editorialgirl

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.

Last night saw yet another debate on Twitter that the news outlets, unbelievably, deemed worthy of report. For example, these two articles from BBC News:
18:10 GMT, Saturday, 31 October 2009: Fry ponders leaving Twitter site
09:55 GMT, Sunday, 1 November 2009: Fry ends row with Twitter critic

In summary, the “news” is that Twitter user @brumplum said that he sometimes finds Stephen Fry’s tweets “a bit… boring (sorry Stephen)” and Stephen, who admitted he was feeling “low and depressed”, decided that now might be a good time to take a break from Twitter.

Big wows.

Having been an admin for various internet groups (not always successfully, I might add), I can tell you that this sort of thing happens all the time in online communities, especially once the community has started to “bed down”. It certainly did on our old Yahoo group, Moseley Free, where a deliberate lack of moderation meant that every disagreement and misconception caused days of jaw-grinding discussion. What happened on Twitter last night has been happening for years.

The difficulties of online conversation are well known: it’s easy to make a comment in haste and then to have to repent in leisure, as it stays on the web, cached for eternity. It’s also easy to misinterpret a comment when there’s no body language, facial expression or tone of voice to accompany it. So it’s no surprise that misunderstandings and bickering are starting to happen on Twitter, especially now that its honeymoon period (perhaps even the “enthusiasm”, “evangelism” and “growth” phases in the classic life cycle of mailing lists) is over.

The difference with Twitter, of course, is that most of the “evangelists” of this community are well known names. That’s why it’s got so big, so fast. And its unprecedented size is why the sort of comments that would have caused days of debate and side-taking on our little Yahoo group five or ten years ago causes mass hysteria in a much shorter space of time on Twitter now. Within an hour, Stephen Fry’s fans were not only tweeting to ask him to stay, but sending some really quite vicious comments BrumPlum’s way.

This heady mix of celebrity and mob mentality is why, to the journalists from every single news outlet that I’ve looked at this morning – including the Times, Telegraph, Guardian, Daily Mail, Sky News and BBC News – Twitter must seem like a godsend. When someone like @stephenfry takes issue with a posting from someone, this gives an insight into a celebrity’s personality that is at least as newsworthy as, say, what Cheryl wore on X Factor this week. It also gives rise to a large number of people taking sides and giving their point of view. It may not have mattered if it had happened anywhere else on the web, but on here, the biggest online community anyone’s ever known, it’s news.

A cynical question, though: are these reporters and news agencies really just lazy, or do the pound signs light up in their eyes when they see anything remotely controversial happen on Twitter? After all, commercial websites – including online news – are all about the hits. The more traffic, the more their advertising space is worth. Even if that goes slightly wrong (cf the Jan Moir incident, where advertisers asked to be pulled from a Daily Mail feature), the numbers are still way up and the stats look great on the books. The “Fry ends row with Twitter critic” feature has been on BBC News’ “most read” list all day today. News outlets are getting more hits than ever, simply by running features about Twitter, knowing that people love to read about themselves. Is that a deliberate ploy?

Finally, the biggest surprise to me during last night’s debate was Alan Davies‘ contribution (left, now deleted from his stream). Within about half an hour, he’d replied to every user he could find who’d dared suggest that Stephen Fry might have been over-reacting, calling them tossers, pricks, prats, halfwits, morons, dickheads and idiots. I’m all for free speech (and I’m aware that he might have been may have been rather “tired and emotional” after celebrating the Arsenal win earlier), but, especially given that the last time he was in the news was for biting a tramp, I think his agent might want to have a word.

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

Prompted by this tweet from Chris Hart, I’ve been a bit nostalgic this week, thinking about the jobs I was doing ten years ago and how they got me to where I am today.

The two jobs I had between 1997 and 2003 were both life changing in complete opposite ways. The first was probably the most awful job I’ve ever had, but it taught me everything I needed to know about writing copy – and unwittingly gave me the confidence boost I had been needing since school. I left it walking on air. The second job – the one Chris is talking about – was probably the best job I’ve ever had (besides my current one, of course). It gave me friends for life and taught me everything I needed to know about the web and how people use it, which has shaped the rest of my career – but by the time I left I was a pretty broken person.

So this post is about the first one. Bad job come good.

In 1997, after leaving school with two poor A level grades and spending four years bumbling around, opening and then closing a small shop selling secondhand clothes(!) and finally doing a bit of freelance proof reading to earn some intermittent cash (I was great at the proof reading bit but not so great at the freelance bit), it was time to bite the bullet and look for some real work. My then-boyfriend dragged me to the jobcentre where, miracle of miracles, we found a small piece of card on the “no specialist skills required” part of the Jobs Wall headlined, simply, “Writer”. The jobcentre person phoned them. I went for an interview, spent half an hour there writing a feature about double glazing – and got the job.

So, from 1997 to 1999 I worked for a publishing company, writing copy for five newspapers. This sounds quite good for a “first proper job”, doesn’t it? In fact what these free “news”papers were full of was not news, but pure, steaming bull shit.

It’s known as “support advertising”. A feature about a company – the feature itself being of no interest whatsoever to the publisher – is surrounded by paid adverts from the featured company’s suppliers; the purpose being to make guilt money. If no suppliers lists are forthcoming, the money has to be extorted out of the featured company itself, even when they’ve been told they won’t have to pay.

You can imagine the kind of aggressive sales techniques that the sales teams used. Any number of awards, certificates, even new newspaper titles were invented, used and dropped in the name of money-making, loophole-exploiting, probably-given-their-own-archive-room-in-the-trading-standards-office, bad business. But at the end of every day, the sales teams hit their targets, the writers got another few published article for our portfolios… and the papers? The papers got stored and then pulped, as far as we ever knew. Job done.

The turnover of staff was immense. Sales staff came and went daily; some with slanging matches, some without. The number of times our “writers’ office” door was slung open by angry young boys in oversized polyester suits saying “I need to write a resignation letter NOW! Er, can you show me how to use the computer?” was, in hindsight, hilarious. My co-writers didn’t think so and by 1998 I was the only writer left.

In 1999 the “Directors” of the Birmingham office – a husband and wife team – decided that even they couldn’t bear it any more and left. A new Director came in – a short man from the Head Office in Derby, no less – and told me that he would no longer be able to pay me the salary I had been on. I could accept a pay cut of more than forty per cent (this would have taken my already laughable salary to £7,000 per annum) – or I could leave, so that they could get someone else in on the lower wage. Now, of course, I realise that this isn’t even legal – but at the time I didn’t know any better, so I simply refused the pay cut and made plans to leave.

But what happened next was strange – and rather cool. Having become used to this fast paced job – watching the very worst of human life argue amongst themselves every day and finding myself treated as slave one minute, IT guru the next – the anger I should have felt simply manifested itself as… energy. I was wired. I gathered my things, stored up some goodies on the PC (a rather impolite “scrolling marquee” screensaver, as well as a few read-me files telling whichever poor writer came to use it next what was in store for them) and left. The buzz that had been building up inside me since the morning’s conversation was amazing and I suddenly had the feeling I could do anything at all. I was so much better than any of these people I had met in the big wide world of work so far – and now, absolutely nothing could stand in my way.

The feeling didn’t go away, either. Over the next few months, I stayed wired. I made new friends like they were going out of fashion. I applied for – and succeeded in getting – a job I’d never have dreamt of having the confidence to apply for before, in an area I was interested in but had no experience or even real knowledge of (books about web programming).

Yes, this “publishing” company had actually done me a favour and prepared me in a way no degree or training course could have done: as well as boost my confidence through the roof and even show me – the girl who goes red at the slightest fib – how to blag a little, it had taught me how to write. How to write about anything at all, from any amount of information, to a strict wordcount and an even stricter deadline. The best grounding for my line of work – editing, subbing, writing for the web – that I could ever have hoped for.

Birmingham what what what event?

For a while now I’ve been involved in Birmingham Photospace, a voluntary group dedicated to finding a permanent space for photography in the city.

It’s crazy that there are so many photographers in Brum, but no central space dedicated to photography. So, prompted by a post on flickr last year from Patrick Willcocks, a group of us have been meeting regularly to try and make it happen. The idea is that a Birmingham Photospace would provide exhibition and gallery space as well as potentially educational, studio and technical facilities. (And of course a cafe. Every good gallery needs a cafe.)

To this end, the Birmingham Photospace group are holding our first awareness-raising evening next month: a “flash” – as in “now you see it, now you don’t” – photo exhibition.

What? Where? When?

Photographers of all abilities are invited to bring their work along to exhibit at a spontaneous, free event at the Custard Factory on Saturday 21 March 2009. But there’s a twist. Everything exhibited can be offered as a swap.

Whether your photo has been created lovingly in the darkroom, digitally manipulated or just snapped on the run, everyone who brings a print will have the opportunity to swap their work for that of another photographer. It’s a great chance to show your work off to an appreciative audience, as publicly or anonymously as you like – and to pick up some unique, locally produced art for yourself.

How Does It Work?

Simple. For every print you bring to give away, you will be able to take another from the exhibition in return.

To take part, bring your images to the Vaad Gallery in the Custard Factory (next to the Medicine Bar), between 11am and 4pm on Saturday 21 March. Your prints will be exhibited in the Gallery for the whole of Saturday, when you’ll get the chance to meet other photographers and choose a print for yourself. At 5pm we’ll have an official launch – we’ll tell you a bit more about what we’re doing to try and make a Photospace happen; you’ll get a free drink! – and then from 7pm you can take your new piece of artwork home.

If you’re just interested in supporting the idea of a Birmingham Photospace, but don’t want to swap prints, do come along to see the exhibition anyway and show your support.

And if you can’t make it to the Flash Swap, but still want to help, follow the Birmingham Photospace blog and spread the word about a permanent space for photography in Birmingham. If you can help us to find funding, or have any other bright ideas for ways to make it happen, all the better!

It was Christmas day with the family and I was telling my mum what I’ve been up to over the last couple of months. After covering “the cat”, “work” and “having two colds”, I was struggling. Then I remembered. Of course! The most exciting event to happen for months – and it had only happened a couple of days before Christmas. How could I forget?

“I was in a pantomime!”

As the words left my mouth, I realised it was a mistake. Don’t get me wrong; I was in a pantomime, but not one it would ever be easy to explain to my officially pensionable mother.

The fact is, I played Dandini in the first ever Twitpanto. The brainchild of Jon Bounds (whose brain, to be fair, has a lot of children), the Twitpanto took place on – where else? – Twitter, with a cast that included MP Tom Watson and Guardian writer Jemima Kiss, as well as the usual Brum Twitter suspects. See the full cast list here. (I told you it was exciting, didn’t I? Dandini is Prince Charming’s right hand man, no less!)

So how did it work? First you need to understand what Twitter is and how it works, which is where the idea of telling my mum all about it fell down somewhat. I’ll take it as read you at least understand the principles, because Twitter is notoriously difficult to explain, even to those who have “given it a go”.

Cast members were given an outline of our character (our “motivation”, if you will) and a script to follow – and we all followed a private Twitter account set up by Jon, where he could act as director and prompt without being seen by the audience. “As far as I know it’s the first time someone has attempted live drama on the microblogging service” said Jon on his blog “…and it might fail spectacularly (it’s very much an experiment).”

Those who wanted to watch the pantomime could follow Twitpanto in a number of ways, with varying degrees of success. You could just follow all the cast and then try and pick out the panto from amongst your Twitterstream, for example, or you could use Twitter’s search facility to look for #Twitpanto and keep refreshing.

Another tool, roomatic, did the job a lot better, allowing us to follow everything tagged with #twitpanto in real time and in reading order. But because of the sheer number of people using the tag, it was still very difficult to separate the cast – saying lines from the panto – from the huge amount of audience chatter and participation. This was solved when Matthew Somerville (Dracos) hacked the roomatic script and created a version with all the cast members highlighted in blue. It made it loads easier for everyone and you can read a final transcript on Matthew’s site.

As I sat watching the pandemonium unfold (or rather, scroll) on my screen, waiting for my cues amongst the rowdy #twitpanto stream, and trying to cut and paste my lines in time to keep the flow going, I did experience a strange, mild form of stage fright. Given that roomatic crashed a couple of times and I had to resort to following the panto by refreshing the #twitpanto search page, I found it nigh on impossible to improvise. It didn’t help that several of my colleagues were also following, watching my fingers hover over the ctrl+V keys and saying “are you on soon?”

So, did it “fail spectacularly”, as Jon feared it might? Of course not. Like every good pantomime should be, it was silly, chaotic, funny, rowdy and … well, tiring. It involved lots of audience participation – oh, yes it did! – and even made page 11 of the Birmingham Post (nothing to do with the Editor playing the part of Cinderella’s coachman, of course).

Being the last day at work, it was a great way to get into the Christmas spirit and, ludicrous though it sounds, I felt like I’d really been part of something big. I may not have been able to explain it to my mum (in fact I resorted to mumbling “it was on the internet” which turned out to be enough) but she gave me a hug and said “wow, well done!” anyway. And surely that’s what Christmas is all about.

I wrote this on Sunday 2nd November and I’m buggered if I’m going to let a silly hosting problem stop me from publishing it again. Big thanks to Jon Bounds, who found the original in his Google reader archive. Lesson learned for me: back up, back up, back up…

Reading today’s Observer, I became worried for a moment that we’d had the wrong paper delivered. Christmas is axed in Oxford, read the outraged headline.

“Council leaders in Oxford have decided to ban the word Christmas from this year’s festive celebrations to make them more ‘inclusive’,” the article says. “But the decision to rename the series of events the ‘Winter Light Festival’ has been criticised by religious leaders and locals said it was ‘ludicrous’.”

Sound familiar? Yes, it’s exactly the same kind of moral outrage that put Birmingham into the spotlight ten years ago, when our Council decided to brand three months of winter celebrations and events – from bonfire night to New Year’s Eve – into one marketable festival: Winterval. Despite lights across New Street reading “Happy Christmas” and council-sponsored carol services taking place across the city, the tabloid press had a field day. The Bishop of Birmingham was quoted as saying Winterval was “a way of not talking about Christmas” and more than one commentator told us it was “political correctness gone mad”.

But no-one “banned the word Christmas” then, and no-one’s banning it now. In the very same Observer article that says Oxford’s Winter Light festival has “axed Christmas”, writer Rowan Walker quotes Tei Williams, press officer for the Winter Light Festival, as saying: “Winter Light … is a whole festival spanning two months. Within that will be Christmas carol services.” So, no-one’s axed anything, then.

I do find it strange that the Observer, of all papers, has jumped on this bandwagon, especially when these “anti-Christmas” fallacies are now so widely disproved. Even the Guardian – the Observer’s sister paper – published a feature two years ago explaining that the War on Christmas is no more than a myth.

But I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised. This week, in an article that called bloggers like me “winterval deniers”(!), The Birmingham Post’s Paul Dale says it’s all about perception. Whether these councils are right or wrong to use catch-all names like Winterval or Winter Light, it’s the fact that people perceive them as anti-Christmas that matters, he says.

He might have had a point if he hadn’t perpetuated the myth himself in the first paragraph. “Ten years after Birmingham City Council invited ridicule by airbrushing out the word Christmas from its official celebrations…” he wrote, ignoring the fact that this just isn’t true.

Paul goes on to admit that “the best explanation was that winterval represented a collective name for the events held from mid-November through to the first week in January” – this is true – but then continues, “to most of us, that’s Christmas.”

Is it? To me, the fireworks that we hear every night at the end of October and beginning of November are to do with Diwali and Bonfire night, not Christmas. The week after Christmas, going into January, is New Year’s Eve and the start of the new year… not Christmas. If the council wants to bring all of these events together and give them a catch-all name for marketing purposes, then “Christmas” is really not the right one.

(And besides, as Claire White was so right to point out to the Post, “you say Christmas is the right word for a season that lasts for weeks – and yet you, the mainstream media, moan every year about Christmas being too long or starting too early…”!)

So, is the Observer article just the beginning? Will the Winter Light Festival ensure that Oxford too will become a byword for anti-Christmas political correctness, or is Birmingham alone in having this nonsense thrown at us year after year? Put it his way: I’m pretty sure that in ten years time, Oxford will still be famous for its dreaming spires.

Well, knickers. My web hosts apparently had a “hardware failure” – some problem with their MySQL server – which resulted in all of our websites going down for a couple of days.

When they came back up, a week or two’s worth of data had been lost, so my last post disappeared and Meowseley lost two reviews and an obituary.

Luckily, Google had cached Meowseley just after the last post on there, so Daz got it back, but my Winterval post is lost. I had saved a draft locally, so I’m going to try and rewrite it, but the comments – alas – are gone for good. Sorry, Cat, Jenny and Peter (and was there another one? I can’t remember).

Yes, I’m grumpy.