Big In Cyberspace, Small in Publishing

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I've changed the name of my travelblog to Onehorsetown/Loaferville, adapting it to suit my new position in life - that is, unwashed, in my pyjamas and hoodie all day, generally loafing. I doubt it will make as interesting reading for those kind or bored enough to read my blog over the past year who found tales of death roads in Bolivia and surfing in Sydney, but I've decided to continue the blog and document my release back in to the community anyway (and you'll notice my spelling, grammar and punctuation are all on the up again).

So it needed a name that moved with the times.

I chose Onehorsetown to reflect how I felt at that point in my life - happily surrounded by much loved friends, but perpetually lonely in my heart - sob sob, eh - and now Loaferville puts a bow round my new condition, jobless, flatless, cashless, on the dole, avoiding daytime telly, waking up at 11 and surfing the net all day in my pyjamas. I even sleep on the couch, not just because all the bedrooms are taken, but because this is the room where the computer is - which, in these times of Home Counties loafery and disconnection from my London life, is my umbilical cord. It's actually fine sleeping on the sofa; a year carrying 17 kilograms on my back has given my spine the kind of curvature that makes such a resting place logical.

On the note about readership of my blog, I'm surprised to report that since inception last August, its had nearly 4200 hits (not including my own). If only there were some kind of hit-o-meter on Travelblog to compare traffic between blogs, which, as irriatingly like those Facebook applications that are clearly only designed to prove how popular you are, might help me begin to patch up my now failing professional confidence with the comparison of numbers. I'm sure 4000 is a good show for someone who certainly doesn't know that many people, and has never had a marketing budget to drive clicks. The top entry is always Valley Girl - a lengthy monologue about a really fun week in Brisbane, in which I drank nasty home brew in a rat infested alley, saw a lot of live shoegazing indie bands and spent a long, long weekend in the company of the most preposterously lo-fi indie boy I'll probably ever come across, who encouraged me to break into a private pool and go skinnydipping for the first time in my life. That has 156 hits to date. I can promise I have not read it 155 times. It makes me happy to know that some of my friends followed my travels online (what patience and dedication to read my blog AND the lengthy emails I sent some of them on a regular basis!), even though it is impossibly long most of the time, it seems people did log on regularly and skim to the bits that interested them. Not only that: I had a number of emails from totally random strangers who had read my blog (one girl has actually signed up as a subscriber), looking for some advice on their own trip, to respond to something I'd said (in one case, I got the prime minster of Peru wrong and one man corrected me - rudely, but I was grateful. I can't know everything!), or just to say that they loved reading it. And as I failed in teaching my mum to use the internet before I left, at least I know she can't claim to have racked up 3999 hits. I like the idea that the blog connected random people somehow, maybe gave other travellers ideas for their own trip, while at the same time giving me an outlet for my thoughts and recollections, which was the point of the blog. My writing has in some small way been entertaining and useful.

So it's a shame I cant convert my small triumph in cyberspace to real-life success. Job hunting in the real world is something I've usually excelled at, enjoying the chase, the sell, the talking about myself (being the kind to oscillate between believing I'll always be a geek and a loser to feeling like a genuine award winning powering-ahead journalist of some talent, this part is useful) and generally interacting with the market and contemporaries. But, with my new set of circumstances, it's deflating at best. True, I've only been at it for less than a fortnight. But I'm impatient and I want results. After last Monday's character assassination from one of my agency contacts, which would usually put no more than a little dent in my armour, I felt seriously depressed, and demotivated, the latter not being an emotion I usually experience in my work or my life. I resigned to loafery in an even more dedicated way - and it wasn't helped, god bless 'em, by seeing my friends Elaine, Becki and Bettina again, all of whom had been promoted or found new, more senior, more glamorous jobs in better companies (I won't lie - two of the three work at the company I've wanted to work for for years that just will not employ me), and had that healthy glow of three ladies in satisfying professional situations with appropriate renumeration and benefits. I admit to feeling mildly jealous, which is one of the most deplorable traits in a person and something again that I don't usually experience. But I had to remind myself why: I had just returned from a year fulfilling one of my other most cherished dreams.

But now that I have done this, and am home, I need to get on with my other primary dream - shapeless and formless though it is - to be great at journalism and be gainfully employed in a place that wants to help me get there. I have sent out many CV's, and now the waiting and chasing begins. But this time, it doesn't really fire me up. I think loaferville is melting my will to live.

Not only that. I miss being on the road. The excitement of turning up to a bus terminal at any time, buying a ticket to a place you know nothing about, bundling up next to rotund locals who eminate enough heat from their stanky, llama wool-clad rolls to keep you warm as you ascend some frigid wasteland (or sharing a single sleeping bag with your boyfriend to keep out the cold... one of the top joys of travelling in pairs), and waking up in that place with nowhere to stay and no guarantee you'll find one. And then doing it all over again in a new place a few days later. In flip flops and unwashed hair. There's no having to wear blouses, learn how to apply makeup to conform to professional expectations, or laughing at the rubbish jokes of bad idiots in that game. If only I could be myself in the publishing world: if only my work was enough. I guess that luxury is reserved for the most brilliantly talented whose personalities and presentation skills are supposed to be entertainingly louche. Not that I'm even that colourful.

Speaking of which, I was just watching Michael Palin's new travel show on Eastern Europe (neck and neck with Paul Merton's China on BBC 1 and Louis Theroux's thing on plastic surgery on 4) and it set me planning my next (theoretical, at this financially weak point) adventure. I've always wanted to go to Russia, but my two week jaunt through Romania and Turkey in summer 2006 gave me a taste of what that part of the world had to offer and I wanted more. A lot of places I've long been interested in are, by luck, close to each other - Russia, the near east, eastern Turkey, more Romania, the Ukraine, and over to Montenegro to see a distant cousin who lives there. The last book I read, the Lost Cosmonaut - which Alexis lent to me - got me thinking about those weird territories of the former Soviet Union where the seeming lack of anything to do is the reason to go. I like places where it seems there's nothing to do: Puerto Villarroel and Coober Pedy (Australia) were two such places that formed the highlights of my trip for their out thereness, their weirdness, and their lack of tourists.

For now, that place will have be Loaferville, located just off the M3 inside Elvetham Heath, of which Wikipedia says: "Due for completion by 2008, Elvetham Heath is one of the UK's largest new housing developments, and will add some 6,000 to Fleet's population, bringing its total population up to around 36,000, a 20% increase in less than a decade." This prompted me, in my unemployed state, to seek information on the estate. This is what I found - a website devoted to the mini-city (or mega-village) with this precious tidbit of gossip on one of their very interesting forums...

http://www.elvethamheathforum.info/forum/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=1812

And this is what Loaferville has to look forward to. A calendar crammed with events.

http://www.elvethamheathforum.info/forum/cal.asp?view=eventslist

Thank Christ for the internet.

x

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Photos

Loaferville
My actual street in Elvetham Heath, mega-village for the afraid.
Picture stolen from Hantsweb without permission.