...for it's a rousing experience to coax a feisty lass out of sleep and back to husky-voiced active service duty several thousand kilometres away as soon in her morning as you dare, after you've used the first few seconds of your working day to learn what went down in the night, then come to need a hand.
Especially when her great guy does the shoulder-shaking for you.
And it's nice to discuss the temperature of the woman's shower before she takes a quick one you had no time for yourself. You close your eyes for an instant's wild trip on the light fantastic waveband before plunging into the deluge of news and reactions she'll help you through like a friend true as a rock, though you've just bitten hard into her well-deserved weekend.
Everybody else had their eyes and ears turned to Rome.
Not us.
So Lauren's feller will have to forgive me -- both of us? -- the occasional foreplay that precedes any more hard slog on a dirt-poor small west African country, population around half that of Paris in and out of city walls.
Last night's second round of "Who'll be leader?" has won me a 20-euro bet on how long it would take Togo's army and their chosen man to stand down. I confess I hadn't believed the tiny handful who forecast it would come as swiftly as during my few waking hours' absence from the Madhouse.
Some of us have found the odd story of a regime change or two (AFP) in a country as "insignificant" in the global arena as Togo, which saw it ill-matched vs. a united front of African heavyweight leaders, more fascinating than the drawn-out agony of a very old pontificator. That's turned almost as embarrassing, in a sordid and wearying way, as the time it took the people's "great leaders" to die -- or be allowed to -- in the former Soviet Union.
This is no place for the real stakes in the Togo drama, unless you're in a mood for a discourse on an alliance shaping up among Third World countries, Japan and Germany to tackle Washington in a cold war for permanent seats and voting rights on a UN Security Council reshaped to be relevant to the world of our time.
What's going down in Togo -- and especially who gets to claim the credit for it should everybody decide it's duly "democratic" -- is a part of that bigger game. But even that interests and amuses me less than simply surviving long days of reporting on the power play by resorting to brief but wicked games on the 'phone with the correspondents on the ground.
Truly the best politics are sexual ones, however relegated they may be to realms of pure fancy and even if they earn me trouble!
I reckon we did a good job on Togo today. Should I be unkind enough to collect those 20 euros, they'll cover little presents for the others who shared the load ... or a bit of the 'phone bill if anyone whose job lies in cooking the books to everybody's taste is stupid enough to ask me just why costly calls are my preferred means of influencing friends and winning journalists happy and brave to the warm side of the wire.
"Use notes!" those with the mindsets of pocket calculators instruct us. "Service notes cost less."
Yes. They do. And any "factory" -- from a hard-breaking news and analysis packaging service to a poultry-slicing line for plastic supermarket wrappers -- needs its service notes to keep all concerned right in the loop, thus I left one in my wake tonight for the next couple of days.
Along with a vow to buy a very big bar of soap and spend Sunday washing the thing down my throat so the bubbles float clear across town from Montparnasse to Madhouse. Not a promise I'll keep.
I guess this wraps an unholy trinity of blog entries delivering, at least in part, a hefty few kicks below the belts of the insecure, frighteningly earnest devotees of some crazy "new school" of journalism who consider themselves right at the cutting edge of the ancient trade.
For theirs is a folly and a dangerous conviction which makes journalists miserable, thought-free slaves of the technology now at our fingertips. To dish out facts without sense to them, placing priorities always on speed and "beating the competition", to bludgeon a potential audience with "trunk stories" and a dozen "sidebars" branching out into more than anybody could ever want to know about anything, is as counter-productive and damaging as it's arduous. Worse, I've heard it said sometimes: "Oh well, we might have blown it on the trunk story, but" -- note of cheery uplift in the voice -- "we did well with some of the 'sidebars'."
When I muck about with colleagues and friends on the 'phone, boosting morale as best may before setting them to work, it's knowing they're the people who'll be out the next day rubbing shoulders with that "competition", trying to grin down the ones with the knives: "Did nicely with the bio, didn't you? But your lot really screwed up the main story of the day."
Back to my Quiet Revolution?
Sure I am: in front-line defence of the old-timers, the really wise guys -- and a few women too -- who'll dare still to stick their necks on the block for the sake of their nose and gut feeling for a story, take their time to tell it the way somebody might really want to read it. Somebody who may be learning a place exists for the first time, maybe.
Any modern-minded smart ass may bring the axe swinging down, hacking a comma here, ranting over a typo there, even turning out news by committee and consensus if it suits them, that's the way of things.
But when one of the old fellers changes colour and fumes quietly on having a story "sub-edited to improve it" -- often to "simplify" it -- I know whose side I'm on and I'm sufficiently reckless to say so, loudly. It may be a strange thing, but look hard to the media and you'll often find the real QRs among those nearing the end of their allotted careers, along with the younger ones still ready listen to them.
Anywhere in Africa, I find it harder and harder to stomach nonsense spouted by well-off westerners, however "seasoned" they may be, sent in by big Factories to a "patch" of their choosing, if they start downgrading the "local hires" and their work just as soon as they can on the grounds "they can't write proper English (or French or whatever) and don't know how to put a story together."
I'd rather talk any day to the "locals", pretty sure that when push comes to shove at a weekend, they'll frequently be the ones staffing offices and with an ear to the ground, often as not my unsung heroes, while the visitors passing through for a four-year stint are off at the golf course, or, if you're lucky as an editor, "filing from home". They can. They're the ones with the technology, a training somebody has afforded to pay for, plus a small fortune being stashed on the side to buy a flat or a house when their boat gets called in. Equally often, they're the ones who ask for a byline on the story: "Oh, s/he just gave me bits and pieces, you know, the stuff from the street. I did the work. Actually."
Angry generalisations? Of course, but it's been an angry-minded week all around and not just in the Factory -- just another week where I've had a lot of time for those with the jokes and a sense of distance and proportion, right in the thick of it.
Some of those who get rather hotter under the collar go home to take it out on their spouses, but I prefer to let off any spare steam right here, since that way if you don't like it, you can skip it, while I can save the fun for the friends I can count on.
As for the sex?
Well, I do try to keep my voice down low enough to spare ears that don't like it while it lasts, since it's all sweet nothings, but I can't get enough of it once out of the Factory, especially in the shape of 'Curved Air'. And good heavens, they're still there! The recording quality of 'Live at the BBC,' first cut when I was also live at the BBC, may not always be what it could be, but Sonja Kristina has really been doing it for me these past few days with 'Woman on a One Night Stand' and 'Hot 'n' Bothered.'
Between those shameless offerings, her way with a 'Midnight Wire' is a bend on the blues about as good as it gets, the lyrics red-hot right. I don't mind telling Lauren and anyone else that yes, I finally did get to a shop tonight in time to sort out the "Daddy, my computer's exploded" problem -- at outrageous cost. 105 euros for a mains socket adapter for a PowerBook?! It comes cheaper from Apple and they're thieves themselves for accessories ... but it was in stock.
Back in the Métro, reeling as my bank manager soon will in turn, a great-looking girl took a long hit from my midnight-wired eyes and paid me the courtesy of eyeballing me right back in leisurely fashion, up and down, until she got off.
Then I noticed the two lads opposite, football fresh and into half-drunk hilarity though I couldn't hear a word they were saying. Both were taking turns, legs wide sprawled like some guys do in the M, to clutch and rub their crotches as they laughed, so that if stripped of the jeans, they would have been masturbating in public -- merely unconscious of it.
So I discreetly pressed the rewind button and midnight-wired them as well. Nobody else in the carriage seemed even to notice this remarkable preening display, apart from me, in an anthropological kind of way, and Sonja.
Ah, "to soothe my fire across the midnight wire..."
Don't tell Bernie, just get to see who's first to pick up a couple of iPods on your travels. It's unceasingly astonishing what you get to see -- and to do or say to strangers -- once you've got a head free of Togo and anything else of passing importance, wiped of all thought but for music.
Be warned. Things change! Of course, should Bernie have the misfortune to stumble on this elegy, he can take any needed reassurance, Lauren, from the certainty that you're far from the only woman I mess with nowadays.
Today, you were just singularly unfortunate.
11:55:47 PM link 
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