emails are read at 9 o’clock in the morning, then they’re all printed out and we each get a copy on our desks. So if you email me now, I won’t get it until tomorrow.” He was baffled. Couldn’t she just access her email now? “No, it’s not my email,” she said. “It’s the office email. Only one person has access to it, and she only looks at it at 9 o’clock each morning.” Whu… why? “That’s just the way we do things.” Well, that’s silly, he told her. “Well, it works for us,” she replied. Bonkers.

Other People: They Ask A Lot Of Questions

Finally – and this is the biggie – managing other people’s expectations has proved to be surprisingly stressful. It’s amazing how much angst can be caused by worrying that you’re going to cause offence to close friends and family simply by making the decisions that have to be made.

Some friends don’t seem to realise what a juggling act the whole thing is. Space at the venue is limited. Catering is expensive, so every detail counts. The reason I need the RSVPs returned isn’t because I’m a psycho bride with a spreadsheet obsession; it’s because if one person can’t make it, there’s a list of friends we’d really like to offer that place to, that we haven’t been able to invite so far. And if one person suddenly announces they’re bringing an uninvited guest, that’s one more place we can’t give to someone we actually know.

The other problem is that, despite waving their hands and saying “it’s your day!”, families do seem to have preconceptions of what their relatives’ weddings should be like. Today, for example, [a family member who will remain nameless] said “are you going to run [a really minor detail] past [another family member]?” Up until this past week, I’d probably have said yes, thinking that I was keeping the peace. Today I just said, firmly, “no! Because it’s our wedding, no-one else’s.” Then laughed through the ensuing couple of seconds of awkward silence. Whoah. I’ve changed.

And lovely though it is that everyone’s so interested, do people (okay, women) really need to know every detail, every day? Even when all that’s happened that week is that we’ve, say, filled in a form for the registry office, I find myself making up other stuff to make my wedding sound more interesting to them. “Er, yeah, phoooo, I’ve been having a good old think about flowers this week. What’s your opinion on gerberas?”

As an aside, I’ve found that some girls – including total strangers – love all the wedding chat. I suppose for those who loved preparing for their own wedding, it’s like a hobby; they know all the jargon and they really care about the finer details of the subject. I am not one of those girls. I didn’t care about those details before, I don’t care about them when I go to other weddings and so I’m not going to care about them for mine either. When someone asks “are you going for a train?” or “what’s your scheme?” and I realise I not only have a clue what they mean, but know what my answers are (‘a very small one’, and ‘coffee and cream’), I find it hard to hide my vague nausea. I’m sorry. I just don’t get enjoyment out of this amount of planning. Yes, it’s a day to remember – and it’ll be a bloody brilliant day – but I’m quite sure that in ten years time, I will neither remember nor care what the height of heel was on my shoes, or how my bouquet was tied.

I’m beginning to read everything the wrong way, too. Whilst the rational part of my brain is sure the constant questions are just well meaning, the other part – the bridezilla brain – just knows there’s a passive aggressive tone to them. “Have you thought about doing it this way?” (where “this way” is a tradition we’re not going to follow) is a line that raises my hackles. No. We’d have mentioned if we were going to do it that way. And what is the correct response to “I went to a wedding recently where they… [did something cheesy]“? Thanks for the advice, but we’re not going to do stuff because your mate saw it in a magazine…? Probably not.

Today I told someone, “well, that’s a nice idea for someone who can be bothered, but put it this way, if it’s a bunch of hassle, then you can rest assured I have no intention of getting myself into it”. I meant it in a light-hearted, funny way, but I sounded like a bitch.

Sigh.

I recently found a story I wrote in secondary school that’s made me rethink the way I write. Or don’t write, as is more often the case.

The story is called Prejudice. It’s the tale of a girl called Jo, who’s being bullied at school and decides to run away. (I know. Just… stop sniggering.) It hasn’t got a date on it, but it does have my class number, so I know it was written in the third year, when – as one of the youngest in my school year – I would have been 13. (Yes, you can read it in a minute. Just indulge me, please, by reading this first.)

I remember this assignment being set for us quite clearly. Our usual English teacher was away so we had a substitute; a young woman we hadn’t met before, who’d obviously been drafted in at the last minute. I don’t remember the lesson itself, but for the homework, she had simply asked us to write a 1000 word story on the subject of “prejudice”.

I can remember the joy I felt at this. After our usual lessons, which would involve reading and analysing set texts, perhaps writing an opinion piece or even a creative piece based on one of those, it was liberating to be given a vague theme and told to come up with whatever we liked.

I still work best when given a theme, a word count and a deadline. But usually I’m writing non-fiction, for work. Reading this story now has made me pine for the creative writer I was then.

Yes, there is plenty wrong with it – not least the knuckle-chewingly dreadful naivety of a young author writing on a subject she knows nothing about. But it’s what’s right about it is precisely what’s missing from any writing I do now: I didn’t worry about anything – I just wrote.

And what’s more, if you can ignore the haphazard punctuation, slippery spelling and terrible paragraph control, it’s actually quite well-structured. It’s (more or less) got a proper plot curve! The scene is set at the beginning, with some flashbacks to place the character and introduce some tension that will need resolving. The journey continues to a climax point, whereby a conflict enables the character to put her own problems into context. And so the tension is resolved.

Okay, you can read it now. I’ve copied it out exactly as it was written then, dodgy grammar and all.

So over the next few weeks I’m going to try and channel my blithely confident 13 year old self and try and write short stories the way I used to. I’m going to pretend that, once again, my standard sources are dad’s Daily Mail, mom’s Women’s Weekly and whichever books from Hall Green Library’s “young adult” aisle I am currently reading. Who cares? I’m going to try not to worry about a thing – and just write.

I’ve been answering questions on formspring.me this week, as I’ve found it a good way to “just keep writing” (which would be a new year’s resolution, if I did that kind of thing).

The questions I’ve been asked so far have been quite thought-provoking. I’ve found myself writing a lot more little memoirs, on and off the site, which is the sort of writing I like to do.

But one question took me a while to answer: Of friends you’ve lost who do you miss the most? Am I alone in thinking this question was a bit… I don’t know, sinister?

Anyway. If you’d like to ask me a question – although if you ask me something as thinky as this I can’t necessarily guarantee an answer! – please go ahead.

You might have noticed the whole NaBloWriMo writing-a-blog-post-every-day thing has fallen by the wayside somewhat. Well, I’ve decided to take some advice from every mother ever: “if you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all”. Writing every day would be good, but if it means personal posts every day, then I’d just rather give it a miss.

Back in 2005 and 2006, this blog was more of a journal. The first post was about a disastrous holiday I’d just returned from, where my then-boyfriend and I spent most of the week arguing and the Spanish police carried out a terrifying raid on the next door apartment, involving guns and smoke bombs.

That was about as upbeat as the blog ever got.

Over the next thirty or so posts, I covered my struggle with a ten year marijuana habit that had turned into an addiction, my unhappiness with my job, the breakdown of my relationship, the deterioration of my uncle’s health and then his death, my dad’s heart attack and finally, the death of my beloved Nanna.

It wasn’t very chirpy.

Worse than that, though, it wasn’t helping. In hindsight, it was a cry for help at probably my lowest ever point in life – but hardly anyone read it and those that did couldn’t help me. Yup – only I could do that. Eventually I realised this and, against every instinct in my then-addled brain, started leaving the house again, forcing myself to be sociable, finding “hobbies” (hello, flickr chums!) and giving up the weed.

The last entry in my old blog, before I deleted it in January 2007, read:

It’s said that you should dress for the job you want, not the job you’ve got; wear a managerial suit and you’ll soon be the boss. If I’m going to show a face online, it should be the face of the person I want to be, not the person I am at the moment. If editorialgirl’s going to be online, she might as well be someone who inspires me.

Everything changes and I need to learn to live with that. Life is all about grief and how we handle it. And you don’t handle it by moaning to strangers.

So this is the (cliche and metaphor ladened) end of editorialgirl as you know her. No more “ooh, get me, I’ve given up weed”, no more “boo hoo, everyone dies”; just a CV, an eye on the web and some photos. From now on, editorialgirl is fucking ACE.

See you in my future.

And so here I am, in my future. Hello! It is no exaggeration to say that today (three years almost to the day since I last needed a smoke, by the way) I’m a completely new person. And I’m happy to announce that I don’t need a journal any more. I mean, I’ve got a handwritten diary for those moments where things go a bit wonky – we all need to “let it all out” occasionally – but I don’t write about it online any more.

This blog is still for me, but it’s for things I want to be pleased to look back on. Posts with a point.

Ooh, lasagne!

Well, not quite. Okay, so it’s only day five and I haven’t actually got anything to blog about… already.

I had great plans for this evening. I was going to get home from work and have a bite to eat, then my Flickr friend Steve was going to pick me up, to go to the Lickey hills and take some firework photos. Then I was going to come home and blog about it.

It didn’t really work out that way. Despite blue skies all day, as soon as it got dark (just after four o’clock) it started pissing down with rain. So after a brief text conversation with Steve we decided to knock it on the head and save the night shoot for another (drier) evening.

Instead, I got a bus from work straight to the pub. After downing a couple of pints, we went for tapas and vino.

I’ve got this far, so I might as well let you know what we had:

• peppers stuffed with couscous and feta
• pork in Malaga sauce (ie sherry) with pine nuts
• manchego cheese with quince jelly
• paella valencia
• quesadilla (cheesy flatbread)
• pork with garlic and paprika
• calamari
• aubergine in vinegar (tastier than it sounds)
• chorizo in wine
• a duck dish that never arrived, so doesn’t count

and of course, olives, bread and two lots of pathathath bravath.

So, um, there you go.

Tomorrow we’re off to Eastbourne for the weekend to see the inlaws, so my blogging will be brief for the next few days. Yay, seaside!

This photo is of my great grandfather, Ernest, with his sister Jessie and his brothers Frank, Sid and little Freddie. Of the older boys, I’m not sure which one’s which, but my guess is that Ernest is second from left.

There are eight years between little Fred and Jessie, the oldest - so if he’s about six and she’s about 14 in this photo, that would date it at 1897.*

I don’t know where it was taken, but all of these children were born in Birmingham, as were their parents. This branch of my family – my dad’s mum’s dad’s side – is listed on censuses over the years at addresses around the Bordesley area – Deritend, Small Heath, Hay Mills – including, in the 1881 census, an address at Muntz Street, then the home of Birmingham City FC.

By the 1901 census, the boys and their parents had moved to Crayford in Kent, where Ernest met his future wife – my great grandmother – Rosina, before bringing her back to Birmingham with him to start a family. Jessie stayed in Birmingham, working as a tailor.

I have a tangible connection with Jessie; I wear her ring on my right hand. She left the ring to her favourite niece – my Nanna – Ernest and Rosina’s daughter. And Nanna left it to me.

Intriguingly, someone has been snipped out of this photograph. You can see the line where it’s been cut, between the boy on the far left and the others, leaving only a bit of spooky trouser leg.

*EDIT: I saw my dad at the weekend and he showed me the original photograph – here’s what was written on the back:
Frank Herbert 9 yrs / Ernest John 10 yrs / Jessie May 11 yrs / Sydney Charles 8 yrs / Frederick Clifford 3 yrs
This would date the photo at 1894.

Dad hadn’t noticed that someone had been cut out of the photograph – he couldn’t explain it either…! He did tell me about two more brothers, who wouldn’t have been born when this photograph was taken: Reginald Joseph, who was born in 1897 and died in a POW camp in 1918; and Horace Richard (Dick) born in 1901.

Dad has an amazing scrapbook full of pictures like this, with captions explaining who everyone is. I spent a long time poring over the photos and watching these children growing up, having children and grandchildren of their own and getting old.

I’m getting married next year. It’s all been going swimmingly so far – we’ve booked a venue and a registrar, we have a vague idea of numbers; we’ve even booked the cake (hi, Jenny!). But the one thing that we haven’t been able to have a proper conversation about without big frowns, waving of hands (and even, dare I say, a bit of going all silent) is the music.

It’s weird. We both really like music. We even have a big crossover of tastes – there are loads of bands and styles of music that we both listen to and enjoy. So surely it should be easy to make a list of music we want at our wedding…? But no.

For some reason, whatever I suggest “isn’t weddingy enough”. Yes, my husband to be, who has the biggest CD collection of anyone I’ve ever met, who buys at least three new albums a week; who goes into the record shop to “look for things I’ve never heard of”… seems to think that because it’s a wedding, things have to be done a certain way.

He wants us to have a cheesy DJ at our wedding, playing fucking Abba.

I know what you’re saying. “But everyone likes Abba!” I don’t. If there’s one band I will never, ever listen to, it’s fucking Abba. I hate them. I’ve got nothing against the band themselves (or even the songs, when it comes down to it – there’s no denying they were extremely cleverly written perfect pop songs) but whoah, I just hate the Abba sound, and what it represents. I only have to hear the first note of Mamma Mia or Waterloo – god! I’m having trouble even writing this, for fear I’ll get something stuck in my head! – to feel a deep, visceral STABBINESS.

Oh, okay. I do have my reasons.

I hadn’t even really thought about Abba until the mid 90s, when they suddenly seemed to be just everywhere. It was weird, frankly. A whole bunch of films were released with Abba music as the soundtrack. People who’d never mentioned them before suddenly professed to be their biggest fans. Every pop singer in the world seemed to be doing covers of their songs. And everyone seemed to be hailing them as a genius band. Why now? It got on my nerves a bit and seemed to go on for years. They seemed to become a byword for ironic campness. Everyone liked Abba – and even now, it feels almost sacreligious to admit you’re not that keen.

But it’s worse than that. There are three main events over the last ten years that have sealed my opinion of Abba and turned my meh-ness into a near-phobia.

Reason one: Hyperactive Flatmate

When I shared a flat with my friend, back in the late 90s/early 00s, we had a brilliant time. There’s so much about that era that I remember with fondness, this almost seems rude (if you’re reading this, ex flatmate, I don’t mean it to be rude). But I don’t think it’s possible to live with anyone without at least one thing getting right up your nose. Dear reader, that one thing was Abba. Whenever my flatmate was feeling hyperactive – which could mean deliriously happy, grumpily angry, gleeful about boys or cross about work – she would go on a cleaning trip and the Abba would go on full blast. There’s nothing like walking home from work and hearing the dulcet tones of Bjorn and Urethra (or whatever they’re called) coming from two streets away, and knowing that instead of a cup of tea and cosy chat on the sofa, you’re going to open the door to a whirlwind with a can of Pledge, slamming doors and hoover dancing.

Reason two: A Funeral

In 2001 an acquaintance of mine committed suicide. A tragic, unexpected, awful thing. This person – whom I won’t name here – was only young and had a lot of friends. At the packed crematorium, it transpired that he’d in fact spent two years planning his own death, including full details of the funeral. So, after marking his life with readings, poems and words from friends and family, what poignant song had he requested to play the guests out of the chapel?

That’s right: Dancing Queen. Yes, it was poignant the first time, as the tearful congregation turned to one another to smile at the dark humour and incongruity of the music. By the fourth time, ten minutes later, as everyone was still filing out, it was more of a torture. It was on a loop, but as those of us remaining – wide-eyed in the queue for the door – knew, it would have been disrespectful to turn it off. That person, his sad life and death, and the tragi-comic ending to his funeral are still the first things that come to mind when I hear the opening notes to Dancing Queen. Even now, nearly ten years on.

Reason three: National Express Christmas Parties

Yeah, I used to work for National Express. Yeah, it was all right. After refusing, hermit-like, to go to the company-wide Christmas party for a couple of years, I finally decided to bite the bullet and join in, because there were rumours that 2006 would be the last one and, as such, might include a special guest or two.

I don’t know if it was their last party, but it was certainly mine. Yes, there was plenty of free booze, but for a start, there was also the dreaded talky DJ. You know the sort: “Let’s take it… dowwwwn a notch now, ladies and gentlemen… do you remember Last Christmas? I do. And so does [pause while he finds the right button]… so does George Michael, ladies and gentlemen, yes… this one’s for all you lovers out there…”

And okay, it was actually rather fun for a while. Until he said the dreaded words. “Ladies and gentlemen we’ve got a great surprise lined up for you tonight. This band have come all the way from… Acocks Green [laughter] to play for you tonight. We sent out an SOS [pause] and paid them some Money, Money, Money [another pause... there was no need, they were half way onto the stage] ladies and gentlemen, it’s ABBA!” It wasn’t Abba. It was someone’s brother in law and his missus and their friends, dressed in those Marilyn Monroe wigs you get from Partyland, and singing really, really out of tune.

In hindsight it’s surprising I didn’t run screaming from the ICC. Instead, I made a mental note that this was the final straw; that from now on, I would avoid any situations where Abba, or Abba-related “tribute” acts, could possibly get to me.

And that includes my own wedding.

Just to reiterate: if ANY Abba is played ANYWHERE NEAR my wedding, I will PUKE.

I’ve explained all this to my fiancé but I’m not sure how seriously he’s taken it.

After all, everyone likes Abba, don’t they?

Argh! Due to Other Important Writing Commitments it’s got really late, so I’m ashamed to say that, on only the second day of NaBloWriMo, this is me publishing some nonsense that I really only wrote for myself, and didn’t intend to use, in the rush to get something out before midnight. So please forgive me for the ramble you’re about to read.

Who is editorialgirl?

I know this isn’t really what Jenny had in mind when she asked me about “the journey to editorial girl” in a comment on previous blog post (and I do hope to write about that “journey” a little bit over the next month), but this is about the name editorialgirl.

With apologies to my parents, I have a rather boring real name. It’s… common. My first name – whilst pretty, I guess – is currently the most popular girls’ name in the US and has always been in the top 20 in the UK. My last name – according to Wikipedia, at least – is the second most numerous surname in the UK and I’m pretty sure that’s been the case for about a hundred years. So, yeah, Emma Jones is a common name. There were at least two of us in my school (and it wasn’t a large school).

On the internet, a common, boring name is both a blessing and a curse. It means I can be as anonymous as I like (you’d have a job finding me via google if you only knew my name… which is fine by me) but it also means I can’t use my real name as a username anywhere on the web. And as for domain names – forget it. The journalist, the “it girl”, the poet and the “home business expert” have always got there first.

So – once I decided I needed one – I had a bit of a quest to find a usable username.

At first it was a variation of my first name. Emma is a short name and it’s how I prefer to be addressed if you don’t know me. If you do know me, I don’t mind you calling me Em, or even EJ, but not Emmy and definitely not Ems or Emsy. At one point in my mid twenties, however, Emma took a rather unexpected turn; from Emma to Em, to Embob. Embob was shortened to Bob and for some reason, I was Bob for ages. Some people were introduced to me as Bob and never knew what my real name was. One group of friends went the other way and took the name Embob to new extremes; it became Embobina and eventually Embolinajolie, which is, frankly, embarrassing when it’s used in public. …I’m digressing. For a while, my online username was Embob.

It was only as I turned thirty and started to need to use my online identity for work-related stuff that Embob started to seem a little… silly. Not only had my circle of friends changed, but I was starting to realise that my web skills could get me work, and that the best way of promoting my web skills was… well, on the web. I couldn’t use my real name, but I couldn’t seriously put a portfolio online under the name Embob, especially since no-one even called me that any more. I needed something more relevant.

I decided to go with something wordy. I’ve been an editor of sorts since the 90s and by now I was specialising in online editing. Whilst I was playing around with words including “web”, “web writer”, “web editor” and “web editorial” – searching for usernames that hadn’t already been taken – I found that something strange had happened. A song had stuck in my head. Like it or not, I was humming Madonna. It took me a good five minutes to realise why; to realise that my mind’s eye (ear?) had read “editorial” and mashed it into a song I used to dance around my bedroom to when I was ten. “For we are living / in editorial world…”

Yes, it seemed that my subconscious had chosen the name editorialgirl for me. Every time I read it, the song would start up in my brain again. Although I hadn’t planned to use the word “girl” in a username, the whole concept tickled me so much that I tried it out on a few websites (this was pre-Twitter, so I think I was looking for a Blogger ID). It was available everywhere I looked. I’d found my new name.

These days, I identify with the name editorialgirl (all one word, please, and all lower case) as much as my given name. I might even prefer it a little, since it’s virtually unique. I feel complete ownership over it. It’s my name on Twitter, Flickr, Facebook, Identi.ca and b3ta (to name a few) and if ever I find someone else using it – and there have been a couple – I feel absolutely indignant. I love editorialgirl.

And the downside? Well, of course, there’s the whole “girl” thing. Yes, for a while I worried that – even before I’d really started using it – I wasn’t a girl any more and that if I was still using this name in my old age, I would look like the virtual equivalent of mutton dressed as lamb.

But then I remembered Madonna in that leotard… and figured things didn’t seem so bad.

It’s November tomorrow, and I haven’t blogged since June, and that is a Bad Thing.

It actually got to the point where I didn’t feel that I could post anything, because it had been so long and the first post after such a break would have to be something really worth writing about. That’s nonsense, of course. But I do need to get out of the rut, which is why I’ve decided to give NaBloWriMo a go.

Yes, it does sound a bit like NaNoWriMo, doesn’t it? It’s not that. There is no way I could commit to writing a novel in a month. This is the National Blog Writing Month. A post a day for the whole of November. It’s doable, isn’t it? It certainly sounds doable. (Oh god, I’m scared now.)

So if you’re reading this – and especially if you’ve read my blog or Twitter stream before now – what would you like to read about on here? What should I fill a month’s worth of blog posts with? Personal stuff? Photography stuff? Facts; fiction? Work stuff? Funny stuff; serious stuff? (I can’t really write about current work stuff, actually, but I do have some ideas about blogging some “writing for the web” things, editing, browsing shortcuts and the like…) Or are you secretly cringing at the idea of a post every day from me?

Any kind of suggestions would be lovely and motivating, so please pop them in the comments. And if I don’t get any feedback, I’m still going to give it a go (so nerrr). I need to get into the habit of writing more than 140 characters at a time again.

Wish me luck!

Last April’s 4am Project was a bit of a washout for me. I didn’t plan anything and didn’t even give the idea of leaving the house a second thought. Instead, I woke up at about twenty to five, stumbled to the window, took a blurry shot of the street and went straight back to bed.

This time, though, was different.

I went to bed at about ten o’clock last night; set the alarm for two forty-five and actually managed to get up and out of the house by three. Nick Lockey drove us down to Balsall Heath where we picked up Matt Murtagh – and then we set off for the Lickey Hills.

Turns out Birmingham’s pretty busy at twenty past three on a Saturday night. The fast food restaurants were still serving and we saw lots of people zig-zagging their way home from all sorts of nights out. It wasn’t until we reached the city boundaries and the time crept nearer to four o’clock that we started to feel a bit more like we were doing something out of the ordinary.

As we passed the site of the former Rover Works at Longbridge – now an empty site surrounded by hoardings – I got a sense of what Karen must have had in mind when she first came up with the idea for the 4am Project. Seeing rows of diggers silently lined up in the gloom where the massive factory used to be was eerie, and the jaunty marketing notices on the site’s advertising boards seemed… well, a bit apocalyptic, quite honestly, without the bustle of the Bristol Road’s daytime traffic to give them some context.

At the Lickeys we left the car just outside the visitors’ centre car park (which is locked at night) and walked up the path to a vantage point that we’d already researched as suitable, because it faces East. We’d brought torches, but didn’t really need them – it was light enough to see where we were going.

By four o’clock we had set up our tripods and started taking photos – mostly of the city spread out below us (and of course, a few of each other, taking photos). Nick took some long exposures of himself swinging torches around and made some cool spun-sugar-esque light trail photos. We didn’t really talk – we were just enjoying the feeling that Karen writes about in her description of her inspiration for the project: “The city was asleep and it felt like I had it all to myself.”

At first, the only sounds were the odd chirrup of birdsong and the faint rustling of the bushes and trees – but within ten minutes, the birdsong had escalated into a full dawn chorus. Blackbirds sang in the trees above our heads, flitted around the undergrowth and perched on benches in the murky light. It was lovely.

At half past four, we heard voices – a couple had come to the same spot to enjoy the sunrise. They said a cheery “morning!” but then stood quietly watching the sky brighten in front of us.

Although it had been a dry night, the sun itself didn’t really appear until it had gone five – but when it did, through a thin horizontal gap in the clouds, it was magical. The couple who’d come to watch were delighted too. The man said, “here she is!” and I realised that they weren’t just enjoying a daily constitutional; they were here for the solstice.

To our surprise, on seeing the sun for the first time, our new companion produced a cow horn and blew it three times, like a bugle. He went for a fourth, but fumbled it and made a noise like a dying duck – but it didn’t matter. We knew what he meant.

As the sun rose higher the world began to feel normal again. The couple left us (“see you next year!”), we sipped tea from a flask (thanks, Nick!), then we packed up and wandered back to the car. The city was just as we’d left it – busy – but with joggers in the place of wandering drunks. I got home just after six and went to bed – then slept for a few hours and woke wondering if it had all been a dream.

So that was my 4am Project. Although I didn’t get many good pictures, I’m really glad I made it out this time – mostly thanks to Nick and his infectious enthusiasm for just about everything. And despite my cynicism for most things spiritual, I’m glad I saw the sun rise on the solstice and shared it with the mystery horn-blowing man, for whom it obviously meant a lot.

See more of my 4am photos
Nick’s 4am photos
Matt’s 4am photos