Life as a journalist

My week over at The Stirrer has been more stressful than I expected. Just the requirement to find six stories a day has been a pressure. I now understand the terror that must afflict scribblers when the locker is empty of stories.

You see this most clearly in Sunday lobby journalists. They gracefully wander the corridors of Westminster on a late Tuesday morning looking like they haven’t got a care in the world, Monday having been their day of rest. On Wednesday they’ll be at lunch or shooting the breeze over coffee in the Pugin room. By Thursday, they take on an earnest, almost troubled look; their conversations are distracted, jumpy almost. And if you’re in Westminster on a Friday, they look like they haven’t eaten a square meal for days, so ravenous are they for data; so desperate that their story will hold until after the Saturday papers are printed later that day.