A Stretch In Limousin – RSVP

The intelligent man's monthly

I am at fault here. I know that. And I accept it. I made a mistake. Not a big mistake by any stretch of the imagination. I’ve certainly made bigger, and hope I shall again, for mistakes are fine, unregrettable things, just so long as we learn from them. Let’s see what I can learn from this one.

What happened was this. I was sub-editing on a magazine this week, and I heard a man somewhere behind me end a conversation with the following words, ‘you’re just a woman’. As the magazine I was working for is published by the same people who publish Loaded, I immediately thought, wouldn’t it be funny if the person who spoke those words wrote for Loaded. For obvious reasons. So I watched him, the guy who said ‘you’re just a woman’, and lo and behold, he walked the length of the open-plan office and sat at the Loaded desk. Fantastic! I thought. That’s worth a tweet.

Unfortunately, I was wrong. I made a mistake. The guy I watched was not the guy who’d spoken those words. And let’s face it, even if I’d been right (which I wasn’t), it would still have been vastly unprofessional to publish office tittle-tattle to a social networking site.

But it was what happened next that was really stupid. Basically, in an effort to apologise and then maybe even turn the situation to my advantage, I made another mistake. I went home, smoked a joint and apologised. The following tweets were sent on Wednesday evening, from around 9pm….

• Earlier, in a thoughtless moment – one of a veritable tsunami of thoughtless moments of late – I laid a stupid, irresponsible tweetbomb.
• Or two.
• I have now deleted the offending tweets, but I can tell you, they contained remarks which verged on calumny.
• The remarks were about Loaded magazine, with whom I am sharing office space for the next three days.
• Basically my thrust was thus: magazine’s perceived reputation + naked prejudice on my part = conclusions jumped and remarks regretted.
• I therefore extend my genuine apologies to all concerned, now, publicly, and will do so in person tomorrow morning.
• Fact is, I am gaping finger-mouth perennially stuffed with idiot-foot.
• I have become everything I despise. Ignorant and judgmental. I feel like I should be placed in the stocks, like this week’s Kenneth Tong.
• And to think I’ve just been hassling the editor of Loaded to hire me to write a column from my impending travels.
• ‘What’s that?’ I hear you cry. ‘Why, you stinking fucking hypocrite! You make cheap, insidious remarks with one finger…
• …and with the other you go a’begging for work like some shambling fifty-faced bastard.’ Well, I see your point. But it’s not like that.
• You see, I would actually love to work on a Loaded that could sit with pride in the mouths of its readers, and in any company.
• Not a Loaded that has people champing at the bit to declare it a gratuitous tit-kitty fit only for knuckle-dragging imbeciles.
• In fact, my Twitter fuck-up today could be viewed as highly valuable social media market research. On behalf of Loaded.
• (It wasn’t. I’m just a twat. But that doesn’t make the results any less valuable.)
• 100% of respondents were ready – eager even – to believe that Loaded staff readily bandy bigotries like a gang of barking bushmen.
• If we extrapolate those figures to a pretend world wherein I have 170,000 followers, then you see right there the problem. #totalscience
• As it happens, the remark I overheard was made by an employee of an entirely different magazine. And was wholly humorous in intention.
• I shall apologise to him also.
• But the reaction was telling. ‘Aah, yes,’ sneered the public, ‘but that’s Loaded all over.’ I’m guiltier than most. And it’s a shame.
• You see, I would love to see Loaded turn into a magazine for which men could feel pride, without being slagged off and eye-rolled.
• More Rolling Stone, less Jazz Banquet.
• I’m not saying lose the breasts. Heaven forfend. Definitely keep the breasts. They’re excellent. In fact, if anything, more breasts.
• My own tastes veer more toward being teased – a little underwear, a little narrative – but breasts are good too.
• But maybe a few more thoughtful, daring and generally more intelligent articles.
• What about – this is entirely off the top of my head – what about intelligent slightly unstable man-travel?
• A monthly column.
• Or even: balls-out, brain-faulty, fuck-up-prone, breast-friendly travelogue, taking in 80 of the world’s festivals, starting in 12 days.
• Anyway, I’ve crept off-topic. Once again, sorry for being a dick. I’ll write your first column for free. (Second twice the price.)
• Of course, if Loaded were to give me an opportunity to write for them, this would turn, like magic, into a wonderful Twitter story.
• A wonderful Twitter story rising out of the ashes of a rotten sub-Doocian mess. That would be – as they say – all manner of awesomeness.

So as you can see, what I was banking on, stupidly, was that someone at Loaded might applaud my chutzpah and pay me money to write for them. Turns out that was rather naïve of me.

I did apologise in person, the morning after the offending tweets, but none of the editors had yet arrived. The journalists I spoke to seemed very nice, however. Then, just before lunch, I was told to leave the building.

I wasn’t even working for Loaded! But they’d fired me anyway.

There I was, imagining myself on Newsround, like that guy who got a job by putting his CV on YouTube – I’d be the man who got hired using the power of impertinent tweets. But it wasn’t to be.

One of my problems, I know, is that I’m frequently nowhere near as funny as I think I am. I do know it. And I have to accept it. So when I think I’m being devilishly amusing and somebody else does not, I can’t just call humourlessness on their part and stride off with my nose in the air. That was my first thought on being dismissed. ‘Bloody Loaded eh?’ I thought. ‘No sense of humour.’ But that’s not fair.

They were not amused. They were angry. Fair enough.

Apparently one of the things that made them particularly angry was my inference that Loaded is not the most intelligent magazine on the market. I guess I can understand that. No one likes to have their intellect impugned.

You would think though, that they might have just let their intelligence speak for itself. Rather than throwing a hissy fit.

Anyway, I thought – in the name of fairness – I should have a proper look at Loaded. So I’ve got a copy of it here in front of me. I’m looking at it now.

I’m currently looking at a 12-page spread of Hollyoaks actress and February cover star Jorgie Porter. She looks about 16. But that’s irrelevant. Mostly.  The pictures, I have to say, are neither remotely original nor faintly erotic – here we see her, for example, bending over a chair, and here she is with a fire hose between her legs. But hold on, maybe the commentary is where the intelligence lies. Let’s see…

‘Whether it’s for the storylines or the sexy ladies, we all have a cheeky flick over to Hollyoaks every once in a while, and it’s far from being something to be ashamed of. When you have the likes of Dot Cotton and Deirdre Barlow as the eye candy in EastEnders and Corrie, the girls of the Channel 4 soap will always be a shoe-in for top telly totty.’

Oh.

Oh dear.

(That’s shoo-in, by the way. Any decent sub will tell you that.)

I’m now looking at Lucy Pinder. She is naked. She is looking at the camera. Her eyes are dead. A large pull-quote hovers over the crack in her arse. It says:

‘People diss Hollyoaks, but there’s nothing better than watching it with your dinner.’

Um… What’s going on?

I’m now reading the magazine’s only column. It is written by James Buckley, the actor who plays Jay in the popular light entertainment television programme The Inbetweeners. Oh, it’s his first month! He is a recent hire. This is the direction in which Loaded are headed. To those critics who accuse them of hankering after the glory days of James Brown when Loaded was an iconic title with genuine cachet and considerable social significance, rather than just one of a sticky handful of grotty tit-titles that it is today, they say HA! They say CHECK OUT OUR NEW COLUMNIST!

Buckley’s first column is entitled, intelligently, ‘ALL THIS SHOPPING IS DOING MY NUT IN!’ It begins…

‘Right, so Loaded have decided to give me my own column, where I can write about whatever I want. I imagine they’re after something funny and interesting, which I don’t think are words my mates would use to describe me. However, instead of cowering like a kitten stuck behind a radiator, I’ve decided to give it a go. Writing that is, not getting stuck behind a radiator… This month I want to talk about the Christmas shopping us blokes had to do last month. It’s bullshit isn’t it?’

It ends…

‘Anyway, I better chip off now, the missus is begging me to take her to the sales. Now where’s that air rifle?’

It had this bit in the middle…

‘I thought about my girlfriend’s gift so much it felt like my head would explode. It’s probably the one gift you really, really do have to think about. And, as a guy, thinking bloody hurts.’

Actually, you know what? I don’t think I want to write for Loaded after all. Sorry, Shandy, I retract my offer.

So there it is. Another career lies twitching in the dust. Not to worry. I’ll be in Spain ten days. Or somewhere.

Have you ever been fired? It’s great fun, isn’t it?